The modern era has seen many kinds of traditional authority come under challenge, but until now the “right of managers to manage” has remained largely immune. If anything, the managers’ power has increased as the countervailing power of unions has declined. But the rise of working from home and, more recently, Labor’s right to disconnect legislation pose unprecedented threats to the power of managers over information workers — those employees formerly known as “office workers.”

To see how this might play out, it’s worth considering the decline of another once-powerful authority, the Catholic Church. In the early 1960s, following the development of reliable oral contraception, the leaders of the church had to decide whether to accept the Pill as a permissible way for married couples to plan their families. Pope John XXIII established a pontifical commission on birth control to reconsider Catholic doctrine on this topic.

It was a crucial decision precisely because marriage and sex were the most important areas in which the authority of the Church remained supreme and precise rules could be laid down — and generally enforced — among the faithful.

Most people, after all, have no trouble observing the commandments against murder, and other sins like anger, pride and sloth are very much in the eye of the beholder. But the rules regulating who can marry whom and what kind of sexual behaviour is permissible are precise and demanding, to the point that the term “morals” is commonly taken to imply sexual morals. The official celibacy of priests, who thereby showed even more restraint than was demanded of ordinary Catholics, added to the mystique of clerical power.

By the time the commission reported in 1966 John XXIII had been replaced by Pope Paul VI. The commission concluded that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods they employed. But five of the commission’s sixty-nine members took the opposite view in a minority report.

In the encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI made his fateful rejection of all forms of artificial contraception. As an attempt to exercise and shore up authority it failed completely. The realities of raising large families and dealing with unplanned pregnancies were far removed from the experience of priests and theologians. And the church’s evident demographic motive (the desire for big Catholic families to fill the pews) further undermined the legitimacy of the prohibition.

Previously loyal Catholics ignored Pope Paul’s ruling, in many cases marking their first step away from the Church. Doctrines restricting marriage between Catholics and non-Catholics, including the requirement that children be raised as Catholics, also became little more than formalities commanding at most notional obedience.

The breakdown of clerical authority set the scene for the exposure of clerical child abuse from the 1990s on. Although accusations of this kind had been around for many years, the authority of the church had ensured that critics were silenced or disbelieved.

It is hard to know for sure what would have happened if Pope Paul had chosen differently. The membership and social standing of Protestant denominations, nearly all which accepted contraception, have also declined, though not as much as a Catholic Church that pinned its authority on personal morality. Humanae Vitae’s attempt to exercise papal authority succeeded only in exposing its illusory nature.

In the struggle over working from home and the “freedom to disconnect” we’re seeing something similar happen to the authority of managers.

Following the arrival of Covid-19 in early 2020, working from home went from being a rare indulgence to a general necessity, at least for those whose work could be done with a telephone and a computer. Hardly any time was available for preparation: in mid March, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were still planning to attend football matches; a week later, Australia was in lockdown.

Offices and schools closed. Workers had to convert their kitchen tables or (if they were lucky) spare bedrooms into workstations using whatever equipment they had available. And, to make things even tougher, parents had to take responsibility for the remote education of their children.

Despite the already extensive evidence of the benefits of remote work, many managers expected chaos and a massive reduction in productivity. But information-based work of all kinds carried on without any obvious interruption. Insurance policies were renewed, bills were issued and paid, newspapers and magazines continued to be published. Meetings, that scourge of modern working life, continued to take place, though now over Zoom.

Once the lockdown phase of the pandemic was over, workers were in no hurry to return to the office. The benefits of shorter commuting times and the flexibility to handle family responsibilities were obvious, while adverse impacts on productivity, if any, were hard to discern.

Sceptics argued that working from home, though fine for current employees, would pose major difficulties for the “onboarding” of new staff. Four years into the new era, though, around half of all workers are in jobs they started after the pandemic began. Far from lamenting the lack of office camaraderie and mentorship, these new hires are among the most resistant to the removal of a working condition they have taken for granted since the start.

Nevertheless, chief executives have issued an almost daily drumbeat of demands for a return to five-day office attendance and threatened dire consequences for those who don’t comply. Although these threats sometimes appear to have an effect, workers generally stop complying. As long as they are still doing their jobs, their immediate managers have little incentive to discipline them, especially as the most capable workers are often the most resistant to close supervision. Three days of office attendance a week has become the new normal for large parts of the workforce, and attempts to change this reality are proving largely fruitless.

The upshot is that attendance rates have barely changed after more than two years of back-to-the-office announcements. The Kastle Systems Back to Work Barometer, a weekly measure of US office attendance as a percentage of February 2020 levels, largely kept within the narrow range of 46 to 50 per cent over the course of 2023.

This fact is finally sinking in. Sandwiched between two pieces about back-to-the-office pushes by diehard employers, the Australian Financial Review recently ran up the white flag with a piece headlined “Return to Office Stalls as Companies Give Up on Five Days a Week.”

This trend, significant in itself, also marks a change in power relations between managers and workers. Behind all the talk about “water cooler conversations” and “synergies,” the real reason for demanding the physical presence of workers is that it makes it easier for managers to exercise authority. The failure of “back to the office” prefigures a major realignment of power relationships at work.

Conversely, the success of working from home in the face of dire predictions undermines one of the key foundations of the “right to manage,” namely the assumption that managers have a better understanding of the organisations they head than do the people who work in them. Despite a vast literature on leadership, the capacity of managers to lead their workers in their preferred direction has proved very limited.

The other side of the remote work debate is the right to disconnect. The same managers who insisted that workers should be physically present at the office in standard working hours (and sometimes longer) also came to expect responses to phone calls and emails at any time of the day or night. The supposed need for an urgent response typically reflected sloppiness on the part of managers incapable of organising their own work schedules to take account of the need for work–life balance.

Once again, managers have attempted to draw a line in the sand. Opposition leader Peter Dutton has backed them, promising to repeal the right to disconnect if the Coalition wins the next election. It’s a striking illustration of the importance of power to the managerial class that Dutton has chosen to fight on this issue while capitulating to the government’s broken promise on the Stage 3 tax cuts, which would have delivered big financial benefits to his strongest supporters.

