Australians in paid work face considerable challenges in an employment environment increasingly characterised by insecurity, casualisation and sluggish wage growth. Two leaders in the social policy sector share their thoughts on what the issues are, and how we can begin to resolve them.
The COVID-19 epidemic and its economic consequences mean that many more workers in 2020 understood what it is to have work but not to earn enough to make ends meet. While government payments such as Jobkeeper and Jobseeker offered relief, their removal recasts uncertainty for many workers unable to obtain sufficient income to support themselves and their families.
‘There are a large number of people who just don’t earn enough money to get by’, says Toby oConnor, CEO of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council of Australia.
These are people with jobs, but who work in industries where insufficient hours are available per worker, or pay is below legislated minimums. He says that the ‘gig economy’, a process by which the labour market has been casualised and made insecure, forces the price of labour down, and with it the bargaining power of workers.
Dr Ursula Stephens, who until recently was CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia, shares these concerns. ‘[The gig economy] is very casualised, very insecure work for people where all of the risk and responsibility comes back on the worker as opposed to the employer. So, they are seen as a contractor without any of the safeguards.’
A POWER IMBALANCE
Those in low-skilled contract or award industries don’t have the opportunity to negotiate their income and conditions. Bargaining is currently possible for workers with specialised skills, so that low wages entrench disadvantage and poverty, and create growing inequality.
Dr Stephens notes that a disproportionate amount of casualised work is ‘feminised work’, work substantially undertaken by women. ‘[Women, and men, employed in casualised industries] have a consolidated disadvantage, in life-long savings, their superannuation, their ability to accrue long service leave and other entitlements’, she says.
The pressures on those with insecure work is exacerbated by wage stagnation even as cost of living expenses have increased.
‘When you are on a low wage, minimum wage or a supported benefit just the constant pressure of trying to meet cost-of-living expenses is really tangible for many people and will mean that home ownership will be out of reach of many people in the future’, Dr Stephens says.
The inability to access secure housing makes life especially difficult if a casual worker falls out of employment. The risk, and experience of homelessness, obviously difficult in itself, also makes it very difficult to re-enter the workforce.
‘Without a home you don’t have a base to do anything. Home is everything. Having a roof over your head gives you a lot of stability’, says Mr oConnor.
While traditional manufacturing jobs have declined, they have been replaced to some extent by growth in service and care industries. However, these tend to be industries characterised by casualisation and poor pay. The Royal Commission into Aged Care and the Royal Commission into Disability Care highlighted the precarious nature of employment and low wages in those sectors.
‘The Royal Commissions have said that the workforce in the care industry needs to be better trained, better supported and better paid. If we were able to do that and invest in a commitment to do all of those things, then we would have a much higher standard of care and a stronger commitment from people in the industry to stay there and build their own career paths’, says Dr Stephens.
VALUING ALL WORKERS
Dr Stephens poses a broader question for society: How do we make a career in service and care something that is valued both by society and people?
Part of the answer may lie in considering the way a moral and ethical framework such as Catholic Social Teaching addresses work. That body of teaching requires putting the human person first. This would be the antithesis of a model that considers the worker only in terms of their economically measurable output.
Catholic Social Teaching also promotes solidarity, which implies standing with the worker, and valuing their work, as well as the principal of subsidiarity – where decisions are made at as local a level as possible, and in close consultation with those most affected by them. This means workers need to have a strong voice in shaping their working conditions.
Proponents of the ongoing casualisation of the workforce present its benefits in precisely this way – as personal choice and flexibility. Notionally, workers are able to choose their own hours and move employers as they find better pay and conditions. Insufficient work, however, means that this flexibility is only theoretical. When there is an insufficient total number of hours of work compared with the number of hours workers need to work to flourish, then workers may be inclined to accept exploitative pay and conditions just to earn something rather than nothing.
Mr oConnor says Catholic Social Teaching provides a foundational pillar for working through how the community addresses the challenges of a post-COVID-19 workforce.
‘When you start talking about things like human dignity and the common good you begin to strip away all of the spin and you come back to, what is it like to be a human being? What do we value as humans? What do we want out of our communities?’
> Julian Butler SJ is a Jesuit in formation for Catholic priesthood and contributor at Jesuit Communications. He is also acting Head of Faith & Service at Xavier College in Melbourne, and a board member at Jesuit Social Services.