WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.660 who continue to do terrific work within the Murdoch Press. 2 00:00:04.540 --> 00:00:06.200 Elizabeth was born in the Netherlands. 3 00:00:06.260 --> 00:00:07.600 She grew up in Australia. 4 00:00:08.040 --> 00:00:11.920 She works as a senior feature writer within The Australian 5 00:00:11.920 --> 00:00:16.760 and she thinks of herself as coming from an earlier tradition of journalism, 6 00:00:16.900 --> 00:00:21.220 that is someone who digs deep, spends time developing the stories well, 7 00:00:21.340 --> 00:00:23.920 but particularly tries to draw out the stories from people 8 00:00:23.920 --> 00:00:27.060 who are generally underrepresented in our public discourse 9 00:00:27.060 --> 00:00:29.600 and that takes her into the areas of industrial relations, 10 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:32.080 working life, politics and immigration. 11 00:00:33.200 --> 00:00:36.920 Her book, Dirt Cheap, Life at the Wrong End of the Labour Market, 12 00:00:36.980 --> 00:00:39.500 was published in 2005 and was shortlisted 13 00:00:39.500 --> 00:00:41.680 for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. 14 00:00:41.960 --> 00:00:43.100 It's a terrific book. 15 00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:46.400 It's in a group of terrific books, 16 00:00:46.560 --> 00:00:50.380 along with similar work by Polly Toynbee in Britain 17 00:00:50.380 --> 00:00:56.080 and I will forget her name, Barbara Ehrenreich, of course, in the US. 18 00:00:56.720 --> 00:00:59.260 Her first book was a memoir, Manly Girls. 19 00:00:59.260 --> 00:01:01.100 Now, Elizabeth warns us that she talks very... 20 00:01:01.100 --> 00:01:03.340 She gets a bit of momentum up, starts talking very fast, 21 00:01:03.480 --> 00:01:06.220 so she invites anyone who thinks it's going too quickly 22 00:01:06.220 --> 00:01:07.880 to put their hand up to slow her down. 23 00:01:08.280 --> 00:01:10.380 Thank you very much for being with us, Elizabeth. 24 00:01:10.660 --> 00:01:10.800 Please. 25 00:01:12.760 --> 00:01:13.220 APPLAUSE 26 00:01:14.440 --> 00:01:14.900 Hi. 27 00:01:20.860 --> 00:01:25.340 Just so we can be sure there's at least one new piece of information 28 00:01:25.340 --> 00:01:27.020 you take away from this talk, 29 00:01:27.720 --> 00:01:29.180 let me introduce myself. 30 00:01:29.260 --> 00:01:32.400 So to speak, by telling you my salary. 31 00:01:33.060 --> 00:01:35.640 As a senior writer on the Australian newspaper, 32 00:01:36.080 --> 00:01:38.800 I earn $106,000 a year. 33 00:01:39.180 --> 00:01:40.680 It may be a lot of money. 34 00:01:40.820 --> 00:01:42.080 Hell, it is a lot of money. 35 00:01:42.840 --> 00:01:47.180 But it's considerably less than the salaries of some of my colleagues 36 00:01:47.180 --> 00:01:49.320 who habitually spring into print 37 00:01:49.320 --> 00:01:51.820 to comment on what other people earn, 38 00:01:52.540 --> 00:01:56.340 often suggesting that Australia will turn into Zimbabwe 39 00:01:56.340 --> 00:01:57.620 in the blink of an eye 40 00:01:57.620 --> 00:01:59.240 if minimum wage is cut. 41 00:01:59.240 --> 00:02:02.200 And that's because the average workers get another 27 cents an hour. 42 00:02:02.600 --> 00:02:07.040 I wrote that before I knew that they got 26 point something this morning. 43 00:02:07.660 --> 00:02:11.460 I could go on, pointing out that the $33.5 million 44 00:02:12.220 --> 00:02:15.360 pocketed by Macquarie Bank chief executive, Alan Moss, 45 00:02:15.620 --> 00:02:20.620 means he'd have to work 5.6 hours to earn what I earn in a year. 46 00:02:21.040 --> 00:02:25.920 He could knock off a little after lunchtime on January 1 and have... 47 00:02:25.920 --> 00:02:26.860 LAUGHTER 48 00:02:27.460 --> 00:02:27.660 LAUGHTER 49 00:02:28.200 --> 00:02:28.520 LAUGHTER 50 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:30.940 and have the rest of the year off. 51 00:02:31.680 --> 00:02:34.280 And in those same 5.6 hours, 52 00:02:34.520 --> 00:02:37.840 he would have earned nearly four times minimum wages. 53 00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:42.020 These were the sort of comparisons in my mind 54 00:02:42.020 --> 00:02:43.260 when I wrote Dirt Cheap, 55 00:02:43.380 --> 00:02:46.280 my first-hand account of a life on low wages. 