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Category: COVID-19

  • Working With COVID: Insecure Jobs, Sick Pay, and Public Health

    COVID-19, Insecure & Precarious Work, Labour Standards & Workers’ Rights

    Working With COVID: Insecure Jobs, Sick Pay, and Public Health

    by Dan Nahum and Jim Stanford

    Authors

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

    Jim Stanford

    Media release



    One in Five Worked with COVID Symptoms; Sick Leave Entitlements Must Be Strengthened

    Almost one in five Australians (and a higher proportion of young workers) acknowledge working with potential COVID symptoms over the course of the pandemic, according to new opinion research published by the Centre for Future Work.

    The research confirms the public health dangers of Australia’s existing patchwork system of sick leave and related entitlements.

    The main findings of the report, based on a poll of 1000 Australians, include:

    • More than one in three (37%) employed Australians have no access to statutory paid sick leave entitlements (including workers hired under casual employment arrangements, and self-employed workers). Another 12% had access only to pro-rated part-time entitlements.
    • When the pandemic hit Australia, barely half (51%) of employed workers could count on regular full-time income if they had to stay home from work.
    • Almost one in five respondents (19%), and a higher proportion of young workers (29%), acknowledged working with potential COVID symptoms at some point during the pandemic. This confirms the public health dangers of Australia’s patchwork system of sick leave and related entitlements.
    • Polling results also confirm that a significant proportion of workers (17%) also attended work after exposure to someone possibly infected with COVID.
    • Given inadequate sick pay entitlements and the surprising share of workers attending work in violation of public health advice, it is not surprising that 18% of workers did not feel safe attending their normal workplaces during the pandemic.

    This research indicates that Australia’s sick pay entitlements are clearly inadequate to protect workers’ health and safety at work and allow them to stay home from work when health advice requires it. The expansion of non-standard and insecure forms of work (including part-time work, casual jobs, contractor positions, and ‘gigs’) has heightened concern that many workers do not have the effective ability to stay home from work for health reasons.

    Government should expand sick pay entitlements to cover all workers, and also implement strategies to limit and reduce the incidence of insecure work: including by constraining employers’ use of ‘permanent casual’ arrangements, sham contracting, and on-demand gigs, none of which provide normal and healthy paid leave entitlements.

    Unfortunately, the current federal Government has done the opposite by reinforcing this shift toward insecure working arrangements – including through its 2021 amendments to the Fair Work Act, which cemented and expanded employers’ rights to hire workers on a casual basis (with no sick pay) in virtually any job they wish.



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  • International COVID-19 Income Supports: An Update

    COVID-19

    International COVID-19 Income Supports: An Update

    by Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford

    Authors

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

    Jim Stanford

    The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted global labour markets, and exposed long-standing gaps in social protection systems. Governments around the industrialised world injected hundreds of billions of dollars into a range of unprecedented crisis measures: to support individuals who lost work, to subsidise employers to retain workers despite the fall-off in business, and to facilitate workers to stay away from work when required for health reasons. More recently, as the pandemic progressed and vaccination became widespread, governments have begun considering how to transition toward a post-COVID policy stance. 

    In several countries, governments with stronger commitments to public health and safety, and a more inclusive and equitable recovery from COVID-19, have been more cautious and incremental in scaling back government interventions. Some have also made permanent improvements to income security and other policies whose shortcomings became more apparent during the pandemic. In Australia, however, the phase-out of COVID-19 wage subsidies and income supports was accelerated and premature – perhaps more so than any other major industrial country. A new comparison of COVID support policies across numerous industrial countries confirms the economic and public health risks of the rapid elimination of Australia’s COVID programs.

    This briefing paper, prepared by Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford, catalogues a selection of international income support measures introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and reports on recent changes in those programs as vaccinations roll out and economies have re-opened. This catalogue allows us to make a comparative assessment of the level and coverage of Australia’s provisions, in relation to other jurisdictions.

    After summarising the status of Australia’s Commonwealth-administered COVID-era payments, other countries are surveyed, organised into two groups: those with income support programs still in place, and those whose programs had been eliminated at time of writing. A conclusion summarises the comparison, which confirms that Australia has been an outlier among industrial countries in the speed with which emergency COVID-19 measures were eliminated.



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  • Shock Troops of the Pandemic

    COVID-19, Insecure & Precarious Work

    Shock Troops of the Pandemic

    Casual and Insecure Work in COVID and Beyond
    by Jim Stanford

    Author

    Jim Stanford

    Media release



    Insecure Workers Have Been the ‘Shock Troops’ of the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Report

    New research confirms that workers in casual and insecure jobs have borne the lion’s share of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic – both the first lockdowns in 2020, and the more recent second wave of closures.

