Indeed, the labour market is crucial to the Reserve Bank’s efforts to bring inflation under control. With the unemployment rate close to a record low, and employers desperate to fill labour shortages, wages rates have been charging higher. Those labour costs are in turn being passed through into prices – the latest CPI report shows that price rises are increasingly widespread across all categories. That’s seen local forces starting to take over from global ones as the main source of overall inflation pressures. With that in mind, the September quarter labour market surveys, released this Wednesday, are unlikely to ... (full story)