As a resume writer and employment expert with a solid background in statistics, I know the unemployment figure is massively understated. About 2.7 million Australians have lost work or hours. I have edited an excellent story from Ross Gittens (SMH) below on the real unemployment and under-employment figures.

Remember the shocking TV footage we saw some weeks back of long queues outside Centrelink offices. You’ve seen the movie; now read the stats. They arrived last Thursday. They showed what had happened in the jobs market just between mid-March and mid-April.

They were the most appalling news on jobs we’ve had since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Actually, they’re worse than then, because they happened in just a month (with some more bad months to come), whereas in the Depression it took several years.

A lot of the job loss remains hidden. The truth is about 2.7 million people – almost one worker in five – either lost their jobs or lost hours during six weeks. Yet the ABS said the rate of unemployment rose just from 5.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent.

Don’t trust this. As most people know, the bureau’s definition of what it means to be unemployed is very narrow. You have to be actually looking for work and ready to take up any job you’re offered.

Of the 13 million Australians employed in March, 900,000 lost their jobs in April. However – and I know you’ll find this hard to believe – 300,000 people without jobs gained one during the month, so the net loss of jobs was almost 600,000.

But why, then, did unemployment rise by only 100,000 rather than 600,000? Because 500,000 people didn’t look for another job – so many employers were in lockdown – and so were classed as “not in the labour force”.

So that’s the first source of hidden joblessness. Most of those people will start looking for jobs as soon as it makes sense to, and then will be counted as unemployed.

The next source of hiddenness comes from the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, intended to preserve the attachment between employers and their workers even though, during the lockdown, those employers don’t have much work needing to be done.

There are now more than 6 million workers on the JobKeeper allowance – that is, about half the entire workforce. Because they’re receiving a wage, they’re all counted as employed.

It turns out that the best guide to what’s happening comes from the change in the total number of hours worked during the month. It’s fallen by an unprecedented 9.2 per cent, double the 4.6 per cent fall in the number of people employed.The fall in hours is explained by people losing their jobs, people keeping their jobs but being given fewer hours to work, and people on JobKeeper working fewer hours – or none.

This explains why, despite the limited rise in unemployment, the rate of underemployed workers (those working fewer hours than they want to) leapt from 8.8 per cent to 13.7 per cent.