Australia ended on Sunday a wage support scheme that was created a year ago to help employees amid the health crisis, a move deemed “cruel” by unions that could push 150,000 people towards unemployment.
The JobKeeper program, which initially involved the payment to some employees of 1,500 Australian dollars (971 euros) every two weeks via their employer, was announced in March 2020 in the wake of a national lockdown that had resulted in thousands of redundancies jobs.
Finance Minister Josh Frydenberg said the device had been “an economic lifeline” that had “saved lives and maintained the livelihoods” of many homes over the past year.
But he also explained that JobKeeper had always been intended to be “temporary”, while acknowledging that the situation continued to be tense for many companies.
The unemployment rate, which had risen to 7.5% in July, fell to 5.8% in February. But the Ministry of Finance estimates that between 100,000 and 150,000 people could lose their jobs because of the end of JobKeeper.
Michele O’Neil, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said many more workers would have to deal with cuts in wages or reductions in the number of hours worked.
“The future is uncertain for 1.1 million workers without the JobKeeper wage support system, which has avoided catastrophic job cuts during the pandemic and which is now abolished,” she denounced.
“Shutting down JobKeeper when so many people continue to depend on it is both cruel and counterproductive in terms of economic recovery. “
At the height of the crisis, nearly four million employees benefited from JobKeeper.
On two occasions the authorities have had to extend the system over the past 12 months, while reducing the amount of benefits.
If we compare it to other developed countries, Australia has been relatively effective in the face of the pandemic, since it has totaled since the appearance of the coronavirus around 29,000 cases and less than a thousand deaths.
This result was obtained at the cost of closing the borders of the island. The last sources of contamination were linked to the facilities hosting the quarantines of people entering the territory and were quickly contained.
After a recession in the first half of 2020, the Australian economy rebounded to post fourth quarter growth of 3.1%.
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