The Fair Work Commission’s Review of Modern Awards 2023-24 is considering the impact of workplace relations settings on work and care. This submission argues for good quality, secure part-time jobs to achieve more gender-equitable sharing of care and to support women’s full economic participation.
Deteriorating Disability Worker Pay, Conditions Undermining NDIS
The disability support workforce is central to the effectiveness and sustainability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Hundreds of thousands of NDIS participants rely on this workforce to provide personal support and care on a daily basis.
The NDIS workforce is large and growing, currently employing about a quarter of a million workers, mostly women. Pay, working conditions and career opportunities in the disability support workforce are critical to the future of women’s economic equality in Australia.
It is a decade since the NDIS was first piloted, yet the promise for workers, that the scheme would translate into ‘greater pay, … better working conditions … (and) enough resources to do the job properly’ has not been fulfilled.
Rather, conditions of work in the NDIS are poor and deteriorating.
The design of the NDIS, with its market basis and poor and uneven regulatory oversight, has undermined fair pay and working conditions for disability support workers and is threatening workforce stability.
This briefing paper reviews this evidence and argues for significant reforms to address urgent problems arising from these design flaws and regulatory failures.
This report provides an overview of workplace and job-related factors found to act as barriers to sustainable and inclusive employment for people in groups likely to experience labour market disadvantage. Key findings are that job quality, working arrangements, inclusivity and opportunity for participation at work all matter for inclusive and sustainable employment, along with individual and external systemic and structural barriers to work.
Employment policy and employment assistance for jobseekers focus on individuals’ skills and job readiness, and on job placement. Less attention is given to ensuring placements are into sustainable employment in inclusive workplaces. That is, placement into jobs that people can keep, that support wellbeing and provide opportunity for long-term employment pathways, and in workplaces where people feel safe and are able to participate. Recruiting and placing people experiencing labour market disadvantage into jobs may not lead to positive outcomes if people are not able to retain jobs and benefit from their employment.
Employment can provide people with benefits that improve wellbeing in various ways, including through increasing income, providing routine and increasing social contact. However, where job quality, pay or working conditions are poor, employment can also have cumulative negative effects. Placing people experiencing disadvantage in jobs in which they are insecure, underemployed, or cannot establish daily routines; or placing them in workplaces in which they experience poor or discriminatory treatment and disempowerment, are not likely to produce sustainable employment outcomes or create social value.
This report calls for a greater focus on workplace and job-related factors, including employer knowledge, employment practices, work organisation, job quality and employment arrangements, to addressing barriers to employment for disadvantaged jobseekers. Emphasis on employment placement alone is not likely to produce sustainable employment outcomes. Action is required to tackle barriers present in workplaces and in employment arrangements.
This report was commissioned by Jobsbank, a Victorian-based not-for-profit organisation that works with business and other partners to support sustainable, inclusive employment and make social procurement work. In Victoria, the Government’s Social Procurement Framework aims to improve employment outcomes for people from groups experiencing labour market disadvantage through requiring suppliers and contractors tendering for high value government contracts to employ people from these groups. The Victorian Government’s Fair Jobs Code promotes fair labour standards, secure employment and job security, equity and diversity, and cooperative workplace relationships and workers’ representation. This report recommends that employers be encouraged to develop strategies to meet these standards through collaboration with unions and community groups as one obvious way to address workplace and employment factors that create barriers to sustainable and inclusive employment for disadvantaged jobseekers.
Current work and care arrangements in Australia contribute to economic and social disadvantage for carers, the vast majority of whom are women. Patterns of labour force participation and employment provide clear indicators of the inequities inherent in Australia’s current care and work arrangements. These patterns show we do not have equitably shared care arrangements, nor equitable employment opportunities and outcomes for women. Australia requires much stronger support systems, more effective work and care policies and more secure and fairly-paid jobs to address these problems.
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:
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.
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.”
The Senate Select Committee on Job Security was appointed 10 December 2020, to inquire into and report on the impact of insecure or precarious employment on the economy, wages, social cohesion and workplace rights and conditions. This includes the extent of insecure and precarious employment in Australia, the impacts of COVID-19 with respect to job precarity and insecurity, the digitally-mediated ‘gig’ economy, and other matters. The Centre for Future Work has made a submission to the Select Committee.
Economist and Director Dr Jim Stanford and Economist Dan Nahum presented evidence to the Senate Committee hearing in Melbourne on 20 April 2021. Read the transcript of their testimony below.
