Need for Job Security

Former deputy prime minister Brian Howe chaired an inquiry commissioned last year by the ACTU into insecure work. He observed in the inquiry’s report that a new divide has opened in the workforce that was “no longer between the blue-collar and white-collar worker [but] between those in the ‘core’ of the workforce and those on the ‘periphery’”.

The inquiry found as much as 40 per cent of the workforce – some 4 million workers – are engaged as casuals, on short-term contracts, in labour hire, or as independent contractors.

It noted the key driver of this change “has been the emergence of a business model across both the private and the public sectors that shifts the risks associated with work from the employer to the employee and minimises labour costs at the expense of job quality”.

The inquiry’s recommendations go to many issues that will be seen as workplace re-regulation. But they also go to simply making the casual workforce a more viable option, and to changes that can make life less perilous for this massive slice of the workforce – for example, by changing the way employers report work to the Tax Office to stop people who must partly rely on income support systems from suffering massive swings in income.

At the National Press Club this week, the ACTU’s Ged Kearney noted that “on the one hand we have a couple of million workers regularly working more than four hours of unpaid overtime a week; and on the other we have hundreds of thousands who are unable to earn what they need because they can’t get enough hours of work”.

Business needed to accept that a secure job was not an impediment to productivity, she said.

“In many respects, it is a vital precondition. If workers are being paid well, with a reasonable degree of job security and predictable hours, with skills that are being developed and recognised and put to good use in the workplace, if they are consulted and fully involved in any change processes occurring in the workplace, then you are far more likely to have a productive and engaged workforce.”

Kearney argues the 40 per cent of the workforce in casual labour not only do not have paid leave entitlements, “they miss out on quality skills and training and career opportunities”. That must surely be a problem when we pay such lip service to the need to boost the skills of our workforce. The ACTU will convene a “community summit” in March to push the case for reform of insecure work.

Kearney indirectly noted the Prime Minister’s letters to the Business Council and the ACTU last week calling for a return to the days of the Accord. “We’ve heard a lot in the last week about the need for collaboration and consensus in the debate about productivity and the economy,” she said.

“This is a debate that Australia shouldn’t be afraid of having – indeed it is a debate that Australia needs to have,” she said. “We are putting both parties on notice that secure work is an issue that working people care deeply about.”