Want a job with real wages growth? Forget mining — healthcare beckons

Yesterday the ACTU released a report myth-busting many of the lies from the mining industry about the government’s “same job, same pay” legislation, designed to bring an end to labour-hire firms paying workers below enterprise award levels.

Noteworthy in the union’s report was its claim that “mining profits have increased 194% over the past decade but wages in the industry have gone backwards 6% in real terms”.

Extractive industry profits — especially from oil and gas over the past two years — have indeed soared, even accounting for a substantial drop in prices of commodities like gas, coal and iron ore over 2022-23. But mining, as the ACTU report suggests, continues to be marked by poor wages growth, even if it is by far the best-remunerated profession in average weekly earnings data.

Wage price index and consumer price index data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that mining is the worst-performing sector for real wages growth over the past decade: wages lagged inflation by 5.7 percentage points during that time. Much of that decline in real wages, unsurprisingly, has occurred more recently — in the past five years, mining wages lagged inflation by 5.5 points.

Things have improved in the mining sector in the past year — wages growth over the year to September has picked up considerably from the year to September 2022, putting it ahead of half a dozen other industries and not too far off the national average — mining grew 5.6 percentage points in the year to September compared to six points nationally (bearing in mind the September quarter figures were skewed by one-offs like two award rises in some hospitality sectors, a large minimum pay decision and the aged care pay rise). But recent growth has been nowhere near enough to make up for real wage falls before the last year and a decade of stagnation.

The mining industry’s performance demolishes the persistent lie from big business that if they’re allowed to make large profits, including via company tax cuts, they’ll invest more and pay workers more. The mining industry has paid workers less while making large profits, and as the ACTU note points out, mining investment hasn’t increased since 2016, and is currently at a 20-year low as a proportion of industry income.

If mining has been the worst-performing sector for its workers, others haven’t performed much better.

The administrative and support services and hiring and real estate sectors both saw big real wage falls; the pace of wages growth actually declined over the past 12 months in the latter sector, the only sector where it did so.

The strongest sector for wages growth was health and social assistance, one of the few to record real wages growth over the decade and the only one to see substantive growth. The sector benefited from the commencement of the large aged care pay rise in the September quarter, but even before that it outperformed every other sector in wages growth, with growth almost entirely in the private sector (public sector health relies heavily on state awards, which change more slowly).

This means health and social assistance isn’t just the biggest and fastest growing sector of the employment market (it grew by a staggering 22% between 2018 and this year); it’s the sector where workers are most likely to see strong wages growth. It also, along with education and training and infrastructure services, has the highest rates of unionisation. All have between 20-30% union membership, and all three saw real wages growth over the decade (mining has only 10% union membership).

Health and social assistance, and education, are both middling sectors for average weekly earnings — in the most recent data, they sit on either side of the national average weekly earnings level, though the aged care pay bump will presumably see health pay rise substantially in coming quarters. But if you want a job that will keep your head above water when it comes to inflation, those sectors look pretty good. And with health and social assistance set to continue expanding at a rate of knots, it’s hard to see that changing any time soon.