Can this trend be reversed? The not-so-secret hope is that high unemployment will turn the tables. As Tim Gurner (of “avocado toast” fame) put it, “We need pain in the economy… and employees need to reminded of who is boss.” US tech firms have put that view to the test with large-scale sackings, many focused on remote workers. But the other side of remote work is mobility. Many of those fired in the recent tech layoffs have found new jobs, often also remote.

In the absence of a really deep recession, firms that demand and enforce full-time attendance will find themselves with a limited pool of disgruntled workers dominated by those with limited outside options.

Popular stories — from King Canute’s attempt to turn back the tide (apparently to make fools of obsequious courtiers who suggested he could do it) to Hans Christian Anderson’s naked emperor — have made the point that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise. Pope Paul ignored that lesson and the Catholic Church paid the price. Now, it seems, managers are doing the same. •

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Then there was the unexpected jump in numbers. Net overseas migration for the 2022–23 financial year hit a record 510,000 people, more than 25 per cent above the 400,000 anticipated in the May budget and more than double the October 2022 forecast of 235,000. Not only are more people arriving but fewer are leaving, especially students; the catch-up after Covid means many international students are still in the early stages of their courses and won’t return home for two or three more years.

Combined with the shenanigans of sacked former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, these developments have made it easy for the opposition to conjure up an image of out-of-control migration and link this to housing shortages and other pressing issues. Immigration isn’t the cause of a housing crisis decades in the making, but the surge in arrivals does make a tight rental market even worse.

Arrival numbers would have been no lower under a Coalition government and Australia’s population would be higher if not for Covid. But facts count for little in an overheated debate. Migration is now Labor’s problem and it would be easy to construe the release of its new strategy as an attempt to wrest back the initiative on this fraught topic.

But the strategy is no knee-jerk response. It is the product of months of work, building on an expert panel’s finding that the migration program is “broken” and a report by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon confirming widespread abuse of Australia’s visa system.

The strategy adds detail to the government’s early responses to those two reviews and affirms its commitment to keeping both unions and business onside. It shows a government aspiring to wholesale reform rather than bolting yet more fixes onto an already unwieldly, overloaded and outdated migration machine.

In its existing form, the system satisfies no one. Employers and migrants complain about high costs, slow processing and uncertain outcomes, while the public questions the scale and integrity of the program. In their joint foreword to the strategy, the responsible ministers, Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles, recognise the need to restore migration’s “social license.”

The strategy articulates four policy objectives, and while they are not ranked, the tone and content of the strategy indicate a descending order of priority. Migration, it says, should first, raise living standards; second, ensure a fair go in the workplace; third, build stronger communities; and fourth, strengthen international relationships.

To achieve the primary aim of higher living standards the government wants to refine migration to boost productivity, counter the perceived impacts of an ageing population, fill skills gaps and expand exports.

One step is to reform the points test, which scores and ranks applicants for permanent skilled migration according to their age, qualifications, experience and English language proficiency. A discussion paper will canvass options that are likely to give greater weight to the skills and qualifications of an applicant’s partner and downgrade factors that are “poor predictors” of labour market success, such as studying in a regional area and fluency in a community language. The aim is to reward skill over “perseverance” so that international student graduates working in their professional fields have a faster route to settlement while graduates stuck in lower-level jobs are screened out and leave Australia.

Another measure introduces a “skills in demand” visa to replace the “temporary skills shortage” visa. This is more than a name change. The government had already lifted the threshold wage for temporary skilled migrants from $53,900 to $70,000 to ensure that these visas are not used to recruit cheap labour. (The threshold, frozen since 2013, will now be indexed annually.) New rules allow temporary migrants to switch employers and sectors more easily, which should improve productivity as these workers move to jobs where their skills are more highly valued.

Labour market testing will be simplified, employers can pay sponsorship fees periodically instead of up front, and visas will be issued more swiftly, with the government committing to a median processing time of just seven days for applicants in the top “specialist skills pathway.” This applies to workers earning at least $135,000, who will no longer have to match one of the occupations in demand identified by Jobs and Skills Australia (though the category is closed to trade workers, machinery operators, drivers and labourers).

Workers paid between $70,000 and $135,000 are on the “core skills pathway” and must still have an occupation identified as being in shortage, with a promise that these lists will be updated more frequently to better reflect rapidly changing labour market needs. Both the core and specialist pathways will offer a route to permanent residency.

The details of a third “essential skills” pathway are yet to be worked out. This option will apply to lower-paid, hard-to-fill jobs with a focus on the care economy. The government says it will “further consult” on lower-wage migration next year, but any arrangements will be sector-specific, capped in size, closely regulated and designed to maintain the primacy of Australia’s relationship to the Pacific as “a guiding principle.”

The latter is a reference to objective four of the strategy — strengthening international relationships — and we can expect further development of PALM, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which has its genesis in a seasonal labour program for workers from Pacific island nations and Timor-Leste. Only 3000 Pacific islanders were working seasonally in Australia in 2016, but by October 2023 there were more than 38,000 PALM participants. The original scheme was broadened from horticulture to meat processing and other agricultural industries, and then extended to encompass tourism, hospitality, retail and care. It is mostly limited to regional and rural areas, but is no longer just seasonal, with workers granted visas for between one and four years.

But the scheme remains purely temporary, with no path to permanent residency. Pacific workers can bid for one of 3000 new Pacific Engagement Visas offered annually, but success is a matter of luck. Former top immigration official Abul Rizvi has highlighted a sharp rise in PALM workers applying for protection as refugees and attributes this to dissatisfaction with their treatment in Australia. He says the “silliness” of the Pacific visa lottery will just add to PALM workers’ frustrations and suggests the government should instead help them “develop higher level skills as a pathway to permanent residence, especially skills relevant to the regional communities in which they are currently working.”

Rizvi’s sensible suggestion points to an enduring dilemma of low-skilled migration. Once workers secure permanent residency they tend to quit poorly paid jobs in remote locations and move to better-paid positions in cities. Keeping migrants on temporary visas limits their labour market mobility and ensures they stay put, but it’s a recipe for disaffection and exploitation.

