Should a better life include more risk for workers?
Published: 8 December 2010
During the ACTU Congress last year, the then ANF Federal Secretary (now ACTU President) Ged Kearney launched the Australian Unions – Working for a Better Life campaign. This campaign builds on the major contribution the Australian union movement has made towards making Australia a fairer country.
Our work in this is never done, but it is important to reflect upon and celebrate our achievements to date. This includes the daily work of unions to improve the wages, conditions and safety at work of members, as well as union-wide campaigns to establish cornerstones of fairness in our society, including initiatives such as Medicare, superannuation and paid parental leave.
However, in planning our future unions must also reflect upon the fundamental changes that have taken place over recent decades in our society and our work.
To inform discussion the ACTU recently released the report Shifting Risk: Work and Working Life in Australia.1 This report highlighted three fundamental changes in our working lives:
- The nature of work: characterised by rapid and ongoing changes in technology, production strategies, the security of work and the ways which labour is engaged.
- The nature of people’s lives beyond the workplace: characterised by increasing risks to individual workers and their families of ill health, housing tenure, retirement, and inadequate education.
- The nature of relationships between groups of workers: characterised by widening inequality between workers with respect to working conditions including pay, hours, capacity to bargain and career opportunities.2
These changes have resulted in a fundamental shift in risk from business and government to the individual and the household. Business increasingly pursues lower costs while demanding higher productivity and greater flexibility from the workforce. At the same time, government is retreating from the provision of services, engaging in corporatisation and privatisation agendas, and promoting "user pays" principles.
Households are now juggling more risks in the labour market (more precarious employment), finance (a shift away from defined benefit to defined contribution superannuation schemes), growth in education-related costs (HECS/PELS debt and the promotion of private school education), increasing health and aged care costs (growth in out-of-pocket expenses and encouragement of private health insurance) and growth in utilities and other costs following the push to privatise and corporatise government services. This shift in risk is clear in the worrying rise in household debt levels over the last few decades.
Unions help members to better manage these risks in different ways. This includes improving wages and working conditions, lobbying for the maintenance and extension of "social wage" initiatives such as Medicare, representation on superannuation boards, providing consumer services such as Union Shopper, and low cost banking such as Members Equity (ME). The QNU’s Professional Indemnity Insurance coverage is a great example of how we assist members to manage the legal risks inherent in their work.
The shift in risk has occurred incrementally, and there has not been a comprehensive and thoughtful community debate about how and why this has happened. Nor is there a clear understanding of the roles of government and the market in the 21st century. It is essential that we debate this, especially if we are to ensure that lessons are learnt from the Global Financial Crisis.
This debate will be challenging given the extent of the transformation that has occurred and the blurring of boundaries and interests. We will all be wearing multiple "hats" in this discussion – as citizens, as "consumers" of a wide range of services, as providers of health and aged care services, and as investors through our superannuation funds and other investments. Although we have different interests with each "hat", we need to honestly discuss each interest to fully consider the individual and collective implications.
It is essential that the trade union movement lead the debate on these critical issues. The release of the ACTU’s Shifting Risk report is but a first step in a better life for all workers.
Footnotes
1 Mike Rafferty and Serena Yu, Shifting Risk: Work and Working Life in Australia, Workplace Research Centre, University of Sydney, 2010.
2 ACTU Media Brief, Shifting Risk – Work and Working Life in Australia, 4 October 2010 (www.actu.org.au)
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