It was a case of “lies, damned lies and statistics,” a happy headline, and a gullible media sucked in by the spin.

When the ABS released its latest Australian Social Trends survey, its media release was titled: “Part-time work cushioned Australia’s economic downturn”.

Correct, as far as it goes, and entirely unremarkable: that’s old news and blindingly obvious from the employment figures released each month.

The significance of the Social Trends report is that it undercuts this happy story.

It reveals a far more complex picture of the impact of the economic slowdown on men, women, and young people.

It shows that, even in a downturn ranked by the Reserve Bank as one of the shallowest ever experienced here, young people fared badly.

The prospects for those in the youth labour market deteriorated markedly and the employment outlook for teenagers entering the labour force without qualifications became grim.

More than half of those who left school in 2008 without matriculating couldn’t find a full-time job or a place in further study in 2009.

The share of people under 25 in the workforce fell by 5 percentage points during the latest downturn; a little less severe than the fall in youth employment during the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s but bad enough.

About a third of those people became unemployed.

A greater share simply dropped out of the labour force.

The result: a rise in the number of young people who are “disengaged” from work and formal education.

On the ABS figures, last year, in the wake of the slump in economic growth, almost one in five people under 25 were neither in full-time work or studying.

History shows that the jobs for young people that disappear during a downturn tend not to come back.

Men, the main breadwinners in most households, also suffered an erosion of full-time employment opportunities.

Part-time employment failed to offset the destruction of full-time employment for male workers and the shedding of full-time male jobs, a typical feature of recessions, led mainly to a rise in joblessness among men.

More than half of the decline in male full-time employment was accounted for by a rise in unemployment, and only around one-third by an increase in part-time employment.

The most feminised of industries was also hit hard.

In this supposed mildest of economic declines, jobs in the retail sector were slashed.

On the official estimate, 51,700 jobs were shed from the retail sector, a decline of about 4 per cent. Full-time jobs accounted for more than two thirds of that decline.

That’s a significantly worse outcome for the retail sector than in the deep recession of 1990-91.

Imagine what would have happened were it not for the $10 billion cash handouts the Federal Government delivered in an effort to boost consumption.

And while a rise in part-time work did “cushion” the destruction of work during the downturn, the cushion was a lot thinner than in the last slowdown in 2001.

Back then, says the ABS, a rise in part-time work was a “defining feature” and more than half the fall in full-time employment was offset by a rise in part time work.

In contrast, in the latest downturn, “it was increasing unemployment, as well as growing part-time employment, that accounted for the bulk of the decline”.

So why would the ABS headline its media release “Part-time work cushioned the downturn”, and why would the media uncritically parrot this line (even, sadly, the ABC’s flagship evening television news bulletin)?

Because it fits the mythology about how Australia rode out the GFC.

The myth is that the unemployment rate stayed pretty low primarily because of “work sharing”.

This congenial narrative – told by the Government, the RBA, the employer groups and the market economists – explains the lower than feared unemployment rate as a product of win-win “flexibility”.

Rather than lay people off, employers cut workers’ hours, showing a combination of benevolence and far-sighted self-interest. Businesses had seen how hard it can be to get skilled labour during the boom years so wisely kept people on in the lean times.

Employees, showing good sense and “flexibility”, agreed to accept short work-weeks in the hard times so they and their colleagues could keep their jobs.

Anyone with even a skerrick of understanding about how labour markets work in the real world knows that this could only be part of the story.

Celebrated examples aside, as an over-arching explanation for the labour market outcomes during 2008-09, it’s absurd.

Labour markets are heterogeneous. As demand slumped and fear reigned, alongside labour hording, there was job destruction – a complex patchwork of responses by firm and by industry.

The myth that’s become conventional wisdom implies that the jobs that became part-time were the same jobs that were full-time beforehand, employing the same people.

A study of more than 6,500 workers by the Workplace Relations Centre at the University of Sydney highlights a very different dynamic.

It found that large numbers of employees lost their jobs and were re-employed on fewer hours with reduced pay and entitlements.

For many, the result was a shift from ongoing full-time employment to more precarious casual work.

The ABS Social Trends survey confirms that, in every economic downturn since the recession of the early 1990s, there’s been a decline in full-time employment and a rise in part-time jobs.

Although the data in this survey sheds no light on the issue, we know from separate statistics and research that many of those part-time jobs are casual.

So it’s likely that the latest downturn has continued a long-term structural trend – the “casualisation” of the labour market.

That trend was suppressed in Australia during the latter years of the long-boom when the unemployment rate had a four in front of it and there were shortages in skilled labour, but it remains the underlying dynamic.

It is, in part, the result of a business strategy designed to buffer companies from economic shocks.

Cut the share of “permanent” employees on the books, and you can tailor your labour usage to peaks and troughs in demand, and avoid having to pay redundancy when things turn sour.

Announcing its latest first half profit – a record $100 million – the retailer David Jones confirmed that a variation on this strategy was the key to its profits during the downturn.

DJ’s chief executive Mark McInnes said the company hasn’t employed a single full-time retail salesperson since 2004 – so it’s been able to adjust the working hours of it store staff to match sales volumes.

That’s a logical response, and it has certain spin-off macro-economic benefits: it’s far better to have people under-employed than unemployed.

But it’s a less congenial narrative than the story of “work sharing” and “flexibility”.