Analysing Men Outside the Australian Labour Force

Of the 8 million Australian males in the adult male civilian population in 2005-06, at any one time over 2.2 million or nearly 30 per cent were outside the labour force - neither working nor looking for work. A staff working paper, Men Not At Work: An Analysis of Men Outside the Labour Force, released by the Productivity Commission today, provides information on these men, where they live, why they are outside the labour force and the impacts of their economic inactivity.

The staff working paper finds that, in contrast to women, the rates at which men are disengaged from the labour force have increased four fold over the last century, rising particularly rapidly over the last 50 years.

The paper finds that there are many drivers of this transformation in Australian labour markets. Some of it is due to population ageing, which swells the ranks of retirees. (But the impacts of ageing will be greater in the future than they have been in the past.) Younger men are spending longer in education and older men are enjoying a longer voluntary retirement. Men generally are now much more involved in domestic and child care tasks - that explains 30 per cent of those aged 35-44 years old absent from the labour market. The view that many of the 'inactive' are at work in the 'shadow economy' was found to be a myth.

Many prime aged males leave the labour market due to injury, ill-health, disability or premature 'retirement', with about half the men aged 25-64 years old who are outside the labour force in receipt of the Disability Support Pension. An important explanation for the lower labour force participation rates of these men is the shift away from unskilled manual work in an increasingly service-sector and skill-based economy.

Inactive men are more likely to be living alone, to be poorly educated, and of Indigenous or non-English speaking migrant background. For example, a man aged 45-54 living alone is about four times more likely to be outside the labour force than one who is married or who has a partner.

This staff working paper is part of a stream of research on labour participation issues initiated by the Commission following its 2005 study on the Economic Implications of the Ageing of Australia's Population.

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