The structure of the PALM scheme runs counter to the second major policy objective in the new migration strategy, “ensuring a fair go in the workplace.” By allowing temporary skilled migrants to shift jobs more easily, the government has increased their power to challenge underpayment and resist unreasonable demands. Temporary skilled migrants who suffer abuse will have six months instead of two to find an alternative sponsor and be less reliant on any single employer to support their applications for permanent residence. The contrast with the purely temporary PALM scheme that ties workers to specific employers and regions is stark.

To tackle abuse, the government has introduced a bill to make it a criminal offence for employers to misuse visa programs to exploit temporary migrant workers. This recommendation by Allan Fels’s 2019 Migrant Workers’ Taskforce was ignored by the previous government.

The idea of a “fair go” also has a domestic element. The government wants to ensure that migrants don’t displace local workers or bring down their wages. Its primary move here is to tighten entry requirements for international students to ensure that their main intention is to study, not work. The strategy erroneously calls this closing “back doors and side doors” when, in reality, Australia opened the front door wide to support the growth of education for export; unsurprisingly, international students walked through in large numbers.

New barriers are being erected. International students must pass a higher English language test and prove they have significantly more savings. They will find it harder to switch from one course to another, especially if they appear to be going backwards — by, for example, swapping from a degree to a certificate-level course. The government will prioritise visa processing based on the “risk level” of educational institutions. Applications to study at top-tier universities will sail through while visas to attend private colleges languish in the bureaucratic pipeline.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority will also have extra funding to crack down on ghost colleges, those dodgy providers that are shopfronts for obtaining a visa with work rights.

Evidence of a more stringent approach is already apparent. In 2018–19, the last full year of Coalition government before Covid, only 13 per cent of student visa applications lodged outside Australia were rejected. In 2022–23 (the first full year of a Labor administration) 20 per cent were knocked back. The change was especially pronounced in offshore VET applications, where average rejection rates grew from 38 per cent under the Coalition to 46 per cent under Labor. The perception that Dutton was tougher on border control than his successor as home affairs minister doesn’t match reality.

Labor is also winding back generous post-study work visas, which the Morrison government made even more attractive in late 2021 to help international education “roar back” after Covid. Visas will be shorter: three years instead of four for a PhD and two years instead of three for coursework masters. The eligible age limit will be reduced from fifty to thirty-five years.

When the Gillard government introduced the 485 post-study work visa a decade ago, some of us warned that it would produce a large new cohort of “permanently temporary” graduates — migrants living and working in Australia for years without any prospect of settling. This has come to pass. Of the almost 200,000 temporary graduate visa holders in Australia, most are stuck in limbo. They struggle to find jobs in line with their qualifications and do low-skill work that will never enable them to amass the points needed to qualify as skilled migrants. It makes sense to rein the scheme in.

Over time, these measures could see international student and graduate numbers decline further than they would have, which may reduce the pool of casualised and precarious labour staffing kitchens and delivering meals. On the other hand, the government has reinstated restrictions on working hours lifted during the pandemic. Students can work a maximum of forty-eight hours each fortnight, up from forty hours pre-Covid. Some will need to work more “off the books” to make ends meet, making them vulnerable to ruthless employers.

The government will also evaluate another visa category rife with wage theft, poor working conditions and sexual harassment — working holiday visas — which have morphed from a cultural exchange program into a low-wage labour scheme, especially for agriculture. The scale of abuse has repeatedly been documented over the past decade, and it’s hard to see how the program can be rehabilitated short of scrapping the second and third visas backpackers can acquire if they complete three or six months of “specified work” in regional Australia. As with the PALM scheme, linking work and visas makes young travellers beholden to employers, often in remote towns and isolated workplaces. The PALM scheme is, at least, more closely regulated.

Improved conditions for student workers and backpackers would be a significant achievement and help to restore public faith in the migration program, even if we had to pay more for our food and collect our own takeaway. Whether the proposed measures can achieve this is an open question, but Labor is at least demonstrating a level of intent that was absent under the Coalition. In the words of former senior public servant Martin Parkinson, who chaired the expert review, the migration system has suffered “a decade of almost wilful neglect.”

The government hopes to meet the third objective of the migration strategy, “building stronger communities,” by shifting the emphasis from temporary to permanent migration and providing greater clarity about who can (or can’t) hope to settle here.

The commonsense implication is that permanent migration is more conducive to building “a cohesive multicultural society.” But the strategy is silent on family migration, apart from the strange formulation that the government will support “relationships with family abroad.” That doesn’t sound promising for overseas-born Australians who want to bring parents here to live with them. Parent migration could build stronger communities but clearly runs counter to the higher-priority goals of boosting productivity, filling skills shortages and slowing demographic ageing.

The conundrum of parent visas has been left to fester so long that the shocking blow-out in applications and waiting times means many parents are likely to die before they get a visa. This is causing distress and anxiety for tens of thousands of families.

One immediate option would be to suspend new applications pending a review of the system, just as Canada did in 2011. This would halt the growth in the waiting list and buy time to figure out what to do while working through the backlog. It is cruel to keep applications open and foster false hopes.

The migration strategy draws quite a clear outline of the government’s vision for skilled migration, even if there is lots of colouring in to do. When it comes to family migration, though, the page remains virtually blank, and the government is still “exploring” what visa settings are “appropriate.”

To support all four objectives, the migration strategy promises to make the system easier to navigate and administer. This entails, among other things, merging or closing some of the one hundred “visa products” to simplify offerings, as well as adding extra staff and upgrading IT systems.

The challenge will be to find a balance between the clear regulations and procedures needed to process a high volume of visas efficiently, on the one hand, and retaining enough flexibility to fit individual circumstances, especially in compassionate cases, on the other. Whenever the migration system re-gears, some people get chewed up, including many with compelling reasons to stay in Australia. Foreign parents of Australian-citizen children, for example, will often cycle through a series of temporary visas in a desperate bid to stay close to their sons or daughters. This will get harder as visa rules tighten. It would be ironic and disappointing if attempts to streamline migration mean even more decisions landing in the lap of the immigration minister in the form of last-ditch appeals for him to exercise discretion under various “god powers.”

