The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday reported a rise in employment in July - 10,900 or 0.1 per cent in seasonally adjusted terms.
It was a modest rise.
After a fall of 24,800 reported in May and a bounce of 22,200 in June, it left the estimated number of people with jobs at 10,721,500, just 8,300 more than three months earlier in April.
According to the trend measure worked out by the ABS, employment is now rising by only 5,900 a month, compared with 30,400 at the end of last year.
Those monthly growth rates represent a slowdown from a pace very likely to push the unemployment rate down to a rate with little hope of preventing it from rising over time.
In fact, the unemployment rate has been steady at 4.3 per cent for the past four months.
Even that was due to a fall in the participation rate, the proportion of the adult population active in the labour market, from 65.5 per cent to 65.3 per cent.
And a declining trend in participation is a tell-tale sign that job opportunities are becoming scarcer.
One apparently bright spot in the figures was a big jump of 53,700 or 0.7 per cent in the number of workers in full-time jobs.
A sustained pick-up in full-time employment would promote confidence that the labour market is in good shape.
But this rise in the full-time component was not typical of recent data.
In the preceding six months, full-time employment grew by only 64,500, according to the ABS figures.
And there have been a host of surveys of job vacancies and employment levels in private sector surveys recently telling a consistently bleak story.
That story was inevitable after the economy began slowing noticeably late last year.
So the bounce in full-time employment simply doesn't fit with other, reliable indicators.
Another warning not to get too carried away by the full-time component is the offsetting fall in part-time employment, which dropped 42,800 (1.4 per cent).
One of the features of the labour force data is the tendency for full-time and part-time employment to move in opposite directions from month to month.
In the past decade, the seasonally adjusted measure of full-time employment has more often than not risen faster than its trend growth rate when the part-time component posts a weaker-than-trend change.
And when the full-time component is weaker, the part-time component is usually stronger.
This pattern happens, on average, more than eight months in every year.
Most importantly, such divergent moves are very often followed by moves in the opposite direction.
It is not clear why this happens.
The most plausible explanation is that the seasonal adjustment process is not perfect.
The doubts over the information content of the data this time is compounded by the budgetary constraints at the ABS.
The ABS has cut the sample of households covered by the labour force survey by 24 per cent, which has widened the margin for error.
In any case, the odds favour a sizeable fall in full-time employment when the August figures are released next month, and a corresponding bounce in the part-time category.
The labour market has weakened, and weakened a lot.
No amount of volatility in the data will alter that.