56 00:02:47.220 --> 00:02:50.940 I stole the idea from Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dime 57 00:02:50.940 --> 00:02:53.060 on not getting by in America 58 00:02:53.780 --> 00:02:55.560 and wrote my version 59 00:02:55.560 --> 00:02:59.140 because I was convinced Australia was heading in the same direction. 60 00:03:00.380 --> 00:03:01.720 Namely, the wrong way. 61 00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:04.140 My timing could have been better. 62 00:03:04.520 --> 00:03:07.720 By chance, Dirt Cheap was published a couple of months 63 00:03:07.720 --> 00:03:11.200 before the government produced a draft of work choices. 64 00:03:12.280 --> 00:03:14.820 Since it came into being 16 months ago, 65 00:03:15.060 --> 00:03:18.160 employees can be asked to sign individual contracts 66 00:03:18.160 --> 00:03:20.620 that trade off almost all conditions 67 00:03:21.340 --> 00:03:25.200 and sacked on a slender pretext if they refuse. 68 00:03:26.260 --> 00:03:29.220 With families around Australia hearing from some of those people, 69 00:03:29.220 --> 00:03:30.080 sons and daughters, 70 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.440 who've been given the choice of signing contracts 71 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:36.820 that remove all conditions or not working at all, 72 00:03:37.880 --> 00:03:42.100 Liberal Party polling showed that the very phrase, 73 00:03:42.340 --> 00:03:45.680 work choices, is enough to give people hives. 74 00:03:46.680 --> 00:03:49.480 A colleague of mine on the paper, Peter Lawless, 75 00:03:49.520 --> 00:03:51.620 pointed out something very funny about the fact 76 00:03:51.620 --> 00:03:55.000 that this very Orwellian phrase is now being canned. 77 00:03:56.220 --> 00:03:59.020 The staff handling calls to the Department of Workplace 78 00:03:59.220 --> 00:04:01.900 Relations info line have been told their mouths 79 00:04:01.900 --> 00:04:04.780 will be washed out with soap if they ever use it again. 80 00:04:06.760 --> 00:04:09.160 In order to tackle the inexplicable idea 81 00:04:09.160 --> 00:04:11.040 that work choices isn't fair, 82 00:04:11.200 --> 00:04:13.940 you'll recall the government recently came up 83 00:04:13.940 --> 00:04:15.420 with something called the fairness test 84 00:04:16.280 --> 00:04:18.240 and will bombard us with the message 85 00:04:18.240 --> 00:04:20.820 that a team of fairness inspectors 86 00:04:20.820 --> 00:04:24.400 will cast their beady eyes over every AWA sign 87 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:27.100 since May 7 this year. 88 00:04:27.360 --> 00:04:29.200 Since more than 30,000 inspectors have signed the AWA sign, 89 00:04:29.200 --> 00:04:30.880 agreements are registered each month. 90 00:04:31.160 --> 00:04:33.320 The mechanics are a bit difficult to picture. 91 00:04:34.340 --> 00:04:38.000 But there are other hurdles facing the fast-growing bureaucracy 92 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:41.740 required to enforce deregulation, 93 00:04:42.500 --> 00:04:47.480 like the perception that the 2,600 pages of legislation 94 00:04:47.480 --> 00:04:52.440 formerly known as work choices is overkill from beginning to end. 95 00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:56.820 And as I say, some years before tag teams of lawyers 96 00:04:56.820 --> 00:04:59.180 from Freehills and Blake Dawson Waldorf, 97 00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:02.100 children, et cetera, came up with their 2,600 pages 98 00:05:02.100 --> 00:05:06.060 of deregulation, I took unpaid leave from the Australian 99 00:05:06.060 --> 00:05:08.600 to work at a bunch of low-wage jobs, 100 00:05:08.940 --> 00:05:12.020 the basis of the research for Dirt Cheap. 101 00:05:12.340 --> 00:05:16.780 I packed eggs, I washed dishes, I cleaned nursing home bathrooms 102 00:05:16.780 --> 00:05:21.360 and laundered nursing home sheets for $11 to $14 an hour. 103 00:05:22.460 --> 00:05:25.280 But even allowing that the egg factory in the bush 104 00:05:25.280 --> 00:05:28.260 made me wonder if I had been transposed 105 00:05:28.260 --> 00:05:31.180 to a reality show based on straw dogs, 106 00:05:31.840 --> 00:05:35.000 the real shock came when I was offered a casual position 107 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:36.740 in a discount store in Sydney. 