The strategy is pitched as a bid to get migration working for the nation: “For workers. For businesses. For all Australians.” Noticeably absent from this top-line list is a desire to get migration working for migrants. The strategy (and the ministers’ language promoting it) tends to present migrants, especially student visa holders, as highly calculating and instrumental — as people who use “back doors and side doors” to milk the system for whatever they can get or even engage in outright rorts.

What gets forgotten is that circumstances and aspirations change, especially for young adults at a formative stage of life. Students may come to Australia with every intention of leaving when they complete their courses but then discover new freedoms and possibilities that were not previously available to them. Perhaps they can openly express their sexuality, their creativity or their politics for the first time. Perhaps they find a new vocation or meet the love of their life.

Yet the strategy essentially tells young temporary migrants: please come to Australia for a few years but don’t put down any roots, or even put out feelers, unless you are pursuing an occupation in demand and can help build Australia’s economy. Not only is this unrealistic, it also shows we might be the ones who are calculating and instrumental.

As long as we rely on international students to fund our higher education system and backpackers to pick our produce, temporary migration will continue at a high level. The least we can do is be honest with temporary visa holders about their limited prospects for building a life in Australia, and the new strategy points in that direction. Yet we should recognise that this might inflict an emotional and psychological toll.

In their foreword to the migration strategy, the immigration and home affairs ministers say they want to bring migration levels “back to normal.” It’s not clear what might constitute “normal” in 2024, but a better-targeted and more efficient system would certainly be an achievement, especially if it offers greater clarity and certainty, reins in workplace exploitation, and reduces the number of migrants who are rendered permanently temporary and stuck in a state of being not quite Australian. What it won’t do is resolve the practical and ethical challenges that arise when the number of migrants coming to Australia on temporary visas is so much greater than the number who can hope to settle here. •

The post Is migration heading “back to normal”? appeared first on Inside Story.

But it is complicated by social and economic inequalities, as Wanning Sun explains in her new book, Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences. And in the case of China’s migrant workers, it can’t be considered apart from broader issues of history, politics and economics. Reading this important, pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip.

For most of Chinese history, parents arranged their children’s marriages, a deal typically cemented by either a dowry or bride price, depending on local custom. Men of means were free to seek romance outside the home with professional courtesans or bring choice into the home through concubinage. Women enjoyed no such second shots at happiness.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, progressive and revolutionary thinkers advocated for an end to arranged marriages. The end of dynastic rule and the birth of a modern republic in 1911 created the opportunity for change, with rising educational rates for girls, industrialisation, the entry of more women into the work force, and exposure to Western ideas and culture all playing a role. The wild popularity of a sentimental literary genre known as “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck” fiction over much of the first half of the twentieth century reflected widespread yearning for relationships based on romantic love.

When it came into being in 1949, the People’s Republic of China abolished arranged marriages and other “feudal” customs such as bride prices. Yet its new, purposeful culture subordinated romantic love to revolution and comradeship. By 1966, when Mao launched the decade-long, ultra-left Cultural Revolution, the only sanctioned passion was for revolution itself. With the arrival of the Reform Era in 1978, love quickly divorced revolution to flirt with freedom and eventually marry the market.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, the decade when China’s economy roared past Japan’s to become the world’s second largest. Sun, who provides a brief overview of the history, picks up the story here. If revolutionary China had never been quite as egalitarian as it claimed to be, by the mid 2010s, she notes, it was “one of the most unequal countries in the world.” The new urban middle classes — including, with some caveats, those in the LGBTQI community — enjoyed relative freedom in their romantic and sex lives. Those with more precarious social status and economic stability, such as the migrant workers who are the focus of Sun’s study, faced a very different situation.

The legacy of the decades-long one-child policy, particularly in rural areas has been an outsized gender imbalance. Which is why so many of China’s internal migrants who travel from the countryside to the cities to seek work — its “migrant workers” — are male.

Unlike in nations where people are free to settle where they find work, the People’s Republic has a strictly managed system of urban residence permits called hukou. These permits define who may reside legally and permanently in a city and enjoy its hospitals, schools and other social services. The hardworking villagers who build China’s fast trains and gleaming office blocks, keep its assembly lines humming, deliver its meals and packages, and cook, clean and otherwise serve the middle classes and their businesses don’t for the most part have the right to settle in the city or send their children to schools near where they work.

They’re not an insignificant portion of the population. Before pandemic lockdowns returned most of them to their hometowns for a spell, they numbered 286 million. That’s about a fifth of China’s population. This makes Sun’s close look at how social and economic inequality affects their lives — and at the interdependent structures of capitalism, patriarchy and state socialism that reinforce these inequalities — essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of China today.

By the mid 2010s, when Sun began her field research, many of the migrants she met belonged to a second generation, born in the 1990s. The first, born in the eighties or earlier, typically retained stronger ties to their home villages, to which they planned to retire. Many were already married when they set out for the cities. The second generation, which includes children of the first, enjoy a less certain identity, caught between home villages to which they lack strong emotional connection and the cities whose urban and consumerist dreams they have absorbed while lacking the means to realise them.

They are thus more or less permanently migratory, mobile mainly in a lateral, geographic sense. With hard work — and most of their work is punishingly hard — they can improve their situation. Buying a flat in a township close to their village, where they can live with their children (typically farmed out to grandparents in the meantime) is a common aspiration. But the difficulty of obtaining an urban hukou means they have only limited hopes of joining the urban middle classes.

Those middle classes, in turn, regard them with a mix of conditional appreciation, distaste and fear. Sun notes that the Communist Party itself, for all its trumpeted and historical proletarian affinities, shares the middle-class unease at the “perceived threat” this majority-male cohort poses “to public health, moral order and social stability.” A key source of anxiety centres on the sexual desires of a floating single-male population, and the ancillary underground prostitution industry, involving migrant women, that has sprung up to service them. Many of the migrant workers (including sex workers) with whom Sun has spoken appear to have internalised this shame, knowing that they may be (however unfairly) perceived as living on the moral as well as economic margins.

