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Category: Opinion

  • Fair Pay Agreements: How Workers in NZ Are Getting Their Share

    Fair Pay Agreements: How Workers in NZ Are Getting Their Share

    by Alison Pennington

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    Across the ditch, the Ardern government in New Zealand is undertaking an ambitious and multi-dimensional effort to address low wages, inequality, and poor job quality. NZ unions have just won the introduction of Fair Pay Agreements, planned for implementation in 2022. FPAs will allow working people to bargain collectively across sectors and start to correct the income and power imbalance between workers and employers.

    The Centre for Future Work hosted a special webinar with Craig Renney, Economist & Director of Policy for the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. In the recorded webinar, Craig explains key FPA policy details including design & coverage of the system, and how FPAs can lift wages and labour standards, stop the ‘race to the bottom’, and rebuild worker bargaining power in NZ. The webinar is the first in the Centre’s exciting new webinar series exploring key labour market topics related to work, wages, and fairness. Hosted by our Senior Economist Alison Pennington.

    Craig Renney’s presentation slides presented for the webinar are available below.

    The Centre for Future Work has published research on several ambitious progressive labour reforms pursued in New Zealand. For more, please read Workplace Policy Reform in New Zealand: What are the Lessons for Australia?, by Alison Pennington.


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    Workplace Policy Reform in New Zealand



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    IR Bill Will Cut Wages & Accelerate Precarity

    by Alison Pennington in Jacobin

    The Morrison government has proposed sweeping changes to labour laws that will expand unilateral employer power to cut wages and freely deploy casual labour. Together, the Coalition’s proposed changes will accelerate the incidence of insecure work, undermine genuine collective bargaining, and suppress wages growth. Impacts will be felt across the entire workforce – casual and permanent workers alike.

  • The Broken Bargain: Australia’s Growing Wages Crisis with Sally McManus

    The Broken Bargain: Australia’s Growing Wages Crisis with Sally McManus

    by Dan Nahum

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    In this episode from The Australia Institute’s webinar series, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus outlines the political and legal reasons why wage growth is so low in Australia.

    Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, wage growth in Australia was anemic.

    Historically, a working class with power to organise and bargain, and a broad commitment to the social wage ensured Australia’s wealth was shared. But the last 30 years have seen a dramatic shift of the share of Australia’s prosperity going to profit and away from working people.The shift in the distribution of GDP from the mid-1970s to today has transferred 10% of GDP directly from workers to corporate profits. That’s more than $200 billion – or almost $20,000 per waged worker – per year.

    Australians are facing a wages crisis, and Government actions and inactions are making this problem worse.

    In conversation with Australia Institute Deputy Director Ebony Bennett, and Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford, Sally McManus outlines the reasons why wage growth is so poor, and the way back for working people to once again be at the heart of a strong economy.

    Recorded live on 14 July 2021, as part of the Australia Institute’s 2021 webinar series. A transcript of Sally McManus’s speech is available below.


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  • If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic, Wait Till You See The Figures Now

    If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic, Wait Till You See The Figures Now

    by Dan Nahum

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

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    Australia paid a big price for the over reliance on insecure jobs prior to the pandemic. But as our economy recovers, insecure jobs account for about two out of every three new positions. In this commentary, originally published on New Matilda, Economist Dan Nahum explains why that’s a very bad thing – especially in front-line, human services roles. In the context of COVID-19, the effects of insecure work in these sectors, in particular, reverberate across the whole community with dangerous and tragic consequences.

    COVID-19 has been reintroduced into multiple aged care homes in Victoria, in part via staff who worked in multiple locations. We have been here before, but this time, the Commonwealth government should have prevented this channel of contagion.

    The poorly-managed vaccine rollout, including inexplicable delays in vaccinating aged care residents and staff, has played a key role in the current outbreak. But there is another policy factor at play as well: multi-site, insecure, and precarious work in Australia’s aged care sector.

