Unemployment in Australia is currently at 4.3% – below average for the past century. But last week, the Reserve Bank forecast unemployment will slowly climb from next year on, rising to 4.7% by mid-2028 – and possibly higher if the Middle East war drags on.
That forecast came after a long-running survey of 3,600 Australians – taken in the early weeks of the US-Israel war on Iran – found people thought their chances of losing their job had risen to 26.8%. Job insecurity fears haven’t been this high since 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when unemployment hit 6.4%.
If worrying about keeping your job has been keeping you up at night, you’re far from alone.
But there are evidence-based things we can do – at an individual, organisational and government level – to manage job insecurity better in uncertain times.
How job stress hits our health and even our personality
