SPEECH: ADDRESS TO ALERA - SYDNEY - FRIDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2021

ADDRESS TO THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ASSOCIATION

SYDNEY
FRIDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2021
  *** CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY ***
 

Acknowledgements

While much has changed because of the pandemic, some things have stayed the same: including the current Government’s approach to industrial relations.

Some things have gotten worse and constitute a substantial and ongoing threat to our recovery from the pandemic – not only with respect to the economy, but to the core of what it is like to work in Australia.

But sitting over the top of the current crisis - like a dark cloud – is insecure work.

That’s my focus today. It’s been my focus since I was first appointed by Anthony Albanese to this portfolio.

The future of employment relations both going into and coming out of COVID-19 has been dominated and is being determined by the relentless and insidious creep of insecurity into all forms of work.

We see it in:

- Casualisation;
- Labour hire;
- Outsourcing;
- Gig work;
- Rolling fixed-term employment contracts; and
- Increasingly in part-time work too.

The data speaks for itself:

• Around 3.4 million people in insecure work;
• Around 2.6 million casuals, with a large number actually working regular hours;
• Only about half the working population receiving paid annual leave, sick leave and other entitlements;
• Casuals losing their jobs eight times faster than permanent workers when COVID began and accounting for nearly two-thirds of the job losses;
• Casual employment surging back again in the largest and fastest increase in Australia’s history during the recovery last year, making up 61.8 per cent of total jobs growth: with women filling 62 per cent of those new casual jobs;
• The proportion of Australians working multiple jobs is at the highest point in the 27-year history of ABS statistics on the issue – a record high of 6.5 percent, as workers are forced to work more than one job just so they can pay for essentials, like rent and energy bills, with single incomes not enough to make ends meet;
• Underemployment is at 9.2 per cent.

And all of this with a particular impact on women, who make up the majority of all casual positions and were hit harder than their male counterparts during the pandemic due to the industries in which they work.

In addition to that:

• 67.8 per cent of part-time workers are women, which, according to the Grattan Institute, is the fourth-highest rate of part time work among women in the 36 OECD countries.
• And only 38 per cent of full-time workers are women.

The rise in insecure work hasn’t happened by accident.

Like former Morrison Government minister Matthias Cormann, when he made his references to low wage growth being a deliberate design feature of the economy, the abuse of these different and mostly legitimate forms of short-term work has been a deliberate design feature of an employment model that offloads the responsibilities and risks of employment onto workers.

And in a similar way to how the dream of home ownership has been slipping away for younger workers, the idea of a permanent full time job, with the opportunity for career advancement, is getting further and further away as well.

While take home pay has been less secure, costs of living don’t change.

Rent and mortgage payments aren’t casual, energy bills aren’t casual, grocery bills aren’t casual.

But the Government has never treated the increasingly lived experience of insecure work as a problem. They’ll talk about it as flexibility, they’ll talk about it for all the upsides there might be in the theory of it – but the real life experience of insecure work has been overlooked.

If you compare how the Government deals with other legislation. Every year in Parliament we get ten to twelve tax bills coming in, updating tax law to safeguard the security of government income.

The security of take home pay has been a story of deliberate neglect over the past eight years.

This has left the courts, rather than the Parliament, as the key forum for working through what the rules will be that determine how secure Australian jobs are.

On Tuesday, along with others who may be participating in this conference right now, I received a briefing and heard extraordinary personal evidence from some of the 6,500 retail workers surveyed by their union, the SDA.

The report, undertaken by researchers from the University of New South Wales, is titled ‘Who Cares? – Challenges of Work, Family and Care’.

It is a comprehensive and powerful piece of research.

It spotlights the challenges faced by a female-dominated workforce dealing with the twin challenges of insecure and unpredictable work and caring responsibilities.

But also, the impacts on their families who they overwhelmingly rely on for informal support and mental health. It can also affect their children’s access to educational opportunities – ‘hard-baked disadvantage’ was one of the terms to describe it.

With respect to insecure work, the expression used more than once in the briefing that really hits home, is ‘The Hunger Games’.

If ever a single report debunked the idea of the utopia of ‘flexibility’ that we hear so much about in industrial relations, this is it.

Workers, mainly women, attracted to an industry that appears to offer the kind of flexibility that could allow them to fulfill other responsibilities, such as caring, find themselves trapped in a nightmare of anxiety-inducing uncertainty and unpredictability.

Either literally sitting by the phone waiting to hear if they are being rostered for more hours so they can pay their rent – or receiving a late text message asking them to work the following morning and having to work around child care and other caring responsibilities.

Because to knock back a shift might easily lead to not being offered a shift the following week, a scenario well known to gig workers in the food delivery industry.

Consider a couple of these direct quotes:

“Because I am only given one-month contracts, I get no sick leave or annual leave. As a single parent, this means that if one of my disabled children needs to be removed from the school, either due to illness or autistic meltdown, I need to leave work to collect my child, missing out on wages for the remainder of that shift, and any shifts that occur before my child is able to attend school again. This causes financial stress. If I was able to go on a 12-month contract I would be able to accrue leave to relieve some of the stress caused by needing to leave work for a sick child.”

And this from a part time worker:

“It’s all over the place. Shifts get changed last minute, never get the same shifts every fortnight, extra contract hours and they give you the bare minimum, but expect you to give up your weekends (without) notice.”

Since when did part time work become so close to casual work?

That’s without the benefit of the casual loading.

The benefit of part time work and the reason so many women in particular are attracted to part time work is for the predictability of hours and pay.

For women, this allows them to manage the other responsibilities, which too often fall unevenly on them.

Instead we are now seeing an erosion and degradation of permanent part time work, which potentially sees these workers worse off than a casual employee.