I recall when migrant workers first began appearing in the cities in significant numbers in the 1990s. Friends in Beijing and Shanghai expressed what seemed to be outsized fears of these mostly male workers, whom they believed capable of the most heinous crimes. It was reminiscent of the eighteenth-century “soulstealers” panic, when mass hysteria grew around the idea that sorcerers disguised as itinerants were clipping the ends of men’s queues for dark rites that allowed them to steal the men’s souls. As Philip A. Kuhn wrote in Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, such apprehensions reveal much about a society’s structure and internal tensions.

Researching Love Troubles, Sun cultivated relationships with workers at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, speaking to them at length and over the years to be able to present nuanced portraits of their lives. There’s PC, for example, witty, vivacious and talkative, whose two children live with different sets of grandparents back home. She is constantly arguing with her husband about his gambling habit — not an uncommon vice among migrant workers. He infuriated her by secretly giving away half a year’s wages to his nephew, another gambler, while she was slaving on the assembly line to buy a three-bedroom apartment in a township near their hometown. She became a campaigner against domestic violence and a labour activist with links to a local NGO involved in workers’ rights. As her NGO-backed struggles with Foxconn’s management accelerated, her husband’s support for her activism helped them reconcile.

PC’s story is just one of many personal accounts threaded through this book, deftly contextualised and considered through the lens of ethnographic and other theories. The examples illuminate not just the variety of migrant experience but also issues including “male grievance” among the involuntarily single (and often celibate) members of the migrant labour force; the cohort’s higher-than-normal divorce rates; the “dark intimacy” of prostitution, exploitation and abuse; and how women especially typically face “compromises” rather than “choices” in their intimate lives.

Among the many intriguing subjects tackled in Love Troubles is the politics of romantic imagery. Sun begins the book with a description of her first meeting with some of the workers who would become her long-term informants. She thought to break the ice by asking about their favourite love stories. Some of the men openly scoffed at the idea, saying there was no such thing as true love. Then one of them began talking about the film Titanic. This drew the group into passionate discussion.

What most resonated with them was the fantasy of a poor working-class boy being loved by a rich girl — and how it was doomed to a tragic end, as they felt it certainly would be in China. One young woman, meanwhile, was most struck by the fact that following the death of her true love the heroine was nonetheless free to find happiness with another man, whereas traditional Chinese mores would have condemned her for not remaining chaste and “virtuously” true to his memory.

Other types of romantic imagery discussed by Sun include migrant workers’ self-portraiture in photography and literature, the culture of wedding photography (including a controversial artistic intervention in which an urban photographer posed migrant couples dressed in wedding clothes inside the factories where they worked), and documentaries produced by state media that portray workers’ relationships as unfolding within a broader China Dream narrative of hard work towards a brighter future.

The workers’ responses to such imagery often contrast with the reactions of the wider community. For example, a migrant worker published a suite of photographs of his peers titled “Rural Migrants’ Love in Dongguan.” It included candid shots of lovers, sometimes still in their factory clothes, snatching a cuddle on a park bench or sharing other intimate moments. (Two of these photos appear in the book; one wishes for more.) Widely viewed online, the series incited a range of comments from the patronising and sentimental (“how sweet”) to the moralising and condemnatory (“they’re not interested in learning, they have no souls”).

As Sun writes, the migrant workers’ “right to intimacy” is inescapably “contingent, conditional and vulnerable to violation and exploitation.” In their search for happiness in their personal lives they must balance their employers’ demands on their energy and time, frequently measured in twelve-hour shifts, with family pressures (including around the resurgent custom of bride prices) and their own desires for, and definitions of happiness. As Sun amply demonstrates, neither the men nor the women of this precariat are free from the “triple oppression” of “global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy.” Love can try bloody hard, and it does, but it can’t always conquer all. •

Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences
By Wanning Sun | Bloomsbury Academic | $153 | 216 pages

The post Stolen moments appeared first on Inside Story.

Khrushchev’s eyes slid across the appliance, deadpan. “We have such things,” he replied.

Nixon tried again: “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev bristled, perhaps at the assumptions about gendered work. “Your capitalistic attitude to women does not exist under communism,” he said.

Apparently missing why his praise of a dishwasher might have drawn such a reaction, Nixon barrelled on: “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.” The “American system” gave consumers “new inventions and new techniques” so rapidly, he said, that this very kitchen — currently so up to date — would itself be obsolete in twenty years.

“In Russia,” said Khrushchev, “all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing… In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose… sleeping… on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to communism.”

It was the mention of this exchange in Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that prompted me to watch Nixon and Khrushchev talking past each other. It is good viewing, if only for the unintentional cringecore. Squirm as Nixon digs himself deeper; behold two different views of the world butting up against one another. It’s obvious that the US president didn’t understand Khrushchev, but did he also feel that he was being laughed at, outsmarted or outwitted by one to whom he felt a natural superiority?

I happened to watch the video in Laos, just one of the countries Nixon ordered to be bombed in the name of crushing communism, but one particularly devastated by that crusade. I wondered if humiliations like this kitchen debate partly motivated his inhuman insistence on bombing this country “back to the Stone Age” (in the words used during the Indochinese war by General Curtis LeMay) a decade later.

Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, I could see traces of the poverty, grief and physical devastation left by the war. Amid all this, it seemed indecent to be ruminating on the difficulties of the life I lead at home in Australia. My life, and presumably Hester’s and Srnicek’s, is the kind common across what they call the “rich world”: chronic overwork, real or imagined precarity, a constant feeling of being harried, kids I adore but can’t be with enough, and endless domestic chores at the end of a long week.

This crisis of work in and out of the home has been building for some time, but, as writer Angela Garbes says, “Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand — for the first time, deeply, or with renewed agency — that American life is not working for families.” It is easy to dismiss these as “First World problems.” But they are real all the same.