108 00:05:37.640 --> 00:05:39.940 I expected to find the work to my liking. 109 00:05:40.420 --> 00:05:42.480 I'd worked in shops as a schoolgirl, 110 00:05:42.660 --> 00:05:44.420 starting at the age of 13, 111 00:05:44.720 --> 00:05:47.820 working on Saturday mornings in my mother's dress shop, 112 00:05:48.020 --> 00:05:49.060 Paris Frocks. 113 00:05:49.620 --> 00:05:53.140 Motto, you can buy better at Paris in Seaforth. 114 00:05:54.160 --> 00:05:56.720 Of course, that was all a long time ago, 115 00:05:56.800 --> 00:05:58.140 in the now-forgotten. 116 00:05:58.260 --> 00:06:01.160 In the modern era, grown-ups either had a job or didn't. 117 00:06:01.600 --> 00:06:04.160 A distinction fast being whittled away, 118 00:06:04.820 --> 00:06:08.020 judging by the job offer from Madam in Human Resources. 119 00:06:08.860 --> 00:06:11.920 You may be asked to work any hours from 0 to 38 a week, 120 00:06:12.080 --> 00:06:12.860 she warned me. 121 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:16.660 And as John Howard might say, what could be fairer than that? 122 00:06:17.680 --> 00:06:20.740 In fact, it was Howard who said people should be happy 123 00:06:20.740 --> 00:06:23.340 to have a job, whatever the conditions. 124 00:06:24.080 --> 00:06:28.000 He would have appreciated the situation in which I found myself, 125 00:06:28.040 --> 00:06:28.240 because I was a young woman. 126 00:06:28.260 --> 00:06:29.040 I was happy. 127 00:06:29.300 --> 00:06:32.000 The worse the conditions, the more I had to write about. 128 00:06:33.760 --> 00:06:36.160 I had expected the job to be casual. 129 00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:40.840 Up to 30% of the workforce was in non-standard employment by then, 130 00:06:41.500 --> 00:06:45.000 more likely than not casual part-time employment. 131 00:06:46.220 --> 00:06:49.460 The largest number of casuals, over half a million, 132 00:06:49.620 --> 00:06:51.020 were in retailing. 133 00:06:51.320 --> 00:06:54.820 But as I say in the book, I didn't really get the extent 134 00:06:54.820 --> 00:06:58.240 of the uncertainty on offer until I asked the superiors 135 00:06:58.240 --> 00:07:01.440 if they could tell me when I'd get another shift. 136 00:07:01.800 --> 00:07:02.960 No, she said. 137 00:07:03.580 --> 00:07:08.140 It was at that moment I discovered that I had been hired to fill in 138 00:07:08.140 --> 00:07:10.160 only if other staff were sick. 139 00:07:11.060 --> 00:07:15.000 A woman dependent on the income from the store wouldn't have known 140 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:16.980 if she could pay a single bill that week. 141 00:07:17.820 --> 00:07:20.200 If she were eligible for government benefits, 142 00:07:20.480 --> 00:07:23.820 she would have to keep recalculating her income in advance, 143 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:27.620 hesitating a guess how much she would earn in the next few weeks. 144 00:07:27.620 --> 00:07:30.540 I once interviewed a person who'd given up her government benefits 145 00:07:30.540 --> 00:07:31.420 because she couldn't bear it. 146 00:07:31.460 --> 00:07:32.620 It was endless calculation. 147 00:07:33.160 --> 00:07:37.520 I could only conclude that the welfare system encourages employers 148 00:07:37.520 --> 00:07:40.700 to create these on-the-off-chance sort of jobs, 149 00:07:40.820 --> 00:07:44.620 bolstering their workforce with a reserve army of labour. 150 00:07:45.440 --> 00:07:47.480 Indeed, under Welfare to Work, 151 00:07:47.700 --> 00:07:50.880 the Pinsa movement proclaimed this policy a year ago. 152 00:07:51.020 --> 00:07:55.020 A woman trying to coordinate casual work and childcare 153 00:07:55.620 --> 00:07:57.600 would incur Centrelink's $8 billion 154 00:07:57.620 --> 00:07:59.180 per week no-payment penalty, 155 00:07:59.440 --> 00:08:03.860 the third time she refused to accept so precarious a position. 