Labour market policy director, Greg Jericho, notes in his Guardian Australia column that over the past 40 years the make-up of families has shifted dramatically from ones with just one parent working to now more than 70% having both partners in employment.

While this has mostly come from the great gains made by women since the 1970s that have seen changes to discrimination laws, child care and also societal norms to allow women to participate in paid work even once they have had children, it also highlights the rising cost of living pressures faced by most families.

The times when a family on one income could be expected to buy a house are long gone. But the decade of weak wage growth and recent falls in real wages make living on one wage even more difficult.

But the data reveals that men are still more likely to be the sole breadwinner and it confirms the labour force data that shows women remain much less likely than men to work full-time. This is a major reason why women in over 90% of occupations earn on average less than do men. It means that women remain at a heightened risk of income loss in the event of relationship breakdowns that can severely affect their standard of living, especially in retirement.

The data also reveals that women remain very much the most likely parent in sole-parent families. Given the laws that now see such parents move from the parenting allowance to the lower-paying Jobseeker once their youngest child turns 8, this highlights the precarious nature over 800,000 women face as they attempt to survive as the sole parent.

In his Guardian column, Policy Director Greg Jericho notes that given real wages have already fallen for 2 straight years any further falls will take workers’ purchasing power backwards to where it was more than a decade ago. This however is viewed as being “worse than the alternative” of inflation growth above 3%.

He notes that over the past 2 years the profit margins of many industries, and most especially the mining industry, have risen and have themselves fuelled inflation. But company profits are never expected to suffer, wages however are always viewed as either the culprit of inflation or the means to reduce it. The vast increase in mining profits, largely due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also highlights the urgent need for a windfall profits tax.

Using the RBA’s own estimates Jericho calcuates that by the end of next year real wages will be back at 2008 levels and even with the most optimistic outlook they will not return to 2019 levels until 2030.

The Reserve Bank’s strategy of sharply increasing interest rates risk slowing the economy into a recession even though real wages are already falling faster and for longer than they have in modern times.

Labour market and fiscal policy director, Greg Jericho writes in Guardian Australia that the rising level of inflation, which combined with low wages growth has led to massive falls in real wages, has many Australians wondering if increasing interest rates is going bring the economy to a halt.

He writes that for now a recession is unlikely, but the risks remain. Previous periods of sharply increasing rates have been followed by rising unemployment, and the current market expectations for the cash rate rising above 3.5% within a year would certainly create a massive brake on the economy.

The story from overseas is also worrying, with the United States battling even higher inflation than Australia and suggestions that the market is already pricing in a recession.

It all highlights that while today’s labour force figures are on the surface very promising, they also show just how affected the economy continues to be by the pandemic. Nearly 300,000 employed in June worked zero hours because of sickness or injury – well over double the usual amount.

The nearly 50-year low unemployment rates are also failing to lead to wages growth anywhere near what would have been expected in previous years, let alone at a level that is keeping up with inflation.

While inflationary pressure do remain, the risk that the Reserve Bank will raise rates too high and too fast remains very much in place – especially given the lack of wages growth.

Even with this new increase, however, real wages for the lowest-paid Australian workers are likely to go backwards this year, with inflation pegged to accelerate to as much as 7%. Nevertheless, Australia’s business lobby are repeating tired old complaints about minimum wages being too high, stoking further inflation, and undermining profits.

In his latest commentary, published in The Guardian, Policy Director Greg Jericho reviews and debunks these predictable complaints. The evidence is clear that wages are not causing inflation. Profit margins have grown along with prices. Workers deserve to have their real incomes protected, as the true sources of the problem (arising mostly from after-effects of the pandemic and the global energy price shock) are addressed.

Please see Greg’s full column, “Workers and their wages are the collateral damage of the war on inflation.”