In recent years, workers` coverage by enterprise agreement has shifted to rewards. It is not known why this deferral took place or whether it had an impact on overall wage growth. Chart 5: Prevalence of Long-Term Unemployment, 2000-2019 Same data source shows that the number of long-term unemployed rose from 69,400 in November 2007 to 175,700 in May 2018, but fell to 158,100 in April 2019. Chart 3: Underemployment by Age and Sex, March 2019 Chart 1: Unemployment and Underemployment Rate, 2000-2019 Casual conversion clauses were included in premiums to create a mechanism for workers who were legally employed on a permanent basis (but who were employed in case of incidemnity) to transform their casual status (fixed-term or part-time) status. The Fair Work Amendment Act 2019 seeks to extend the effect of a Fair Work Commission decision to a right to convert full-time or part-time (permanent) employment into 85 modern distinctions, so that all workers entitled to such a right in the national system have access to such a right. The bill does this by introducing a new right to request the occasional transformation of national employment standards in the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth). Chart 5 shows that in April 2019, about 22.9% of the unemployed were long-term unemployed, up from 13.3% in March 2009. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that the unemployment rate rose from 6.3% in December 2014 to 5.1% in April 2019. Over the same period, the rate of underemployment (or the share of the workforce that would prefer more hours of work) fell only slightly, from 8.5% to 8.3%. Collective or enterprise agreements set the terms of employment (wages and/or conditions) of a group of workers in a company or organization.
These agreements are usually registered with a federal or regional labour court or a public authority. The youth unemployment rate was 11.8% in April 2019, up from 11.4% in January 2019, but after the last peak of 14.1% in December 2014. On the other hand, underemployment of young people has varied between 17 and 18% since August 2014. AbS data show that annual employment growth was 2.5% in April 2019, compared to the average long-term employment growth of 1.9% since February 1979. Both the coalition and the Australian Labor Party have indicated that they support stricter regulation of hiring agreements. In the 2019/20 budget, the coalition allocated US$26.8 million over four years between 2019 and US$20,200 million to establish a national registration system for hiring labour to “protect vulnerable workers, including migrant workers.” The scheme requires the registration of workers in high-risk sectors such as horticulture, cleaning, meat processing and safety. Laws regulating the employment agency industry have recently been introduced in Queensland and Victoria. Among the most important rules are: employment contracts become illegal when they are used to sub-contribute to workers` conditions.