156 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:08.840 What the Centrelink bureaucrats call it is suitable work. 157 00:08:09.460 --> 00:08:12.220 I stuck it out for about 15 shifts, 158 00:08:12.920 --> 00:08:16.780 long enough to sample the store's version of suitable work. 159 00:08:17.420 --> 00:08:22.560 The flexibility employers are always invoking was all on one side. 160 00:08:23.100 --> 00:08:25.660 I found you're as likely to be given two hours' warning 161 00:08:25.660 --> 00:08:27.600 as two weeks' warning of the next one. 162 00:08:27.620 --> 00:08:28.820 I was given a three-hour shift. 163 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:33.820 When I knocked back a proposition involving several days' work 164 00:08:33.820 --> 00:08:35.800 in 16 days' time, 165 00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:39.200 the supervisor crossly asked if I had another job. 166 00:08:39.740 --> 00:08:40.600 I did. 167 00:08:40.740 --> 00:08:43.800 I had started sampling suitable work 168 00:08:43.800 --> 00:08:45.880 in the laundry of a nursing home, 169 00:08:46.100 --> 00:08:48.760 an institution run by a religious organisation 170 00:08:48.760 --> 00:08:51.820 that had hired me without explaining 171 00:08:51.820 --> 00:08:54.380 that I was on permanent standby again. 172 00:08:55.180 --> 00:08:57.600 With shifts on an emerging scale, 173 00:08:57.600 --> 00:09:08.880 we meet three times in three years' 65 years we meet 65 times in 65 years we meet 65 times we meet 65 times we meet 65 times 174 00:09:08.880 --> 00:09:09.140 we meet 65 times we meet 65 times 175 00:09:09.140 --> 00:09:12.920 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 176 00:09:12.920 --> 00:09:13.800 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 177 00:09:13.800 --> 00:09:18.120 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 178 00:09:18.120 --> 00:09:21.540 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 179 00:09:21.540 --> 00:09:27.380 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 we meet 65 180 00:09:27.380 --> 00:09:33.560 Holmes employees were fixated on other bits of paper. They constantly compared notes on the 181 00:09:33.560 --> 00:09:40.500 rosters to check where each little scrap of work had gone. In topping up the number of casual and 182 00:09:40.500 --> 00:09:46.580 part-time employees on the books, Church Homes Inc, as I called it, had managed to set up a contest 183 00:09:46.580 --> 00:09:55.000 over working hours. Labor market analyst Ian Campbell, a senior research fellow at RMIT, 184 00:09:55.000 --> 00:10:01.680 suggests that employers in some industries adopt these strategies in order to sustain 185 00:10:02.520 --> 00:10:08.000 underemployment, which gives them more control. Indeed, underemployment appears to be higher in 186 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:14.500 this country than anywhere else in the OECD. Are we in the OECD? It's one of those comparisons 187 00:10:14.500 --> 00:10:21.000 that always pops up, and highest of all in retailing. In a survey of retail work in Victoria, 188 00:10:21.360 --> 00:10:24.740 Campbell found that four in every 10 part-time 189 00:10:24.740 --> 00:10:24.980 employees were in the OECD. That's a lot of work. 190 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:31.780 He and a colleague interviewed said they wanted to work more hours. That left many of them waiting 191 00:10:31.780 --> 00:10:38.580 by the phone, making themselves available to work at all hours, a kind of limbo in which they weren't 192 00:10:38.580 --> 00:10:46.740 free to make plans, but weren't being paid for their time. Australia is in the 17th year of a boom 193 00:10:46.740 --> 00:10:54.420 that's come to seem never-ending. My newspaper's commentators regularly attribute part of this good 194 00:10:54.420 --> 00:11:02.000 fortune to the flexibility of the labour market. Flexibility employers insist they need to be competitive. 195 00:11:02.440 --> 00:11:08.520 But what they're really talking about is a process in which the risks that used to be thought of 196 00:11:08.520 --> 00:11:14.560 as part of the cost of doing business are transferred from employers to employees. 