    There has been a dramatic expansion of insecure work in this sector: including more than doubling the share of part-time jobs in the last generation, a huge shift toward lower-qualified, frequently precarious personal care positions (rather than qualified and registered health workers), and the widespread use of labour hire and agencies to provide short-term labour (rather than creating permanent, stable jobs).

    The recent report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety identified these precarious staffing practices as a major risk to the quality and safety of care. The Commissioners criticised the over-use of temporary or agency work, and emphasised the inextricable linkage between ‘the quality of care and the quality of jobs.’ They recommended that permanent, more stable jobs are most compatible with ‘developing a skilled, career-based, stable and engaged workforce providing high quality aged care’.

    It’s not just in aged care facilities that insecure work has accelerated the spread, and magnified the consequences, of COVID-19. In fact, insecure work has generally weakened Australia’s resistance to the virus, and undermined both our health and economic responses. In aged care and beyond, precarious work enhances risks that the virus is transmitted.

    Precarious jobs do not provide the training and stability to ensure that rigorous infection control measures are implemented and followed. Workers in those jobs have low and unstable incomes, and generally lack paid sick leave: the resulting economic desperation compels many of them to work, when they should be isolating. Another tragic example of the overlap between insecure work and COVID-19 contagion was the tragic failures in hotel quarantine – where a perfect storm of poor training, low wages, and insecure work clearly contributed to the virus’s escape into the community.

    Precarious work is more than just casual work – it includes part-time (especially with unpredictable hours), casual, labour hire, sham contracting, and gig work. Around half of all Australian jobs embody one or more of those dimensions of insecurity.

    Sick pay is unavailable in most of these roles: casual and self-employed workers have none, while even permanent part-timers accumulate only partial credits. When the pandemic hit, 37% of all employed Australians (including self-employed) had no paid sick leave entitlement. Unwell workers thus faced the economic compulsion to work when they should have stayed home.

    Workers in insecure jobs experienced the lion’s share of initial job loss in the early days of the pandemic, cruelly concentrating the costs of the downturn on those who could least afford it. Casual workers lost employment eight times faster than those in permanent jobs. Part-time workers lost work three times faster than full-time workers, and insecure self-employed workers (those without incorporation or without any employees) lost work four times faster than those in more stable small businesses.

    Now, however, the rebound of employment since the initial lockdowns is being dominated by a surge in insecure jobs. Casual jobs account for almost 60% of all waged jobs created since the trough of the recession. Part-time work accounts for almost two-thirds of all new jobs. And very insecure positions (including own-account contractors and ‘gigs’) account for most of the rebound in self-employment.

    So without measures to improve job stability, the post-COVID labour market will clearly be dominated by insecure work – setting us up for future economic, social, and public health risks in the future.

    Multiple job-holding provides further evidence that the labour market, for many people, provides only fractured, incomplete, precarious opportunity. In the December quarter of 2020, there were over a million ‘secondary jobs’ in Australia (where a person is working that job in addition to another role) – the highest in history. Secondary jobs surged by 27% from June through December 2020 (alongside other types of insecure work).

    These jobs now account for 7.2% of all employment in Australia – also the highest in history. As we have tragically been reminded, multiple job holding poses enormous risks: not just on workers forced to juggle multiple positions to make ends meet, but for quality of care and public health.

    Finally, the broader social and familial stresses unleashed by the pandemic have also been exacerbated by insecure work. This problem has a particularly gendered slant: women do most of the unpaid work in our society, and carrying this burden of unpaid work is made even more difficult when paid work is precarious and unreliable. Family demands do not suddenly disappear when there is an opportunity to pick up a casual shift. And for the worker, the consequences of turning down that shift can be damaging and long-term – likely leading to fewer hours subsequently offered by that employer.

    Avoidable outbreaks of COVID-19 provide further proof that Australia needs to roll back precarious work, and ensure all workers have basic security, stability and entitlements.

