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Australia's jobs market weakened in November, far from what was expected by the market.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3%, according to Thursday data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The number of unemployed dropped by 2,000, but the number of employed fell by 21,000, way below the market's forecast of a 20,000 increase.
Employment a month ago grew by 41,100.
With the fall in the number of employed and unemployed people in November, the participation rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 66.7%, Sean Crick, ABS head of labor statistics, said.
Analysts mainly attributed the lagging labor market to a slowdown in hiring within the healthcare industry.
The chief driver of the slowdown has been a normalization of jobs growth in the 'care economy', after a monumental hiring effort over recent years, Westpac economist Ryan Wells said. At the same time, though, there are nascent signs that the pick-up in private demand is starting to translate into stronger hiring efforts in household and personal services.
Callam Pickering, an economist from jobs website Indeed Inc., warned in a Bloomberg News article that the unemployment rate might pick up further if the private sector continues to fail to fill the gap in employment.
However, analysts from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia said that the central bank views the labor market as still a bit too tight to bring inflation back to target, despite the jobs market gradually loosening this year.
The recent resurgence of inflation, stubbornly high unit labor costs and rising surveyed capacity utilization are strong arguments that there is indeed still excess demand in Australia's labor market, CBA said.