197 00:11:15.980 --> 00:11:20.920 Not just the risk of an economic downturn, but the risk there will be fewer people in the store 198 00:11:20.920 --> 00:11:24.400 tomorrow because it's raining, or because there's a better future. 199 00:11:25.180 --> 00:11:26.380 And that's why I'm here today, to talk about the impact of the pandemic on the labour market. 200 00:11:26.380 --> 00:11:35.280 When I was working in the store and had established my cred as a checkout chick, I asked Madam from Human Resources 201 00:11:35.280 --> 00:11:44.460 if I would get shifts only if part-time staff were ill. She said, it depends what promotions we've got on. 202 00:11:45.340 --> 00:11:50.780 I was getting respectable casual loading, not that I made enough to pay rent and eat as well. 203 00:11:51.160 --> 00:11:54.280 And unless we're talking about the sort of casuals, 204 00:11:54.400 --> 00:11:59.720 in IT or business, who get a couple of thou a day for putting their bum in the office chair, 205 00:12:00.180 --> 00:12:05.500 casual loadings fail to compensate people adequately for foregone benefits, 206 00:12:05.800 --> 00:12:10.920 let alone for the additional uncertainties transferred from employer to employee. 207 00:12:11.840 --> 00:12:20.240 I thank Evan Thornley, a Labour MP from Victoria, for directing my attention to the significant price of uncertainty elsewhere. 208 00:12:21.720 --> 00:12:24.020 For instance, in the futures market, 209 00:12:24.400 --> 00:12:31.340 in which the price of options in pork bellies or whatever depends on the level of uncertainty involved in the gamble 210 00:12:31.340 --> 00:12:33.940 that demand for the commodity will go up or down. 211 00:12:35.240 --> 00:12:46.220 Our own CSIRO has a unit that uses econometrics and actuarial mathematics to identify, measure and price risk for corporate clients. 212 00:12:46.620 --> 00:12:52.940 What ordinary employee could possibly be expected to price the risk that she can be sacked at an hour's notice, 213 00:12:53.160 --> 00:12:54.380 after what she's been doing for a long time? 214 00:12:54.380 --> 00:12:56.780 And the other thing is the amount of time the company spends waiting three weeks for the next offer of a shift. 215 00:12:59.620 --> 00:13:04.480 Subcontractors in the building industry have even managed to transfer the risk it will rain onto the workers. 216 00:13:04.820 --> 00:13:08.700 The happy result of persuading them to become self-employed. 217 00:13:09.640 --> 00:13:14.760 When the industry was booming six or seven years ago, this is in New South Wales at least, 218 00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:18.980 so many workers were tempted by the prospect of a lower tax rate, 219 00:13:18.980 --> 00:13:21.880 that the tax office started issuing edicts, 220 00:13:21.880 --> 00:13:25.020 defining the difference between being self-employed 221 00:13:25.020 --> 00:13:27.280 and being in an employment relationship. 222 00:13:28.620 --> 00:13:32.120 This hasn't prevented subcontractors in the finishing trades 223 00:13:32.120 --> 00:13:35.560 from giving every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the industry 224 00:13:35.560 --> 00:13:39.900 the choice of getting an ABN number or not working at all. 225 00:13:40.920 --> 00:13:44.000 They say, if you want to work for us, you need an ABM, 226 00:13:44.040 --> 00:13:46.640 said Tim Vollmer, who's a spokesman 227 00:13:46.640 --> 00:13:49.160 from the New South Wales branch of the CFMEU. 228 00:13:49.620 --> 00:13:52.680 He quoted an offer made to an 18-year-old 229 00:13:52.680 --> 00:13:54.520 who had what used to be called a job, 230 00:13:55.220 --> 00:13:57.840 working five days a week delivering gyprock 231 00:13:57.840 --> 00:13:59.740 for a building supply company. 232 00:14:00.560 --> 00:14:03.740 This 18-year-old got $10.20 an hour, 233 00:14:03.860 --> 00:14:07.260 less than the minimum wage for lugging the gyprock around. 234 00:14:07.900 --> 00:14:11.480 But he didn't get a cent if it was raining and work had stopped 235 00:14:11.480 --> 00:14:14.400 or if he was sick and had to stay home. 236 00:14:14.720 --> 00:14:16.620 He was self-employed, after all. 237 00:14:16.640 --> 00:14:20.200 The boss owed him only what he had earned that day. 238 00:14:20.840 --> 00:14:25.420 In his case, the boss refused to pay his super and workers' comp as well, 239 00:14:25.580 --> 00:14:28.920 wrongly claiming the young bloke had to pay them himself. 