graph 6 some of the compositional change might have been because people were moving out of higher - paid jobs in mining - related activity, and had gone back to lower - paying work. it's hard to pinpoint how important this effect was, because the weakness in average earnings growth was seen in some industry - level data as well. so at least some people would have had to be switching to lower - paid jobs in the same industry. another factor that might have been at work was that fewer people were actually switching jobs than in the past. surveys that track people through time, such as the hilda survey, show that people who change jobs often see faster income growth in the year they switched, than people who didn't change jobs ( graph 7 ). https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - ag - 2019 - 03 - 26. html 8 / 17 3 / 26 / 2019 what's up ( and down ) with households? | speeches | rba graph 7 this lower rate of job churn accords with some of the evidence we see in business surveys and the messages coming out of our business liaison program. many firms report that they find it hard to find suitable labour, at least for some roles, and that this is a constraint on their businesses, though usually not a major one ( graph 8 ). but when we ask our contacts what they are doing about this problem, paying people more is not the first solution they think of. even poaching someone from another firm by enticing them with higher pay is not that common. the evidence from our liaison program suggests that it has long been the case that firms first resort to other strategies to deal with labour shortages, and only turn to faster wage increases when the shortages are severe and persistent ( leal 2019 ). https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - ag - 2019 - 03 - 26. html 9 / 17 3 / 26 / 2019 what's up ( and down ) with households? | speeches | rba graph 8 but whatever the underlying drivers, the gap between the growth rates of the wpi and average earnings has closed more recently. slow wages growth is still a concern, but in terms of its contribution to income growth, it is less of a puzzle than it was a few years ago. instead we need to seek the source of the more recent weakness elsewhere. non - labour income remains

their industry is. either way, we see jobs being added in a range of industries. employment in health care and social assistance has been increasing for a while ; the rollout of the ndis is an important driver of this, but not the only one. more recently, we have also seen employment increase in a number of business services industries. construction employment had also been strong for a while, reaching the highest share of total employment in more than a century of records. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - ag - 2019 - 03 - 26. html 2 / 17 3 / 26 / 2019 what's up ( and down ) with households? | speeches | rba graph 2 one can be reasonably confident in the steer the labour market data are giving us, because it is coming from multiple, independently collected data sets. the employment and unemployment data come from the abs's survey of households. but a survey of businesses, also from the abs, tells us that the number of job vacancies has been a very high share of the total jobs available. separate private - sector surveys of businesses tell us that many firms plan to hire more workers. many of our own liaison contacts also tell us that they are hiring. and as the labour market gradually tightens, we are beginning to see the effects in wages growth. this has been low for some time, but is gradually trending up now, especially in the private sector ( graph 3 ). part of this shift is that fewer workers are subject to wage freezes than was the case a year or so ago. minimum and award wage rises have also increased. along with other countries, it's taking longer and a lower unemployment rate to start seeing faster wages growth than historical experience might have suggested. indeed, we still think australia is a little way off the levels of the unemployment rate that would induce materially faster wages growth. but as the experience of other countries has also shown, if the labour market tightens enough, wages growth does eventually pick up. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - ag - 2019 - 03 - 26. html 3 / 17 3 / 26 / 2019 what's up ( and down ) with households? | speeches | rba graph 3 household consumption spending is slowing in contrast to the positive picture implied by the labour market, growth in household income has been slow, and growth in consumption has weakened