Who's getting sacked in Australia?

News.com.au

4 days ago

ANALYSIS
The ABS just dropped some new data on jobs in Australia and one of my favourite things to do is look in it to see who is getting fired, getting sacked, getting the old heave-ho.
The ABS calls it getting 'dismissed'.
Being dismissed in Australia is kind of rare. It's not like the American TV shows where the boss shows up at your desk and shouts at you and that's it. Lol, if that happens in Australia you take your employer to court and stroll home with a tidy payout of up to six months pay.
Even if they think they have a strong case against you, and you're racked up thousands on your corporate card, you can still win.
To get sacked in Australia you have to do something pretty damn bad. Which is what makes the statistics so intriguing. I'd love to see how many sackings are in December, right after the Christmas party, but the ABS only has annual statistics.
Here we can see that the number of Aussies who got sacked last year, and it is up slightly on the year before. In the last year, people have bee running amok and getting fired at quite high levels. Unsurprisingly it is us menfolk getting dismissed more often than women. But are we getting fired disproportionately? When you consider that men still make up more of the workforce than women the difference disappears a bit. Women are up to no good at work too!
The young are also more likely to be sacked, as the next chart shows. Is that because of skylarking and pranks, or is it just because bosses get rid of the least skilled workers when things go bad, it's not clear.
While firing the youth is the general trend, shout out to the Gen Xers who got themselves fired last year – in large numbers! The 45-64 year bracket was actually second-most likely to get fired last year.
One more chart: Here we can see which states have the highest rate of sackings, and in this particular State of Origin showdown the Maroons have the edge. Shout out to Victoria which despite a lower population than NSW is ahead on sackings in 2024-25.
In Australia we have labour laws and one of the things they do is make sacking rare. (Even if you sexually harass the customers, you can still win in court if you are not sacked in the exact right way).
These strict laws are awesome 99 per cent of the time because it means an angry boss can't boot you if they're having a bad day. But it also means we've all worked with someone who desperately needed to be sacked but instead carried on, doing stuff-all and making work life very, very painful for everyone else.
Instead of sacking people, which is an administrative and legal nightmare, sometimes what an organisation will do to shuffle out a bad egg is totally restructure itself. With a new structure, some jobs can be made redundant. Problem solved. Of course that's not the main reason for redundancy. You also get redundancies when a company genuinely isn't doing very well and needs to cut costs. There's voluntary ones and involuntary.
In the next chart we can see redundancies, which the ABS calls retrenchments. The most important thing to notice is there's way more of them than there were sackings. There were 25,000 people being sacked each year, but 250,000 retrenchments. Men are still leading here, but again, since men hold more jobs than women, it's not out of line.
Getting sacked in Australia is rare, you're certainly not going to get the old heave-ho for
reading the internet at work.
So settle in, have a browse around. Maybe you'll like to read about this guy: a very senior police officer, who had '13 beers and eight spirit drinks' and was 'dancing drunk in a McDonald's' ('flossing', apparently) before he 'crashed [his] unmarked car into a concrete barrier in Sydney's NorthConnex tunnel' and then 'deliberately left the scene'.
And he didn't even lose his job – he's reportedly on paid leave!