240 00:14:29.400 --> 00:14:32.540 That means the boss had managed to transfer 241 00:14:32.540 --> 00:14:34.600 another of the risks of doing business, 242 00:14:34.900 --> 00:14:37.040 in this case onto the hapless taxpayers 243 00:14:37.040 --> 00:14:40.160 footing the bill for the uninsured workers' scheme. 244 00:14:42.340 --> 00:14:45.500 Employers aren't just transferring the risk a worker will be injured, 245 00:14:45.660 --> 00:14:46.620 they're outsourcing it. 246 00:14:46.640 --> 00:14:47.360 Employers are also outsourcing responsibility 247 00:14:47.360 --> 00:14:51.880 for the decisions that could implicate them in an industrial accident. 248 00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:56.200 Last month, I interviewed some tradesmen for a story 249 00:14:56.200 --> 00:15:00.280 about the consequences of speaking out about safety in the workplace. 250 00:15:01.260 --> 00:15:04.560 It did get into the newspaper, I'm surprised you didn't say. 251 00:15:04.840 --> 00:15:08.760 Anthony, a 40-year-old scaffolder from Newcastle, New South Wales, 252 00:15:08.980 --> 00:15:11.720 had been sacked by the contractor employing him, 253 00:15:12.400 --> 00:15:15.280 right after he pointed out that the stuff blowing around, 254 00:15:15.460 --> 00:15:16.600 like sand in a storm, 255 00:15:16.600 --> 00:15:17.900 was asbestos. 256 00:15:18.740 --> 00:15:21.300 That's what I think he did, I'm not sure how it goes with asbestos. 257 00:15:22.180 --> 00:15:24.020 Naturally, scaffolders are constantly confronted 258 00:15:24.020 --> 00:15:26.720 with more routine questions about their own safety. 259 00:15:27.480 --> 00:15:29.460 Anthony described to me a typical scene. 260 00:15:30.620 --> 00:15:33.240 If the boss says, I want you to go to work, 261 00:15:33.280 --> 00:15:37.420 and you say it's been raining, the steel's wet, it's up to you. 262 00:15:37.720 --> 00:15:41.380 You think, will I get out there and try my best to look after my own safety, 263 00:15:41.740 --> 00:15:42.960 or will I sit in the shed? 264 00:15:43.620 --> 00:15:46.000 And at the end of the day, they say, we're cutting back. 265 00:15:46.600 --> 00:15:47.740 We don't need you tomorrow. 266 00:15:49.340 --> 00:15:51.080 Anthony said, you can always say no. 267 00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:53.380 The thing is, do you think you're going to be on the next job? 268 00:15:54.500 --> 00:15:57.380 The interesting thing about these risks is 269 00:15:57.380 --> 00:16:00.580 that the uncertainty itself may be used against the workers. 270 00:16:01.200 --> 00:16:05.040 Consider labour hire, an increasingly common form 271 00:16:05.040 --> 00:16:07.020 of employment, if you can call it employment, 272 00:16:07.400 --> 00:16:09.000 in the construction industry. 273 00:16:10.360 --> 00:16:12.480 While the workers are technically employed 274 00:16:12.480 --> 00:16:16.440 by the labour hire agency, these agencies and the companies 275 00:16:16.600 --> 00:16:19.860 that use their services play a kind of shell game, 276 00:16:20.680 --> 00:16:25.160 sloughing off responsibility for the workers while using the very precariousness 277 00:16:25.160 --> 00:16:28.680 of their position to assert control over them. 278 00:16:29.560 --> 00:16:33.300 Daniel Wallace, an AMWU organiser in Newcastle, told me, 279 00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:36.420 in labour hire, if someone speaks up, they're gone. 280 00:16:37.280 --> 00:16:39.360 You need to be quiet and toe the line. 281 00:16:41.020 --> 00:16:46.040 In her research on the subject, Elsa Underhill, a lecturer at Deakin University, 282 00:16:46.600 --> 00:16:50.760 has found that one in five labour hire employees was dismissed 283 00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:53.000 for raising a concern about safety, 284 00:16:53.880 --> 00:16:57.220 which helps explain why she also found they were more likely 285 00:16:57.220 --> 00:17:01.400 to be injured at work, but less likely, four times less likely, 286 00:17:01.440 --> 00:17:03.140 to lodge a workers' comp claim. 