As we know from the SDA study, we now see permanent part time workers engaged to work as little as three hours per week.

When the majority of hours worked by a part timer are not contracted, it’s hard to argue this is a permanent job. Most of the worker’s take home pay is insecure.

There was a time when talking about insecure work made no mention of part time workers. Too many part time workers are part of the story of insecure work. Too many part time workers have no idea what their pay will be week to week.

Labor is committed to delivering secure employment. There is a place for flexibility but insecurity is out of control. Part timers need more rights and we are working on this right now.

And with respect to the findings of this study, we are not talking about a small industry - one in every 10 workers in this country works in the retail sector.

The survey found:

• Only two in five workers always work the same shifts each week;
• 10 per cent of parents don’t have a regular work day;
• 41 per cent of parents said their shifts can change unexpectedly, including 36 per cent of part time and full time employees.

For a long time now, ‘flexibility’ has been spruiked as the utopia for workplace relations.

Certainly, it works for some employers who want an ‘on demand’ workforce, preferably one that doesn’t come with responsibility for leave or superannuation or different ways of avoiding workers’ comp.

But as we see all too clearly, in many cases, in many industries, flexibility is a one-way street.

It’s a promise held out for many workers – I mean let’s face it, who amongst us wouldn’t like to work when it suited us? But the reality is quite different.

Recent times have been dominated by uncertainty and unpredictability.

What this study shows us is this is what it is like all the time for Australians in insecure work.

We have heard a lot about the way the pandemic has completely exposed the risks of insecure work and the different impacts on sectors of our economy and the workforce.

Of course jobs will return once lockdowns end – but we are likely to see:

- More casual jobs;
- The further erosion and degradation of permanent part time work with casual like flexibility minus the casual loading;
- More undercutting of genuinely negotiated enterprise agreements via labour hire and outsourcing; and
- A widening gender pay gap.

We need to take action to give the Fair Work Commission the authority and power to do its job in a changed workplace environment.

Labor is committed to this change.

Earlier this year, Anthony Albanese released the Secure Australian Jobs Plan.

It’s a plan we will continue to add to as we head towards the next federal election.

It’s structured around secure work, better pay and a fairer system.

We will make job security an object of the Fair Work Act 2009 – small, but important in the way that informs every judgement call.

We will extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include ‘employee-like’ forms of work which will allow the Commission to make orders for minimum standards for new forms of work, including the gig economy.

As it’s been seen around the world, the platform operators of on demand services have invested significant resources into evading any legislative provision that classifies a gig worker as an employee.

Apart from a couple of exceptions, the whole point of the business model used by platforms is to shift responsibility for gig workers as employees onto the workers themselves, calling them independent contractors.

Many are paid below minimum wage, they receive no leave entitlements, no superannuation and no workers compensation if they are injured, as they all too frequently are, or worse, killed.

When Government ministers can’t give a straight answer to the question ‘Should Australian workers be paid less than the minimum wage?’ - it’s clear they have no intention of fixing a problem they fail to even recognise.

We will address this issue differently by giving the Fair Work Commission the ability and, yes, the ‘flexibility’ to be able to capture where there is an employee-like form of work and making sure the appropriate minimum standards apply.

We will limit the number of consecutive fixed term contracts an employer can offer and we’ll provide an objective definition of a casual.

I read the quote from the SDA case study earlier – a part time retail worker on monthly back to back contracts.

The only thing permanent about that job is that the worker is on permanent probation.

An Albanese Labor government will be a model employer and we will leverage our procurement power to ensure taxpayers’ money is used to support secure employment.

Government can play a huge role in raising the standards around employment, but sadly itself has been a perpetrator when it comes to insecure work.

Labour hire, outsourcing and back-to-back fixed term contracts have become an all too familiar feature of the public sector.

As a major employer, government can lead the fight against job insecurity, including by using the power of its significant spend to only buy goods and services from companies who are themselves good employers.

We will deliver ‘same job, same pay’ to address the increasing use of labour hire and outsourcing, where instead of it being used for surge workforces, it’s being used to undercut properly negotiated bargaining agreements.

We will stop bad businesses from undercutting good businesses.

We’ll ensure our equal pay laws do their job, so women get the pay they deserve. We will outlaw the use of pay secrecy clauses and require companies with more than 250 employees to publicly report their gender pay gap each year.

And we will criminalise wage theft – once and for all. We’ll ensure working people have a quick and easy way to get their wages back, and that the system is easy and fair for employers who want to do the right thing.

We will legislate a right to ten days’ paid family and domestic violence leave.

We will implement all 55 recommendations of Respect@Work, to ensure everyone who goes to work can expect a safe workplace free from discrimination and harassment.

And we will restore balance to the Fair Work Commission.

Insecure work has a huge negative impact on the lives of millions of workers in our nation.

Addressing the problem will not only improve their lives and those of their families, but will have a much broader impact.

Casualisation, labour hire, outsourcing, gig work and back-to-back short term contracts might provide employers with labour on demand with little risk - but it’s impact is self-defeating.

The multiplier effect of insecure work and estimated losses to the Australian economy has been estimated by Per Capita at more than $30 billion a year - through lost wages, lower household income and consumption, lost super savings and lost tax revenue.

Secure jobs on the other hand lead to greater household confidence, wages growth and increased spending.

Businesses who provide decent jobs with security and predictability benefit not only because their workforce feels valued and are happier, but because they retain their workers, there is less churn, they spend less on the initial training of new recruits and their workplaces are safer.

Giving workers more financial security, through more reliable and predictable hours benefits the worker, the employer and the economy.

There is a critical need to act on a problem that directly impacts so many Australian workers and their families. An Albanese Labor Government will act.

The insecure work challenge is too big to be ignored.

ENDS