About one in 14 workers say they expect to lose their job or business by mid-2021. A survey of employed people in the June 2020 quarter showed 7 per cent felt there was a high or almost certain chance of losing their job or business within the next 12 months, Stats NZ said.
At a national level, this represented 185,000 workers. A further 18 per cent, or 468,000, felt there was a medium chance, while 4 per cent, or 105,000, stated they did not know what their job security was going to be over the following year, it said. Most people surveyed said there was little or no chance of losing their job or business, which was 71 per cent or 1.86 million, statistics showed.
The household labour force survey was collected over a three-month period from April to June and asked employed people about their perceived job security over the next 12 months. During the collection period, New Zealand dropped from Covid-19 alert level 4 in April, when non-essential workers were required to work from home and students did distant learning, to alert level 1 by June when life almost returned to normal.
“People who felt the chance of losing their job or business was high or almost certain were considered to have low job security,“ labour market statistics manager Andrew Neal said in a statement. “As you might expect, people were more anxious and uncertain about their jobs under the higher alert levels than in level 1,“ Neal said. Small businesses have been vulnerable during the pandemic. Self-employed people who did not have staff or employees of their own felt more insecure about losing their business than employees felt about losing their job, he said. Ten per cent of self-employed people without employees reported low job security, compared with 6 per cent of employees, he added.