    Australia has among the highest reliance on insecure work arrangements of any industrial country. That precarity is not natural or inevitable, it is the result of deliberate policy choices. And in the wake of COVID-19, Australia should be making different ones.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • A Review of Lapsis

    A Review of Lapsis

    by Dan Nahum

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    The increasing precarity of economic life for many people is being reflected in a growing output of film and TV, including the work of Ken Loach (‘Sorry We Missed You’, ‘I, Daniel Blake’), Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s 2019 documentary ‘American Factory’, Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ as well as his ‘Snowpiercer’ film and subsequent TV series, the interplanetary class divisions explored by the Syfy Channel’s ‘The Expanse’, and Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning ‘Nomadland’. The Centre for Future Work’s first film review considers a new entry in this recent canon of art imitating life.

    Writer-director Noah Hutton has shrewdly crafted a science-fiction world that closely resembles our own. The premise of the film is that quantum computing has revolutionised the world’s financial markets, further exploding the dominance of the financial industry. The shabby underbelly of this quantum computing revolution is the rise of ‘cabling’ — workers managed by an algorithm, via an app, dragging cables through the woods between one quantum computing node and another.

    Read Economist Dan Nahum’s review of Lapsis.


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    Centre For Future Work to evolve into standalone entity

    The Centre for Future Work was established by the Australia Institute in 2016 to conduct and publish progressive economic research on work, employment, and labour markets. Supported by the Australian Union movement, the centre produced cutting edge research and led the national conversation on economic issues facing working people: including the future of jobs, wages

  • Why is Job Quality Worsening?

    Why is Job Quality Worsening?

    by Alison Pennington

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Over time, insecure work has become more prevalent in the Australian economy. Key drivers of worsening job quality include: decades of economic policies which constructed unemployment “buffers”; insufficient paid work available for all who need it; reductions in the level of unemployment benefits to below-poverty levels, collapse in collective bargaining coverage, and failure to regulate insecure work.

    In this update on job insecurity in Australia, Alison Pennington reviews the ongoing erosion of full-time, traditional “good” jobs, growth in COVID-era “gig” work, and outlines how business trends and labour market policies have facilitated both lower worker bargaining power and a dramatic rise in insecure work.

    For more on reducing the incidence and consequences of insecure work, see our recent submission to the Select Committee on Job Insecurity, by Dan Nahum.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Video: Myth & Reality About Technology, Skills & Jobs

    Video: Myth & Reality About Technology, Skills & Jobs

    by Jim Stanford

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    We are constantly told that the world of work is being turned upside down by ‘technology’: some faceless, anonymous, uncontrollable force that is somehow beyond human control. There’s no point resisting this exogenous, omnipresent force. The best thing to do is get with the program… and learn how to program! Acquiring the right skills (usually assumed to be STEM or computer skills) is the best way to protect yourself in this brave new high-tech future.

    But what if technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? And what if you invest in learning the current hot coding language, only to see it replaced by something totally different as soon as you graduate?

    In this 30-minute video, Centre for Future Work Economist and Director Dr. Jim Stanford takes on several myths related to technology and jobs.

    He argues that technology is neither exogenous nor neutral: innovation reflects the priorities (and the power) of those who have the resources to pay for it. By some indicators, jobs are becoming less technology-intensive — and this is undermining job security and living standards. Finally, we need a more holistic and democratic approach to skills and training: one that respects the all-round interests of workers as human beings (not just ‘producers’), and accepts that skills alone are no guarantee of decent, fair jobs in the future.

    The video is an excellent, free resource for adult education workshops, career development courses, and union meetings.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Rage & Optimism as an Activist Economist

    Rage & Optimism as an Activist Economist

    by Alison Pennington in Crikey

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Originally published in Crikey on April 23, 2021

    Crikey is reclaiming the “angry woman” trope in a new column about what women achieve through rage, passion and determination. In this inspiring and poetic feature with our Senior Economist Alison Pennington, Alison explains how rage about how the economy works (or doesn’t work) powers her forceful work as an activist economist.

    We are pleased to share the article by Amber Schultz, with kind permission from Crikey media.