After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Reading it in Laos forced me to see the history of coercion behind the crisis Hester and Srnicek describe. It is not that we “find ourselves” in isolated nuclear families and impossible work–life imbalances. And not everyone lives that way today. But everyone is affected by the struggle over how to live. The fight for free time might not have drawn bombs and bloodshed in Australia and the rest of the rich world, but in other theatres it was violent and prolonged.

Understanding how we got into this mess is surely an important step towards finding a way out. That said, After Work is not really a history book. Perhaps a librarian would place it in the critical sociology section. I read it as myth.

It reminds me of a myth told by the ethnic Katu I work with in Laos. Before the flood, they say, everything was different. The stars were people and the people were stars. Animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, everything swapped places. Those who were rats turned into people, which is why today some people have a lot of hair and others are bald — the bald ones were rats that had been captured and plucked for eating when the flood came. And so on: every element of the current world is explained by how different things were before the flood, and how everything changed and bore the stamp of that change.

Hester and Srnicek describe the Industrial Revolution as an “unprecedented change” that “utterly transformed” domestic life: “Prior to this transformation, housework was exhaustingly laborious.” Heating was apparently a large part of this labour, but not cooling: so by implication they are describing life in a cold climate. We are also in a dystopian world: the authors tell us that children were usually put to work and demands for elder care were few because “working to death was standard.”

We are in a city, probably somewhere in Europe or America, because running water, electricity and gas appeared “as the twentieth century dawned” in this everywhere–nowhere home. The authors briefly mention “the Western household” but this is not a frequent phrase: most of the first half of the book describes an unspecified location.

Then came the flood. The “industrialisation of the home,” a “radical” change, “significantly reduced the burdens of domestic labour” and ushered in “peak family.” Labour was split between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, producing the image of the nuclear family.

The “second key phase” in this history is the neoliberal stagnation of the 1970s through to the 1990s. The floodwaters receded, leaving a detritus of expectations about the home (for instance, as the key site of almost all unpaid care work); at the same time, anyone who could work for money was expected to do so. These demands bred “a universal sense of growing time pressures.” Today, say the authors, “We remain enmeshed in a world of domestic technologies whose potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled.”

Hester and Srnicek take issue with Joel Salatin, the advocate of whole foods and farming, for evoking a mythical past. But here they offer another myth: that “most” of our great-grandparents “were more likely to be eating stale and monotonous food, plagued by scarcity.” If Salatin’s myth is a classic Garden of Eden story of paradise lost, Hester and Srnicek’s is of the Katu flood variety: everything swapped places, one dystopia replaced another.

The book’s discussion of bathing shows the limits such a view places on imagination. They write that “when bathing meant lugging water into the home, warming it up, and removing waste afterwards, the sheer amount of work required limited how often baths could be taken.” It is as if the only alternative the authors can imagine to a hot bath in a nuclear family’s bathroom is one where hapless family members create the conditions for such a bath using sheer manual labour.

Looking at bathing across cultures and times shows that we (and I use this word in its most inclusive sense) can and do bathe in many ways. We have bathed daily in the Mekong River as the sun set red over the rushing current. We have bathed in water captured from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes and fed across the village fence. We have bathed in Japanese sentō. We have bathed in Minoan palatial throne-room “lustration basins” under paintings depicting menstruation.

Following anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, we can see that “we” have a capacity for imagining new ways of living and bringing those imaginations into being. Innumerable experiments in living are evident across the anthropological, archaeological and historical record. There is not just one “before” and one “after” in the human story. This diversity is key to the thinking the way out that Hester and Srnicek so rightly seek.

Hester and Srnicek envision a post-scarcity world. By this they mean not an overabundance of consumer goods but a world in which selling one’s labour is not a prerequisite for remaining alive. They propose reducing necessary labour (“work”) as much as possible by improving domestic technologies, accepting lower standards (messier homes, wilder childhoods), and making care work more efficient by removing it where possible from private homes (think: kitchen-less apartments, laundry services). The goal is to expand freedom — defined as time spent in autonomously chosen activities — as much as possible.

The second part of After Work introduces historically grounded alternatives as inspiration: the Russian commune in the early twentieth century; social housing in Vienna; the hippie movement in North America. It is a relief to be grounded after the nowhere–everywhere of the previous chapters.

Hester and Srnicek dutifully mention the well-known shortcomings of each of these “missed futures.” They do include among their inspirations Cuba’s recent family code, which defines a family as “a union of people linked by an affective, psychological and sentimental bond, who commit themselves to sharing life such that they support each other.” But Cuba is not treated as an extended example and nor are criticisms identified. Uncomfortably, all the significant inspirations described in After Work are decidedly white.

“Even in the most gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Denmark, women continue to do nearly 1.5 times as much” unpaid domestic labour as men, Hester and Srnicek write. This is considerably less than the world average, in which women do 3.2 times more unpaid work than men. Here in Laos, though, women do only 1.4 times more such work than men. On this count, Laos outshines Norway and Denmark: by a tiny margin, true, but I still wonder why Laos was left out of the praise granted the Nordic countries.

Of course, I don’t expect all authors to write from a Laos-centric perspective. But living here and being part of a Lao extended family means I read from that perspective. I share Hester and Srnicek’s frustrations with work in the rich world: reading After Work felt like having a sociologist explain a typical week in my Australian life. But I also know that my typical is very strange from the perspective of my Lao family.

Khrushchev and Nixon’s kitchen debate shows how wild the misunderstandings can be when one way of life is perceived from the perspective of another. The mistake Nixon made was assuming that his vision of domestic labour and technology represented progress, and thus assuming that the Soviets were behind. Khrushchev, too, indulged in teleological visions.

Students of conflict in the twentieth century know the violence of such one-track stories. Hester and Srnicek speak truly when they say that typical lives in “the rich world” are now untenable. I agree. Better lives are possible. In building these, let’s not narrow our vision needlessly. The sparks of yet-to-be-realised futures may be hiding in plain sight. •

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek | Verso | $29.99 | 208 pages

The post How should we live? appeared first on Inside Story.