    Since May, workers in casual and part-time jobs have suffered over 70% of job losses from renewed lockdowns and workplace closures. Casual workers have been 8 times more likely to lose work than permanent staff. And part-timers have been 4.5 times more likely to lose work than full-timers.

    “Workers in insecure jobs have been the shock troops of the pandemic,” said Jim Stanford, Economist with the Centre for Future Work and author of the report. “They suffered by far the deepest casualties during the first round of layoffs. Then they were sent back into battle, as the economy temporarily recovered. But now their livelihoods are being shot down again, in mass numbers.”



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  • Post-COVID-19 policy responses to climate change: beyond capitalism?

    Climate Change, COVID-19, Macroeconomics

    Post-COVID-19 policy responses to climate change: beyond capitalism?

    by Mark Dean and Al Rainnie

    Authors

    Mark Dean

    Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow

    Al Rainnie

    A sustainable social, political and environmental response to the “twin crises” of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change will require policymaking beyond capitalism. Only by achieving a post-growth response to these crises can we meaningfully shape a future of jobs in renewable-powered industries shaped by organised labour, democratic values and public institutions. Anything less will merely create more markets and more technocratic fixes that reinforce the growing social and environmental inequalities that our current political system cannot overcome.

    As Australia moves further away from anything resembling a sustainable pathway to reach these goals (i.e., $90bn submarines that we will not see for at least 20 years but no meaningful action on climate change), a new Labour and Industry article – co-authored by Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow Mark Dean and Centre for Future Work Associate, Professor Al Rainnie analyses four alternative responses proposed by Australian unions, climate change groups and grassroots community organisations.

    The purpose of this article has been to identify the range of options that government is capable of pursuing and which, with sensible political choices, can adopt as strategy today. Absent the current federal government’s political will to make long-term choices, Australia is yet to settle on a coordinated policy response that plans and directs the sustainable development of our economy.

    Urgent action is needed to shape policymaking with a strategic, long-term vision that restores the active, interventionist role of government in building an economy capable of overcoming crisis.



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  • An Avoidable Catastrophe

    COVID-19, Education & Training

    An Avoidable Catastrophe

    Pandemic Job Losses in Higher Education and Their Consequences
    by Eliza Littleton and Jim Stanford

    Authors

    Eliza Littleton

    Senior Economist

    Jim Stanford

    Australia’s universities were uniquely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and recession — including the closure of borders to most international students, the implementation of new COVID-safe instruction practices, and effective exclusion from  Commonwealth support programs like JobKeeper.

    Now, 18 months after the borders were first closed, things are getting worse for universities, not better. New research from the Centre for Future Work confirms that tertiary education has been hit by bigger job losses this year than any other non-agricultural sector in the economy.

    The new report, An Avoidable Catastrophe: Pandemic Job Losses in Higher Education and their Consequences, was prepared by Eliza Littleton and Jim Stanford. It shows that total employment in tertiary education in the first half of 2021 fell by 40,000 positions compared to year-earlier levels. Most of the job losses were permanent, full-time positions — and all of them were at public institutions.

    During the first months of the pandemic, casual staff were the first university employees to lose their jobs as universities grappled with the sudden loss of international student fees and other impacts of the pandemic. This year, however, the job losses are both much larger, and targeted at permanent full-time staff. This indicates that universities are undertaking a more permanent downsizing and casualisation of their workforce, on expectation that border closures are likely to persist — and the Commonwealth government will continue to refuse targeted assistance necessary to preserve the universities’ instruction and research capacities.

    The report urges the Commonwealth government to provide special temporary assistance to universities until borders can reopen and revenues return to normal. Targeted support of $3.75 billion would allow the universities to replace and preserve the jobs cut so far this year. Preserving the functions of Australian universities is especially vital at a moment when the economy is undergoing lasting structural changes as a consequence of the pandemic, and hence more students will need higher education opportunities to support the resulting employment transitions. Moreover, the pandemic also reinforced that the need for top-quality research (including in health sciences) is more urgent than ever.



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  • Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia’s Arts and Entertainment Sector After COVID

    COVID-19, Industry & Sector Policies

    Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia’s Arts and Entertainment Sector After COVID

    by Alison Pennington and Ben Eltham

    Authors

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

    Ben Eltham

    Media release



    When the Show Cannot Go On: Rebooting Australia’s Arts & Entertainment Sector After COVID-19

    Culture is an inescapable part of what it means to be human. We can no more imagine a life without the arts than we can imagine a life without language, custom, or ritual. Australia is home to the oldest continuing cultural traditions on the planet, and some of the world’s most renowned actors, musicians and artists. But while we have a proud story to tell, the future of Australian culture looks increasingly uncertain.

    New research from the Centre for Future Work, by Senior Economist Alison Pennington and Monash University’s Ben Eltham, reveals the ongoing, devastating impact of COVID-19 on Australia’s arts and entertainment sector and provides a series of recommendations to government that would reboot the creative sector after the crisis.