    Belittled for being angry, Alison Pennington is breaking the mould of boring economists

    Centre for Future Work senior economist Alison Pennington makes no apologies for harnessed rage.

    By Amber Schultz

    April 23, 2021

    Alison Pennington

    Anger is an emotion we’re rarely told to express. Passionate women and people of colour are often framed as overly outspoken, enraged, shrill or resentful. Their fights are discredited the second they raise their voice.

    But regardless of how it’s framed, anger gets results. When directed in the right way, rage can inspire change. It pulls people out of their homes, it causes them to rally outside Parliament, call out bullshit and fight for what they believe in.

    This week Crikey spoke with Alison Pennington, a senior economist with the Centre for Future Work, about what’s got her riled up this week — and how anger has worked in her favour.

    Crikey: When has rage worked in your favour?

    Alison Pennington: My analysis has force because I feel plenty of rage, and the immediacy of every moment. Being passionate is about giving a shit. “Giving a shit” suggests you have a moral code. I make no apologies for harnessed rage.

    My rage is harnessed as a slow-burning force. I want to dismantle the logic of those creating harm and inequality and establish better systems and processes. That requires equal parts rage and optimism.

    Crikey: Have you ever been called out for being angry?

    I have had years of experience of being belittled or seen as not serious, or as capable, because I give a shit.

    I worked in budget at the Department of Finance. When policies hit my desk for review, I could envision how they impacted working Australia on the ground. I’d suggest additional assessments of clearly damaging, non-transparent government proposals. I was routinely told that caring was getting in the way of efficient rubber-stamping. “Just let it wash over you.” I was also told I was “a bit of a bogan”!

    Crikey: Do you fit the mould of a typical economist?

    Most economists are men in corporate jobs who are actually paid to maintain this air of authority, objectivity and distance from emotion. Bringing your humanity to the table every day is much harder than hiding silos of self-congratulatory authority, which is the way that economics is consistently being taught.

    People don’t want to see impersonal suits wearing economists as authorities and people telling them what their life is like and what it should be like. They want to see someone who talks like them, and thinks like them, or is as angry as them and as concerned as them.

    Crikey: What’s got you riled up this week?

    There was an agricultural worker of 15 years. She provides 14 years of blemish free loyal service as a mushroom picker and then gets injured, and then suddenly, in the six months after that, there’s four disciplinary warnings against her. Finally, the employer finds “the evidence” that she can be sacked because she put her mushroom picking knife on the wrong hook.

    The Morison government has gone about increasing the power of employers in our industrial nations laws to screw over workers in the workplace, and that was just a story that really highlighted the difference between rhetoric and reality.

    Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the government can say that they care about women’s work opportunities and making sure women have opportunities to work and close the gender pay gap and all that but like this is what it looks like on the ground.


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  • Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most

    Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most

    by Alison Pennington in Michael West Media

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Originally published in Michael West Media on March 24, 2021

    As women lead mobilisations against workplace gendered violence, the federal government passed legislation expanding employer power to use insecure, casual labour in its IR bill – laws that will disproportionately impact the pay and security of women’s jobs.

    In this commentary, Senior Economist Alison Pennington explains how new casuals measures and the government’s wider economic policies – including in industrial relations, childcare, welfare, and fiscal spending – significantly undermine the economic security of women, entrench pay inequality, and ultimately, increase their vulnerability to gendered violence.

    This commentary was originally published in Michael West Media.

    Crocodile tears no mask for Coalition’s economic war on women

    Well may Scott Morrison tear up as he relates how his daughters, wife and widowed mother drive his every decision. The facts are that every move of the Coalition government ensures women are poorer, more insecure at work and more vulnerable to violence on the job. The Industrial Relations bill pushed through last week is a final nail in the coffin for women. Alison Pennington reports.

    After a month of anger from women around the country about sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the workplace, federal parliament passed legislation last week that will strike a massive, lasting blow to women’s job quality and pay, entrenching pay inequality and exacerbating women’s economic insecurity.