Over time, insecure work has become more prevalent in the Australian economy. These types of employment – including but not limited to jobs without paid leave – shift financial burden and risk from employers to workers. The economic brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic was felt most acutely by this significant proportion of workers who were in casual positions or worked variable hours. These effects were disproportionately experienced by women and young workers.
The rebound in casual employment since May 2020 constituted the fastest surge of casual job growth in Australian history – over 400,000 jobs. And other forms of insecure work have also surged since the recovery began: for example, the number of ‘owner-managers of unincorporated enterprises without employees’ – the most precarious business structure, and which includes gig workers – has grown to record-high levels, and in February 2021 accounted for well over a million Australian workers.
It is no coincidence that the expansion of precarious labour has occurred at a time of record-low wage growth. Precarity makes it more difficult for workers to organise and collectively bargain. And on an individual basis, it undermines workers’ ability to ask for higher wages.
While much of the government’s Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Act 2021 (Amendment Act) was abandoned during its passage through Parliament, the remaining provisions still push the dial in precisely the wrong direction. The new legislation explicitly confirms the right of employers to define workers as casuals, even if the work they perform is regular.
Improving the security of the labour market for workers and their families should be a key component of a long-term strategy for inclusive economic recovery, including expanded public investment, increased spending power for workers to lift aggregate demand, and improved job stability and equity. To this end, our submission makes several recommendations that would help to reduce the incidence and consequences of insecure work, and enhance the access of Australian workers to better, more secure jobs. These include recommendations dealing with:
In December 2020, the Senate of Australia launched an important inquiry into the federal government’s proposed Fair Work Amendment Bill.
Core features of the legislation include clarifying and expanding employer power to hire workers on a casual basis, obtain greater flexibility in the use of permanent part-time workers (adjusting hours up or down without penalty, much like casual workers), and exercise greater unilateral wage-fixing influence in enterprise agreement (EA)-making.
The Centre for Future Work were glad to make a submission to this inquiry. The submission assesses major components of the legislation, and finds measures proposed will result in the expansion of employer power to use insecure labour and low-wage enterprise agreements, placing further downward pressure on already record-low wages.
Alison Pennington presented evidence in-person to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee in Adelaide on February 10th. A transcript of her testimony is attached below.
Read the Centre for Future Work’s opening statement to the Senate Inquiry.
The Fair Work Amendment Bill is introduced in a fragile moment in Australia’s history, with wages decelerating to the slowest sustained pace since the Depression – growing by less than 2% per year since 2015, and now at an utter standstill: growing just 0.1 per cent in the September quarter.
In our judgment, several features of this legislation will enhance the power of employers to hire workers on a just-in-time basis, suppress wages, and undermine terms and conditions. Key measures proposed include:
Together, these changes would constitute a significant weakening of institutional supports for improving wages and working conditions. This is the opposite outcome to the stronger wage growth many economists (including Governor of the RBA Dr Phillip Lowe) agree is desperately needed to support Australia’s more sustainable and inclusive recovery.
You can download the Centre for Future Work’s full submission to the Senate Inquiry below, authored by Senior Economist Alison Pennington, and Director and Economist Dr Jim Stanford.
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.
The national roll-out of the NDIS holds the prospect of a significant enhancement in both the resources allocated to disability services in Australia, and the autonomy and flexibility of service delivery for people with disability. But it also constitutes an enormous logistical and organisational challenge. And the market-based service delivery model built into the NDIS is exacerbating those challenges, by unleashing a widespread fragmentation and casualisation of work in disability services.
In this new report, researchers document the experience of front-line disability service workers under the NDIS based on first-hand qualitative interviews.
The report was a joint initiative of two leading academic researchers (Prof. Donna Baines, formerly of the University of Sydney, and Dr. Fiona Macdonald of RMIT) and the Centre for Future Work. Researchers conducted detailed face-to-face interviews with 19 front-line disability service workers, mostly in the Newcastle, NSW region. (Newcastle was one of the locations chosen for NDIS trials, so workers in the region have more experience with the reality of NDIS delivery problems.)
The interviews indicated 8 major problems negatively affecting the stability, quality and sustainability of work for disability support workers:
The deterioration in job stability and working conditions under the NDIS will inevitably impact on the quality of service experienced by NDIS clients; it will also exacerbate the overarching challenge of recruitment and retention facing disability service providers as they try to attract the 80,000 new full-time equivalent workers required to operate the scaled-up NDIS.
The researchers conclude with several policy recommendations to improve the quality and stability of work for disability support workers, and the quality of care for participants.