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  • Industrial Policy-Making After COVID-19: Manufacturing, Innovation and Sustainability

    COVID-19, Industry & Sector Policies

    Industrial Policy-Making After COVID-19: Manufacturing, Innovation and Sustainability

    by Mark Dean, Al Rainnie, Jim Stanford and Dan Nahum

    Authors

    Mark Dean

    Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow

    Al Rainnie

    Jim Stanford

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

    As Treasurer during the 1980s, Paul Keating lamented that Australian governments had for decades been allowing the country’s sophisticated industrial base to fall apart as unsophisticated raw materials came to dominate the nation’s exports and as a result, its economy slipped into developing-world status. Keating’s famous warning of Australia’s looming ‘banana republic’ status spurred the Hawke and subsequent Keating Labor governments into action on economic restructuring, which included considering a range of industry policy intervention options to put Australia on a track to advanced, industrial status, as had been the aim of post-war nation-building that helped to institute an advanced manufacturing industrial base in Australia.

    But since the 1990s, the ‘default’ economic and industry policy setting of government has ultimately been to favour resource extraction as our national strength. Even despite the growing threat of climate change and global economic crises that make a shift to ‘green’ industrial transformation a pathway pursued by many other nations, current Coalition government policy continues to reflect deliberate, calculated emphasis on the extraction and export of raw materials. Australia risks cementing its developing-world economic status if we do not consider important industry policy challenges.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to opportunities for Australia to not only rebuild, but reconstruct our economy in a way that capitalises on our national manufacturing potential and their ability to contribute to a sustainable recovery from the economic and social crisis that has culminated in lockdowns and recession. The future development of Australia’s manufacturing industry must focus on the opportunities presented by renewable energy to drive innovation, industrial transformation and a green future shaped by a skilled manufacturing workforce.

    Researchers from the Centre for Future Work, Mark Dean, Al Rainnie (Centre for Future Work Associate), Jim Stanford and Dan Nahum, have co-authored a new scholarly paper which will be published in the academic journal, the Economic and Labour Relations Review and is currently available as an online-first publication at their website.

    The article analyses Australia’s opportunities to revitalise its strategically important manufacturing secor in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, considering Australia’s industry policy options with reference to both advances in the theory of industrial policy and recent policy proposals in the Australian context.

    To examine the prospects for the renewal of Australian manufacturing in a post-pandemic economy, the article draws on recent work from The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work – specifically, Dan Nahum’s research into manufacturing and sustainability in Powering Onwards and Jim Stanford’s research on post-COVID-19 manufacturing renewal and Australia’s record on robotics adoption, in synthesis with analyses from published and forthcoming research from Al Rainnie and Mark Dean relating to critical evaluations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its implications for the Australian economy.

    The aim of the article is to contribute to and further develop the debate about the future of government intervention in manufacturing and industry policy in Australia. Crucially, the argument links the future development of Australian manufacturing with a focus on renewable energy. The purpose of this article has been to interpret the decline of manufacturing in Australia over the last generation and to identify the core principles and policy levers that would facilitate a revitalisation of our domestic manufacturing capabilities. The paper considers the history of half-hearted attempts by Australian governments and industry to spark a recovery: these attempts have largely lacked any critical consideration of the structural factors that inhibit a full-scale transformation of Australian industry. Such a transformation would in fact require consistent and systematic policy settings.

    The Coalition government’s evolving policy framework – focused on tax cuts for high-income households and companies, subsidies for further fossil fuel use, and further interventions to weaken industrial relations practices – reflects its attempt to use the pandemic as an opportunity to reinforce its previous commitment to a business-dominated economic strategy. But Australia can, and must, do better than this. The article analyses the possibilities and the challenges of developing a new industrial policy that is informed by modern understandings of technology, sustainability and social cohesion.

    A modern, sustainable industry policy is not a catch-all solution to addressing climate change, economic crisis and pandemic recovery – but it does hold great potential to help redirect Australia’s lurch further towards the banana republic status first identified nearly forty years ago.

    You can access a pre-publication version of this article below and those with access can read the article publication on the Economic and Labour Relations Review website.



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  • 2020 Year-End Labour Market Review: Insecure Work and the Covid-19 Pandemic

    COVID-19, Insecure & Precarious Work

    2020 Year-End Labour Market Review: Insecure Work and the Covid-19 Pandemic

    by Dan Nahum and Jim Stanford

    Authors

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

    Jim Stanford

    Media release



    Pandemic Exacerbated Inequality, Insecurity in Australia’s Labour Market

    Australia’s labour market experienced unprecedented volatility during 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting recession. In the first part of the year, employment declined faster and more deeply than in any previous economic downturn, as workplaces were closed to control the spread of infection. Then, after May, employment rebounded strongly. The subsequent recovery has replaced over 80% of the jobs lost in the initial downturn. While considerable ground remains to be covered to complete the employment recovery, the turn-around in the quantity of work has been encouraging.