    The mainstream media has mainly focused on the fact that most of the Industrial Relations bill didn’t pass. But the cornerstone of the legislation – and the primary reason for its inception, pre-pandemic, by business lobbyists – did.

    A new legal definition of casual work will allow employers to call any job a casual one. Jobs can now look and smell like permanent jobs, except that employers can legally engage you as a casual, stripping away your legal entitlements at will.

    So-called “permanency conversion” rights in the legislation are so weak that employers will easily craft employment arrangements to lock in casual jobs long-term.

    Employers will simply vary rosters

    Employers will vary rosters sufficiently to ensure that employees will never reach the benchmarks of six and 12 months of regular schedules that should lead to permanency. In any case, employers will be allowed to refuse offers on “reasonable grounds”. And small businesses, which employ a huge 44% of all private sector employees, are exempted entirely.

    The federal government’s new casual laws will expand the incidence of casual work. Women will disproportionately suffer in a labour market with diminishing opportunities to obtain secure, decent jobs because women are more likely to be in casual roles (filling 54% of all casual positions). And women’s vulnerability to casualisation is growing. Women accounted for 62% of all new casual jobs created in the period from May to November 2020.

    Casual workers are not compensated

    Despite claims from employers that casual workers are compensated for the loss of entitlements and lack of predictability in rosters and tenure, nothing could be further from the truth.

    Casual workers are, on average, paid far less than employees in permanent roles. Median weekly earnings of full-time casuals were 23% lower ($1080 per week) than those in permanent roles ($1400 per week), and 45% lower for casual part-time workers ($390 per week) compared with permanent part-time workers on $720 per week.

    The expansion of the power of employers to use casual work in a jobs market awash with many hungry mouths desperate for paid work means more women in lower-paying, insecure jobs.

    The government’s decision to subject the unemployed to a below-poverty JobSeeker rate means more women reliant on employers to survive. At every move the Liberal National party government is making Australian women poorer, more insecure and more vulnerable to violence on the job.

    Women return to lower quality jobs

    Treasurer Josh Frydenberg celebrates the recent fall in the unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent, claiming the recovery is well under way. But the detailed job quality data tell a very different story for women.

    Women workers are “snapping back” to a world of paid work on inferior terms compared with men – fewer hours, less pay and less security.

    Casual jobs accounted for 64.3% of the total growth in women’s employment from May to November last year.

    Alarmingly, more than half of all the growth in women’s employment over the six-month period was in both low-hours and insecure work, with 52.4% of total growth in employees in part-time casual jobs.

    Traditional full-time permanent jobs with normal entitlements (such as paid sick leave, holidays and superannuation) represented a dismal 10.4% of female employment growth from May through November.

    It’s a crude fact that as women’s casual jobs were booming, business lobbyists were pushing for passage of the IR Bill on the basis that employers “lacked confidence” to hire casuals due to legal “uncertainty”. Australia was simultaneously experiencing the largest and fastest increase in casual employment in its history.

    More fuel for gender pay gap fire

    The consequences of an employment recovery overwhelmingly concentrated in part-time and casual jobs for women is more fuel for the gender pay gap fire.

    The gender pay gap is most often measured by comparing the earnings of men and women in full-time jobs. But women face persistent barriers to workforce participation – including unaffordable childcare, lack of family-friendly work arrangements, and workplace discrimination. Consequently, almost half (45.1%) of all employed women are in part-time work.

    Measuring the gender pay gap using total average earnings data (including both full-time and part-time workers, and bonuses and overtime as well as ordinary time wages) indicates that the gender pay gap is 31% across all jobs – a more dire, but more accurate, measure of the pay gap.

    Ironically, the gender pay gap narrowed in the early stages of pandemic and recession. From late-2019 to May 2020, the gap between male and female total wage incomes declined from 31.4% to 29.6% – down by 1.8 percentage points.