287 00:17:04.700 --> 00:17:07.600 On the other hand, it could be said that the anxieties 288 00:17:07.600 --> 00:17:10.640 about job security shared by casual workers 289 00:17:10.640 --> 00:17:14.240 and agency workers alike are starting to infect people 290 00:17:14.240 --> 00:17:15.540 with permanent jobs. 291 00:17:15.720 --> 00:17:16.580 As we speak. 292 00:17:16.600 --> 00:17:19.780 we'll meet we meet 293 00:17:19.780 --> 00:17:20.700 we meet 294 00:17:20.700 --> 00:17:21.040 we meet 295 00:17:21.040 --> 00:17:21.600 we meet 296 00:17:21.600 --> 00:17:22.600 we meet 297 00:17:22.600 --> 00:17:22.680 we meet 298 00:17:22.680 --> 00:17:22.980 we meet 299 00:17:22.980 --> 00:17:23.600 we meet 300 00:17:23.600 --> 00:17:24.240 we meet 301 00:17:24.240 --> 00:17:24.260 we meet 302 00:17:24.260 --> 00:17:24.920 we meet 303 00:17:25.880 --> 00:17:27.060 we meet 304 00:17:28.540 --> 00:17:29.560 we meet 305 00:17:29.560 --> 00:17:30.740 we meet 306 00:17:30.740 --> 00:17:31.760 we meet 307 00:17:31.760 --> 00:17:32.140 we meet 308 00:17:32.140 --> 00:17:33.520 we meet 309 00:17:33.520 --> 00:17:34.740 we meet 310 00:17:34.740 --> 00:17:34.980 we meet 311 00:17:34.980 --> 00:17:35.740 we meet 312 00:17:37.700 --> 00:17:39.380 we meet 313 00:17:39.380 --> 00:17:41.520 we meet 314 00:17:41.520 --> 00:17:46.580 we meet 315 00:17:46.580 --> 00:17:48.320 to working on an as-needed basis, 316 00:17:48.920 --> 00:17:52.060 without any kind of penalty rates for working nights or weekends, 317 00:17:52.420 --> 00:17:54.160 or any kind of casual loading. 318 00:17:55.180 --> 00:17:58.460 This year, it emerged that more than half the workplace agreements 319 00:17:58.460 --> 00:18:02.800 signed since Work Choices have abolished overtime rates, 320 00:18:02.940 --> 00:18:04.640 penalty rates and shift loadings. 321 00:18:04.800 --> 00:18:07.560 But get this, I signed an agreement like that 322 00:18:07.560 --> 00:18:10.240 when Work Choices was just a gleam in Howard's eye. 323 00:18:10.740 --> 00:18:14.800 I had been hired as a breakfast attendant by a small Melbourne hotel. 324 00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:19.300 I started at six in the morning and worked Saturdays and Sundays, 325 00:18:19.400 --> 00:18:22.560 all for the same $11.98 an hour, 326 00:18:23.240 --> 00:18:26.580 63 cents over what was then the minimum wage. 327 00:18:27.380 --> 00:18:30.340 The contract I signed went on and on and on 328 00:18:30.340 --> 00:18:32.360 about something called flexi-time, 329 00:18:32.580 --> 00:18:35.160 though it could have been spelled out very succinctly. 330 00:18:35.220 --> 00:18:39.440 The company had complete control of my time, 24-7, 331 00:18:39.580 --> 00:18:42.600 and could demand more or less of it as the occasion required, 332 00:18:43.020 --> 00:18:44.500 without bothering to notify. 333 00:18:44.800 --> 00:18:44.840 I was given a job offer by the company, 334 00:18:44.840 --> 00:18:45.340 and they would notify me in advance. 335 00:18:46.640 --> 00:18:49.420 I'd had a couple of low-wage jobs by then. 336 00:18:49.840 --> 00:18:53.720 I was aware that a company might well have a proprietorial attitude 337 00:18:53.720 --> 00:18:56.680 to what I used to think of as my time. 338 00:18:57.560 --> 00:19:01.060 My fellow workers seemed to take all this flexibility for granted. 339 00:19:01.960 --> 00:19:06.160 I worked closest of all with a tiny, voluble woman from Eastern Europe, 340 00:19:06.220 --> 00:19:08.620 with a guttural voice and a melodramatic manner. 341 00:19:09.180 --> 00:19:13.320 I found her most engaging, though it has to be said that Svetlana, 342 00:19:13.320 --> 00:19:16.420 who had told me her life story ten minutes after we met, 343 00:19:17.120 --> 00:19:20.820 was a mixture of childlike trust and paranoid suspicion. 