The way we talk about Google has also changed, reflecting a wider reassessment of the costs and benefits of our connected lives. In its earlier days, Google Search was enthusiastically embraced as an ingenious tool that democratised knowledge and saved human labour. Today, Google’s many services are more popular than ever, though Google Search is the subject of a major antitrust case in the United States, and governments around the world want to regulate digital services and AI.

In Power and Progress, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson take the project of critical reappraisal further. Their survey of the thousand-year entanglement of technology and power is a tour de force, sketching technology’s political economy across a broad historical canvas. They chart the causes and symptoms of our contemporary digital malaise, drawing on a growing volume of journalism and scholarship, political economy’s long tradition of analysing “the machine question,” and the work of extraordinary earlier American technologists, notably the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, the network visionary J.C.R. Licklider, and the engineer Douglas Engelbart.

If, as Acemoglu and Johnson argue, our digital economy is characterised by mass surveillance, increasing inequality and destructive floods of misinformation, then the signal moments from the past will inevitably look different. From this angle, the great significance of Google Search was its integration with online advertising, opening up the path to Facebook and a panoply of greater evils.

The strengths of Power and Progress lie in the connections it makes between the deficiencies of current technology and the longer story of innovation and economic inequality. History offers many opportunities to debunk our nineteenth-century optimism in technology as a solution, and to puncture our overconfidence in the judgement of technology leaders.

A particular target is the idea that successful innovations produce economy-wide benefits by making workers more productive, leading to increased wages and higher living standards generally. The theory fails to capture a good deal of historical experience. The impact of new agricultural technologies during the Middle Ages provides a telling example. Between 1000 and 1300, a series of innovations in water mills, windmills, ploughs and fertiliser roughly doubled yields in England per hectare. But rather than leading to higher incomes for most people, living standards appear to have declined, with increases in taxation and working hours, widespread malnutrition, a series of famines and then the Black Death. Average life expectancy may have declined to just twenty-five years at birth.

The cities grew, but most of the surplus generated by improved agriculture was captured by the church and its extensive hierarchy. A religious building boom proceeded on spectacular lines. Vast amounts were spent on hugely expensive cathedrals and tax-exempt monasteries: the same places, as Acemoglu and Johnson note, that tourists now cherish for their devotion to learning and production of fine beer. The fact that better technology didn’t lead to higher wages reflects the institutional context: a coercive labour market combined with control of the mills enabled landowners to increase working hours, leaving labourers with less time to raise their own crops, and therefore reduced incomes.

If medieval cathedrals give rise to scepticism about the benefits of tech, it follows that we should think more carefully about the kinds of technologies we want. Without that attention, what the authors call “so-so automation” proliferates, reducing employment while creating no great benefit to consumers. The self-checkout systems in our supermarkets today are a case in point: these machines simply shift the work of scanning items from cashiers to customers. Fewer cashiers are employed, but without any productivity gain. The machines frequently fail, requiring frequent human intervention. Food doesn’t get any cheaper.

The issue then is not how or whether any given technology generates economic growth, but which conditions make possible innovations that create shared prosperity. The recent past provides examples of societies managing large-scale technological change reasonably well. The postwar period of sustained high growth and “good jobs” (for some but not all) had three important features: the powers of employers were sometimes matched by unions; the new industrial technologies of mass production automated tasks in ways that also created jobs; and progressive taxation enabled governments to build social security, education and health systems that improved overall living standards.

For technology to work for everyone, the forces that can temper the powers of corporations — effective regulators, labour and consumer organisations, a robust and independent media — play an essential role. The media are especially important in shaping narratives of innovation and technical possibility. Our most visible technology heroes need not always be move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneurs.

Finally, public policy can help redirect innovation efforts away from a focus on automation, data collection and job displacement towards applications that productively expand human skills. Technologies are often malleable: they can frequently be used for many purposes.

Acemoglu and Johnson would like us to divert all that frothy attention on AI to what they call machine usefulness, focused on improving human productivity, giving people better information on which to base decisions, supporting new kinds of work, and enabling the creation of new platforms for cooperation and coordination: a course they see as far preferable to a universal basic income.

Kenya’s famous M-PESA, introduced in 2007, is one of many examples, offering cheap and convenient banking using basic mobile phones. On a larger scale, the web is also a human-oriented technology because its application of hypertext is ultimately a tool for expanding access to information and knowledge. Acemoglu and Johnson concede that the idea at the heart of Google Search can also be understood in this way: a mechanism that works well for humans because it is constantly reconfiguring itself in response to human queries.

The authors’ ideas for positive policy interventions can usefully be read alongside those of the Australian economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, whose 2019 book Innovation + Equality remains less used than it should be.

One way to read Power and Progress is as a historically informed guidebook for the conflicts of our time — in the courts, where Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission has launched far-reaching cases against Google and Amazon, in the new regulatory systems emerging in the European Union, Canada and elsewhere, and in the wave of industrial actions taken by screen industry writers and auto workers in the United States.

In Australia, we are also at a point where governments will soon make decisions about the kinds of technology we want to support or constrain. We can have no certainty about the outcomes of any of this, but Acemoglu and Johnson argue that such conflicts are both necessary and potentially productive. They diverge here from one of the main currents of liberal technology critique: where writers like Carl Benedikt Frey, whose The Technology Trap (2019) covers some of the same terrain, see redistributive policies as necessary for managing the consequences of automation, Acemoglu and Johnson point to the positive potential of political and industrial conflict for reordering technological agendas. They want to place more emphasis on our capacity to choose the directions technology may take.

The recently concluded Hollywood writers’ strike offers an intriguing example. The key point is that the screen writers didn’t oppose the use of generative AIs such as ChatGTP in screenwriting. Instead they secured an agreement that such AIs can’t be recognised as writers and that a studio may not require the use of an AI. If a studio uses an AI to generate a draft script that it then provides to a writer, the credit or payment to the writer will be the same as if the writer had produced the draft entirely themselves; and a writer may use an AI with the permission of the studio without reducing their credit or payment.

The settlement clearly foreshadows the extensive use of generative AIs in the screen industries while offering a share of the benefits to writers. The critical point, as some reports have noted, may be that the revenue-sharing deal with writers preserves the intellectual property interests of the studios, since works created by an AI may not be copyrightable.