    But this did not represent “progress” in pay equality. The gap only closed because more than 300,000 women in low-paid casual roles lost their jobs, which increased the average earnings of those women who were able to stay connected to the workforce.

    How good’s “snap back”?

    As the economy recovered from May last year, an influx of women’s lower-paying jobs widened the gender pay gap again, just as quickly. How good’s “snap back”?

    Instead of improving the quantity and quality of jobs for women, governments have actively pursued policies that will exacerbate pay inequality this year and into the future.

    In addition to casual work changes pushed through in the IR bill, two other policies create higher barriers to women’s participation in paid work, and suppress their pay once they get on the job.

    The federal government and all states and territories (bar Tasmania and Victoria) have imposed punitive and counterproductive public sector wage freezes and caps on their workforces. This suppression of public sector pay hurts women most because they account for 61.7% of all public sector jobs.

    The failure of government to provide affordable, quality childcare presents another major barrier to women’s paid work opportunities. After dangling free childcare in front of families early in the pandemic, the federal government cut supports and reintroduced fees after just three months.

    The return of full-fee, high-cost childcare prices women out of paid work. More than half of women with young children outside the workforce list childcare costs as a key factor in their decision not to work. A childcare system that lets a small number of profit-driven providers determine access denies families and their children access to critical developmental education and much-needed community bonds as people emerge from pandemic-era isolation.

    Rebuilding women’s economic security requires a very different approach from the bankrupt austerity agenda of government. Women need more and better quality jobs, free childcare, a superannuation system that provides genuine income security and an employment relations system that works to lift the quality, pay and safety of their jobs, not undermine it.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

    Australia’s Gas Use On The Slide

    by Ketan Joshi

    The Federal Government has released a new report that includes projections of how much gas Australia is set to use over the coming decades. There is no ambiguity in its message: Australia reached peak gas years ago, and it’s all downhill from here:

  • Wrecking superannuation, not protecting women, is the government’s priority

    Wrecking superannuation, not protecting women, is the government’s priority

    by Alison Pennington in The New Daily

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Originally published in The New Daily on March 20, 2021

    It doesn’t matter what the crisis, when it comes to the Morrison government the message is clear: you’re on your own.

    Women deserve so much more than what Jane Hume is proposing, writes Alison Pennington. Photo: AAP

    It doesn’t matter what the crisis, when it comes to the Morrison government the message is clear: you’re on your own.

    As women across Australia lead historic mobilisations demanding government action on gendered violence week, the federal government encouraged women facing domestic abuse to raid their own superannuation accounts.

    Calling superannuation withdrawal measures of up to $10,000 “an important last resort lifeline” for women experiencing domestic violence, Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy Jane Hume later announced the policy would be reviewed following concerns from frontline workers about victim coercion.

    Minister Hume now proposes to strengthen the “integrity” of the scheme with safeguards protecting the free withdrawal of funds. But additional steps for accessing women’s retirement funds do not change the policy’s message: survivors of abuse must fund their own crisis supports. All the while abusers roam free – an addition of intolerable insult to injury.

    Safeguards may stop abusive partners forcing women to raid their retirement savings, but it’s not stopping the federal government. The early-release scheme is entirely consistent with the government’s clear established priorities: dismantling the superannuation system – rain, hail or shine.

    Women marching for economic security and safety are not just ignored by the government. The Coalition’s anti-superannuation crusade to transform the system into an emergency personal bank account actively exploits women’s heightened COVID-era economic vulnerability.

    Women worse off since COVID

    In the initial COVID shutdowns, women experienced greater losses of jobs and hours. Against this backdrop of women’s desperation, the federal government introduced the superannuation early release scheme. Significantly, this was introduced two weeks before the introduction of the Coronavirus Supplement and the JobKeeper wage subsidy.

    Between April and December 2020, 1.5 million women drew down their super, one-quarter of the entire female workforce. $14.9 billion was stripped from women’s already meagre retirement savings. Some 345,000 women completely emptied their accounts. Many more women aged under 20, and also those aged 36-55 (prime working years pre-retirement), withdrew from their superannuation compared to men.

