Last November, Australian workers were still confident that the GFC wasn’t going to affect their employment. Despite the bad international and stock market news, workers still mainly perceived that as bad news affecting other people.

An Auspoll survey released by the AWU this week suggests that this personal confidence is diminishing. While last year’s Morgan poll found 18% of respondents believing that they had a chance of unemployment, the Auspoll finds that 17% of workers are very concerned about their jobs and another 24% are concerned. The different question makes comparisons problematic, but that may be greater insecurity than the 32% in the Morgan series who were worried about their jobs at the peak of the early 1990s recession, though obviously actual unemployment is to date much lower than then.

On the optimistic side, while nearly a third of workers in 1992 feared that they would lose their jobs less than 10% did.