344 00:19:21.820 --> 00:19:24.980 I don't know if it was a legacy of life east of the Caucasus, 345 00:19:25.120 --> 00:19:27.700 but if she saw someone for management twice in a row, 346 00:19:27.780 --> 00:19:28.400 she would whisper, 347 00:19:28.520 --> 00:19:29.840 there's bang on us. 348 00:19:30.540 --> 00:19:33.700 Svetlana put so much heart into the job, 349 00:19:33.760 --> 00:19:35.640 I would write that she seemed to have sprung 350 00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:39.300 from an Employers' Federation myth about that golden era 351 00:19:39.300 --> 00:19:43.220 when simple folk paid a pittance, took a measurable price, 352 00:19:43.220 --> 00:19:45.160 and tried to survive in doing simple things well. 353 00:19:45.420 --> 00:19:49.200 Yet she had convinced herself she could be carpeted for a small mistake, 354 00:19:49.540 --> 00:19:52.620 like closing the breakfast buffet a few minutes early 355 00:19:52.620 --> 00:19:55.500 or returning a few minutes late from lunch. 356 00:19:56.120 --> 00:20:00.120 Her fear was out of all proportion to the actual threat from management. 357 00:20:00.460 --> 00:20:02.800 I noticed the same thing in the egg factory. 358 00:20:03.160 --> 00:20:05.660 There was abject fear of management. 359 00:20:07.100 --> 00:20:09.620 The women on the production line were bruisers 360 00:20:09.620 --> 00:20:11.360 who challenged each other automatically, 361 00:20:11.700 --> 00:20:13.200 but when the boss came in, 362 00:20:13.220 --> 00:20:15.660 and came to tell them the factory was being sold, 363 00:20:15.900 --> 00:20:18.800 they sat still and silent as stones. 364 00:20:19.640 --> 00:20:24.120 I concluded at the time that nothing in their experience 365 00:20:24.120 --> 00:20:26.760 suggested you could reason with management. 366 00:20:27.820 --> 00:20:31.260 I wondered later if I had missed the larger explanation, 367 00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:34.980 that the fear rose out of the atmosphere of insecurity 368 00:20:34.980 --> 00:20:37.500 created over many, many years. 369 00:20:38.300 --> 00:20:41.040 Australian workers were being told they didn't measure up 370 00:20:41.040 --> 00:20:42.800 long before Howard's so-called 371 00:20:43.220 --> 00:20:44.140 workplace reforms, 372 00:20:44.580 --> 00:20:46.740 and they're still being told these days. 373 00:20:48.220 --> 00:20:51.960 Howard famously said he was compelled to introduce work choices 374 00:20:51.960 --> 00:20:54.160 so Australia could compete globally, 375 00:20:55.220 --> 00:21:01.000 a notion again repeated often by the 200k a year columnists on my paper. 376 00:21:01.340 --> 00:21:04.840 But in truth, by the time Howard linked this bit of rhetoric 377 00:21:04.840 --> 00:21:08.480 left over from the 1970s and 80s to work choices, 378 00:21:09.500 --> 00:21:12.040 the wages share of national income 379 00:21:12.040 --> 00:21:13.220 were steadily slipping, 380 00:21:13.380 --> 00:21:15.940 the profits share was steadily growing, 381 00:21:16.100 --> 00:21:18.860 and even in allowing that more than half a million Australians 382 00:21:18.860 --> 00:21:20.460 are underemployed, 383 00:21:21.040 --> 00:21:24.060 Australians on average work more hours per year 384 00:21:24.060 --> 00:21:26.920 than their counterparts in OECD countries. 385 00:21:27.660 --> 00:21:29.880 For his part, the guy I interviewed, 386 00:21:30.040 --> 00:21:31.600 Newcastle Scaffolder Anthony, 387 00:21:31.940 --> 00:21:33.800 hasn't worked near home very often 388 00:21:33.800 --> 00:21:35.880 since he was escorted off the site 389 00:21:35.880 --> 00:21:38.960 for voicing concerns about asbestos. 390 00:21:39.360 --> 00:21:40.300 He said, 391 00:21:40.300 --> 00:21:44.440 for me to work in Newcastle now has become much harder. 392 00:21:45.180 --> 00:21:47.740 The bosses that do that kind of work know each other. 393 00:21:48.440 --> 00:21:50.580 If you have trouble with one contractor 394 00:21:51.300 --> 00:21:53.380 and ring up another, you have a problem. 395 00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:57.680 Instead, Anthony goes where the work is. 396 00:21:58.780 --> 00:22:00.620 If it's somewhere on the east coast, 397 00:22:00.880 --> 00:22:03.960 he often gets home to see his wife and two-year-old son. 398 00:22:05.020 --> 00:22:08.300 If he's adapting to the demands of the flexible labour market 399 00:22:08.300 --> 00:22:10.280 by chasing the work as far away as possible, 400 00:22:10.300 --> 00:22:12.520 as far away as Karratha or Port Hedland, 401 00:22:12.800 --> 00:22:14.540