    In 2018, the Coalition announced domestic violence would be added to the list of early release “compassionate grounds”. Frontline domestic violence services voiced concern back then too. Now, pressured by intensifying calls for a proactive government addressing gendered violence, the Coalition suggests “safeguards”.

    The federal government acknowledged heightened gendered violence risks during COVID. But it has still failed to give sufficient funding to the domestic violence sector, lift critical income supports for vulnerable women fleeing abuse, or introduce paid domestic violence leave into minimum labour laws. In fact, $1 million was cut from anti-domestic violence education programs in schools in the 2020 October Budget.

    Early release scheme exacerbates disadvantage

    Women already face systematic disadvantage in the superannuation system and have much lower retirement incomes: they retire with barely half the retirement savings of men. There urgently needs to be targeted reforms to prevent labour market inequalities that reduce women’s career earnings from being baked into the superannuation system as well.

    Abolishing the $450 per month minimum threshold, closing the ‘motherhood gap’ by making super payable for all paid and unpaid care-related absences, and proceeding with the legislated increase in the superannuation guarantee (to 12 per cent) are all important to boosting women’s economic security and safety.

    In the absence of real action on gendered workplace and domestic violence, the government’s superannuation early release scheme for domestic violence victims only exacerbates women’s economic insecurity.

    Women desperate for incomes to survive are more reliant on abusive partners and low-wage casual jobs, more helpless to the threat of ‘handsy’ bosses and colleagues, and below-poverty welfare payments in the future. This latest policy only increases the risks of gendered violence over women’s lifetimes.

    For women experiencing job loss, financial hardship or domestic violence, the message from the federal government is one we are getting sick of hearing: in a crisis, you’re on your own.

    Australian women deserve so much more.


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  • Migrant Workers Abandoned in the COVID Recovery

    Migrant Workers Abandoned in the COVID Recovery

    by Alison Pennington

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    COVID continues to sweep Europe and the US, while Australia celebrates near-elimination of community transmission. But Australia’s public health success has not come without significant economic and social hardship for large sections of our community – especially migrant workers. Thousands of migrant workers were pulled off the job to stop the spread of COVID-19, and excluded from key government income support programs including JobSeeker and JobKeeper. Temporary migrant workers are still left without access to Medicare.

    In this short, accessible commentary, Senior Economist Alison Pennington outlines how the pandemic, the resulting recession and government COVID-era policies have increased risks to migrant workers’ financial security, and health and safety. Building more secure, inclusive labour markets can reduce risks that future major events don’t hit the most vulnerable hardest.

    This commentary was prepared for presentation to the Migrant Workers Centre Conference, November 2020.

    Migrant Workers & The COVID-19 Recession

    by Alison Pennington, Senior Economist at Centre for Future Work

    COVID infections continue to sweep Europe and the US while Australia celebrates multiple days without any cases of community transmission. But Australia’s public health success has not come without significant economic and social hardship for large sections of our community – especially migrant workers. Thousands of migrant workers were pulled off the job to stop the spread of COVID-19, and excluded from key government income support programs including JobSeeker and JobKeeper. Temporary migrant workers are still left without access to Medicare.

    As the economy slowly recovers from recession, migrant workers will face even greater hardship in accessing decent jobs and incomes. The expiration of temporary work visas without supports to reconnect with new employers, and in jobs that pay enough, will expose migrant workers to more intense exploitation.

    The federal government’s response to the unprecedented COVID-19 economic crisis has included big spending on tax cuts, subsidies and other business concessions as part of its “business-led recovery”. But there are many problems with how the government thinks about the economy, that will mean the economic crisis will be longer and more painful than it needs to be.

