We can work and care in ways that don’t leave people (women particularly) feeling rushed and stressed all the time, by adopting a new social settlement that meets the realities of 21st century living, writes Greens Senator for South Australia, Senator Barbara Pocock.
Every day, millions of Australians go to work. While at the same time juggling care – usually of someone they love. It might be their mother, a sick friend, children, or someone with a disability.
These millions of Australians make call, plan respite, pack lunches and wrangle carloads of kids and complex commutes. They manage appointments and so much more. When a child wakes up sick, their heart sinks – and they make a new plan for the day. They do all of this around their hours of paid work.
Contrast this with earlier times, a century ago, when in 1907 Justice Higgins first set a living family wage. That full-time wage was fixed to allow a worker and his family — back then that being a wife and three children — to live in ‘frugal comfort’ in exchange for an 8-hour day. This family wage was part of what historians like to call ‘the Australian Settlement’: a social contract whereby a living wage sustained a worker and family.
The key assumption from this plan was that a worker had a wife at home – someone to care for kids and run the household. Even in 1907, this settlement did not hold for households led by single women, but it did apply to the most common household type: a man at work, a female carer at home. Alongside a living wage, Australia led the world on the 8 hour day won by stonemasons in 1856, leading labour historians to refer to us as a working man’s paradise at the time.
We have travelled a very long way from that 20th-century social settlement. Almost half of all workers today are women. Neither they, nor most men, have a partner running their home beyond paid work. On any day of the week, four in ten Australian workers have caring responsibilities while they are at work. They are living a 21st Century juggle, managing their care of others around their jobs with most families dependent upon two wages and both parents working.
Unfortunately, despite all this change, we are awaiting a 21st century social settlement that recognises this new reality.
Instead, we leave much of the work of the juggle to individuals to manage. And much of this falls to women. It is no surprise that, as a consequence, over half of women of 35-44 years of age say they always feel rushed and pressed for time.
Since 1907 Australia has made some patchy, partial adjustments along the work and care road as women and carers have entered paid work – especially in an expanding services sector hungry for their labour. They have taken jobs – but they have not given up their unpaid care roles. They are the jugglers, the adapters, the ones who ask themselves why am I so stressed, surely not everyone feels this way?
Our adaptions – and their consequences – now make us international outliers in terms of work-care systems. Many Australian women manage the juggle by working part-time, and the price of their reduced hours is insecure casual work. One in four workers in Australia are now casual, disproportionately women. This has meant a wide and persistent gender pay gap, and a loss of conditions like promotion, a career path, superannuation, paid carers leave, a paid holiday and long service leave. Australia didn’t provide any Commonwealth childcare until 1973 and, shamefully, it took until 2011 (a hundred years after it was recommended by the International Labor Organisation) before a national paid parental leave was introduced for those workers having babies. If Australia had been a working woman’s paradise we would have had world’s best childcare and parental leave.
We are a long way from that with a workforce now characterised by poor rights to paid leave, inferior paid parental leave and amongst the industrialised world’s most expensive childcare. Too many women work in degraded part-time jobs with unpredictable rosters, while a sizeable proportion of men – a quarter – now work in long hours jobs.
These arrangements cast long shadows: they mean that many senior managerial and professional jobs have hours that are hostile to care and therefore off limits to women. This also means that unpaid domestic work and care of children is off limits to men and loads up their partners.
New technologies in all our workplaces promised productivity and flexibility gains that should be shared by workers and bosses; however, for too many these technologies tether workers to machines and stretch the length of the working day, so that on average Australian workers now ‘donate’ 6 weeks of unpaid overtime to their workplace. Alongside this, over the past decade wages have stagnated while the costs of care have risen: most workers this year will experience a steep decline in the buying power of their pay packet in the face of 7.8 percent inflation.
Things can be different. Many other countries do things differently. They have not met women’s entry to paid work with second-rate short-hours jobs that embed them in a double day, while locking men into longer hours and out of care. They have not left the care and wellbeing of children, aged people, or disabled people to a marketized, expensive ‘system’ of paid care that results in ‘care deserts’, high costs and care of dubious quality. All on the backs of paid aged, childcare or disability care workers who are underpaid and lack basic conditions like secure rosters and a retirement free of poverty.
It is time for a new social settlement appropriate to the 21st Century – one that does not rely on the athletic adaptions of hyper-flexible, often overloaded workers who are also parents and carers. One with workplace regulations that ensure secure, predictable hours and pay, with childcare and respite systems that provide the quality care appropriate to a rich OECD nation. One that does not run the labour market on the stress and sweat of a juggling worker.
Next week the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care, which I have Chaired over the past 6 months will report to the Australian Senate. With evidence collected from across Australia from many different workers, employers, organisations and carers, it provides a unique and timely picture of where we are at in Australia – and what a fair work and care regime appropriate to a 21st century social settlement should look like.
Most Australians will need to combine work with care responsibilities at some time in their lives.
Workplace arrangements are still predicated on what historians like to call ‘the Australian Settlement’: a social contract whereby a living wage sustained a worker and family. This model (established in 1907) is outdated and no longer serves the modern Australian workforce where women now make up almost half the workforce but are burdened with low-paid insecure work while also providing the vast majority of care for children, elderly and disabled family members.
Australia is an international outlier in terms of Paid Parental Leave, Early Childhood Education and Care, insecure work and gender equity.
A new social contract is desperately needed to address the issues of our 21st Century workplaces.