    However, the pandemic also highlighted stark fissures in Australia’s labour market. The employment and income impacts of the pandemic were starkly unequal, across different groups of workers. This report highlights several ways in which the pandemic has increased inequality in Australia, and reinforced the dominance of insecure work in the overall labour market.



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  • Work and Life in a Pandemic

    COVID-19

    Work and Life in a Pandemic

    An Update on Hours of Work and Unpaid Overtime Under COVID-19
    by Dan Nahum

    Author

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

    Media release



    Unpaid Overtime Rife, Despite Shift to “Work from Home”

    2020 marks the twelfth annual Go Home on Time Day, an initiative of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute that shines a spotlight on overwork among Australians, including excessive overtime that is often unpaid.

    It has been an extraordinary and difficult year, to say the least. Many workers are doing at least some of their work from home, and the standard scenario of ‘staying late at the office’ around which we have often shaped our Go Home On Time Day analysis in the past applies to fewer workers than usual. But that is not to say that workers aren’t doing work for free—in fact, the estimated incidence of ‘time theft’, or unpaid overtime, has gone up compared with 2019 (see our results here). And in many cases people’s responsibilities in their home lives have increased in response to the health and social crisis, accentuating the double burden faced by workers—and especially by women workers.

    Survey data suggests the average Australian worker puts in 5.3 hours per week of unpaid overtime, despite the shift towards home work. Many employers expect this free labour as a sign of workers’ “dedication”, but it’s unfair and in many cases illegal. Across the whole labour market, this theft of workers’ time now amounts to almost three billion hours, or $100 billion, per year. In an environment of depressed household demand and purchasing power, this has extraordinarily damaging consequences throughout the economy—including throughout the business sector.

    Additionally, 70% of people working at home are doing some of it outside of normal working hours. The post-COVID rise in home work may constitute a further incursion of work into people’s personal time, and a further undercutting of Australia’s minimum standards around employment (including hours, overtime, and penalty rates).



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  • The Choices We Make

    COVID-19, Public Sector, Procurement & Privatisation

    The Choices We Make

    The Economic Future of Tasmania
    by Dan Nahum

    Author

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

    New research by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work analyses the economic effects of COVID-19 on Tasmania, and suggests how Tasmania can ‘build back better’ out of the COVID-19 crisis, making key recommendations to help Tasmania avoid the mistakes made at the Federal level. Ahead of Tasmania’s State Budget, set to be delivered on 12 November 2020, in this new report the Centre for Future Work has explored what the shape of Tasmania’s economy could look like, and how it can recover and reconstruct after this pandemic.

    Businesses and households will not simply ‘regain confidence’ and drive a full recovery themselves. Indeed, Tasmania’s proactive and protective fiscal response indicates that the state government already understands that major support from government is necessary. As a proportion of the state’s gross state product, Tasmania has committed the largest amount of funding of any state. Meanwhile, extremely low borrowing costs mean that there is no reason for the state government not to undertake a more proactive role in the economy than it has done historically, even if that means higher deficits.

    However, a short-term, counter-cyclic approach does not adequately respond to the full scope of the challenge. The underlying working machinery of the economy is not in good order. COVID-19 has highlighted existing vulnerabilities and created new ones, and it has also limited the scope of the private sector to respond.

    The state government in Tasmania will clearly be required to play a hands-on, leading role in job creation, investment and income generation for years to come, and it will need to borrow to do so. This fact should not be feared, but celebrated: large deficits are the flipside of the public investment that will be required to undertake Tasmania’s reconstruction. It will be necessary to mobilise economic resources, to meet human needs and to get Tasmanians working again—especially if the intention is to build a more resilient and diverse economy than the one that existed before COVID-19.

    The Tasmanian economy will not have the same shape as it did before the pandemic. Tasmania can and must think differently about what is possible. Our purpose in this research paper is to add momentum to Tasmania’s conversation about its economic, and social, future. As a result of COVID-19, Tasmania could push itself forward into the next stage of its economic development, or it could, alternatively, spiral into a depression, scarring lives and communities. It cannot afford that. Tasmanians, moreover, deserve far better.

    The report recommends:

    • the Tasmanian Government make a larger investment in public housing
    • the State Government also expand public sector investment into the health, aged and disability care sectors
    • outsourced public sector functions should be returned to direct provision by Government wherever possible, to improve cost, accountability and quality
      • doing so will also provide the State Government with a lever to improve wages and conditions across the economy, especially in sectors dominated by women
    • the Tasmanian Government should also support and co-invest in several strategic industries, including manufacturing and renewable manufacturing, tourism and hospitality, arts and entertainment, food production, and higher education.



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