    The pandemic has left deep cuts in the economy: two million people (15% of labour force) are either unemployed, working far fewer hours than normal, or have left the labour market all together since the March lockdowns; consumer spending has not fully recovered after lockdown restrictions were lifted and people prefer to save in preparation for harder times. Companies are focused on recovering or maintaining profits, cutting investments in their businesses, and cutting spending on employment and wages. Private investments have been decreasing for years and will not miraculously rebound during a recession. Trusting the private sector to lead our post-COVID economic recovery therefore is like hoping for a miracle.

    Income tax cuts are mainly symbolic and do not have real and lasting impacts on boosting spending in the economy. In fact, normal pay rises are far more effective than tax cuts because the effect of wage growth is permanent and cumulative. The announced tax cuts are also unfairly designed to benefit high-income earners. 88 per cent of the combined permanent benefit of the tax cuts will go to highest-fifth of income earners whereas low- and middle-income earners will get only a one-time rebate of $1,080 at the next tax return.

    Wage growth is expected to stay at 1.25 per cent in 2021 – enough only to match the slow rise in consumer prices. But a higher unemployment rate and continued increase in part-time and casual jobs will cut household incomes even more. If the government adopted measures to strengthen wages including higher minimum wages and stronger collective bargaining rights, our recovery would be on a better track.

    Youth, women, migrant workers and long-term unemployed are in most need of targeted job-creation policies. But the federal government has presented no plan to create jobs for the millions of unemployed, underemployed and disenfranchised who want and need paid work. The JobMaker program provides a subsidy for 12 months to employers creating new jobs for young workers on unemployment payments. It is a short-sighted initiative that will not reach its intended claim of creating 450,000 jobs (Treasury estimate now 45,000). There is no guarantee young workers will maintain employment once the government stops paying for the subsidy.  Without job protections, the program will encourage the “churning” of vulnerable young workers in low-wage, insecure jobs. It could also displace existing workers and discourage the hiring of others. Migrant workers have already experienced mass redundancies when employers chose to engage workers who qualified for the JobKeeper subsidy. Migrant worker displacement may occur under JobMaker.

    Despite Australia’s macroeconomic weakness, the government intends to decrease spending by billions in cuts to the JobKeeper and Coronavirus Supplement payments in March 2021. The impacts on the jobs and incomes of low and middle-income workers will be disastrous. The real way to overcome the recession will be to restore the capacity of people to work, earn and be healthy, engaged members of a more inclusive Australian economy. This can be achieved only when the government commits to a long-term, ambitious vision for economic and social change, backed by substantial and sustained public spending. This vision should create more secure jobs, invest in climate-friendly industries, and strengthen and expand our public services like healthcare, education and skills.

    Rather than wait for private sector investment, the federal and state governments can expand direct public sector employment now. They can also ensure all people residing in Australia are protected from poverty and insecurity now. Urgent measures should be taken immediately to address the pronounced risks to migrant workers’ financial security, and health and safety experienced during this crisis:

    • Expand JobSeeker and the Coronavirus Supplement coverage to excluded migrant workers. Reverse the punitive and economically counterintuitive cuts to the Coronavirus Supplement, and permanently restore the $550 per fortnight rate.
    • Expand JobKeeper coverage to all workers, and end the two-tiered wage subsidy scheme, returning the original $1,500 flat payment rate permanently.
    • Create a paid sick leave scheme available to all workers, regardless of their work status.

    The pandemic has shone a light on the growing scourge of insecure work. Around half of all employment in Australia has one or more dimensions of precarity including casual, temporary, part-time insufficient-hours work, and self-employment. Precarious work contributed to the community spread of disease, such as in the private aged care system where widespread practices of multiple jobholding led to virus transmission between facilities.

    We have worked together to eradicate COVID-19, and we can work together to eradicate insecure work. Working to build more secure labour markets for all is about reducing risks that major events don’t hit the most vulnerable hardest. Job creating investment, quality public education and skills systems, income supports for all, and extending minimum labour standards like Award wages and collective bargaining are critical to an inclusive post-COVID recovery. And by strengthening the collective efforts of workers to take action in their unions, we can put good jobs and incomes in the driving seat of Australia’s economic recovery.


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