Meanwhile, AI raises other important issues about automation, quite apart from the focus on work. When we are relying on machines to make or inform decisions, we are also moving into the domain of institutions, with the obvious risk that existing technology-specific laws, procedures and controls can be bypassed, intentionally or otherwise. This, after all, was what robodebt did with a very simple automated system. In the absence of wide-ranging institutional adaptation and innovation, more complex modes of automation will pose greater risks.

More generally, the authors’ framing of the “AI illusion” appears to be premature. Power and Progress was clearly substantially completed before the appearance of the most recent versions of ChatGPT. Accustomed as we are to AI’s many failures to match its promises, we should now be considering the surprising capabilities and broad implications of large language models. As Acemoglu and Johnson would insist, if generative AI does turn out to be as powerful as many believe, then it will necessarily be capable of far more than “so-so” automation. •

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
By Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson | Basic Books | $34.99 | 546 pages

The post Machine questions appeared first on Inside Story.

In the early 2000s, the mining boom gave us full employment without any need for it to be an objective. But concerns that policy was not doing enough to deal with joblessness returned in the 2010s: with slower economic growth, the unemployment rate remained fixed in a range between 5 and 6 per cent without bringing forth any deliberate action by policymakers to shift it lower.

All the signs, however, are that the 2020s will be a new era of emphasis on full employment. The federal government’s 2022 Jobs and Skills Summit gave priority to the goal of achieving full employment. And in April this year the government immediately accepted the recommendation of the Reserve Bank review that the bank “should have dual monetary policy objectives of price stability and full employment, with equal consideration given to each.”

Achieving full employment — ensuring that the maximum possible number of the nation’s available workers are employed in jobs for as near as possible to the number of hours they want — has two main benefits. It maximises national output, and hence overall living standards. And it significantly improves equity, by lifting the incomes of people who would otherwise be unemployed and on income support, or are underemployed.

Pushing employment as high as possible also has the greatest benefits for the people who find it hardest to get work, including lower-skilled workers, the young, and people living in disadvantaged regions.

With Australia’s low unemployment rate of 3.5 per cent these equity benefits are on full display. Just one example highlights the point: in the 25 per cent of regions that had the lowest proportion of employed people before the pandemic, the employment rate grew by 2.2 percentage points in 2022 — about three times more than in the 25 per cent of regions with the highest employment rates.

The benefits of employment are, of course, broader than income. As Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy has emphasised, “working is associated with better mental health and lower rates of psychological distress [and] strong intergenerational benefits [because] children with parents who work are more likely to work themselves.”

All this might suggest that our objective should be to have everyone who wants to be employed in a job working exactly the number of hours they want — effectively abolishing unemployment and underemployment. But it’s universally accepted that’s not going to be feasible.

The labour market is in continual flux. For most new workers, looking for and finding a job takes time. Similarly for workers who lose their jobs, and often also for those who leave a job. Inevitably, at any point in time, some of the available workforce won’t be in work.

The costs of pushing employment growth too far also impose a limit. More of the available workforce in employment means less spare labour available to fill new jobs that are created, forcing employers to compete for workers by offering higher wages. Historical experience tells us that eventually wage inflation will become excessive, imposing major costs.

High wage inflation cuts off jobs growth. It also feeds into higher price inflation, making society worse off in other ways: the cost of living rises, the wealth of savers is reduced and economic activity is destabilised (including by the likely policy response of higher interest rates).

Setting a full employment objective is a balancing act. We want to use as much of the available workforce as possible to benefit national output and equity. But we want to avoid excessive wage inflation. The critical decision is what rate of unemployment achieves that balance. Many commentators see the trade-off resulting in a jobless rate of more than 4 per cent. But if I were setting a full employment objective at present, I’d be aiming for close to the current rate of 3.5 per cent.

Maintaining this rate would generate substantial benefits for national output and equity, compared with going back to our average rate of 5.5 per cent through the 2010s. Wage inflation has not been excessive at this rate of unemployment, either at present or on the other recent occasion when the rate of unemployment fell to about the same level, during the mining boom of the late 2000s. While wage inflation has picked up in recent months, much of this can be attributed to efforts to compensate for high price inflation rather than the effects of a tight labour market.

Fears that our low rate of unemployment could take us back to the spiralling inflation of the 1970s therefore don’t seem well founded. The Australian labour market is a different place today. Reforms to the wage-setting system in the early 1990s — primarily the shift to enterprise-level bargaining — and the fall in price inflation since that time have enabled unemployment to fall further before provoking concerns about wage inflation.

So far I’ve been talking about a full employment objective expressed as a target rate of unemployment, which is how it is usually thought of. But the shift back to a full employment objective also gives us an opportunity to consider whether that’s the best approach.

An alternative would focus on labour underutilisation, which takes in both unemployment and underemployment. We want people to have a job, but we will only make the fullest use of their labour if they are also working the number of hours they want. This matters because underemployment is an increasing share of labour underutilisation. By 2022, of the extra hours that could have been worked in Australia, about 45 per cent were a result of underemployment.

Having a broader measure also matters for how low we think it’s possible to push the rate of unemployment. More underemployment means the economy has greater spare capacity than the raw unemployment figures show. Wage pressures are therefore not as great as they have been at any given rate of unemployment. In this environment, holding down the unemployment rate poses less of a risk for wage inflation. It’s another reason why a target rate of 3.5 per cent is realistic.

In the short-term, existing Australian Bureau of Statistics data could be used to calculate underutilisation among members of the labour force. Longer term, a measure could be developed that also encompasses spare capacity among people not currently in the labour force.

Working to achieve a specific target for full employment means policy is directed towards improving wellbeing; and having a target that is easy to communicate also creates accountability.

Yet, it’s important to recognise that, even if the overall target is achieved, some groups will still be missing out to an unacceptable degree: First Nations people, people with disabilities, people living in disadvantaged regions, and other groups. So, beyond an overall target, goals to improve employment outcomes for those groups are an essential element of a full employment objective. •

The post The unemployment opportunity appeared first on Inside Story.

Central character Tony Woodford (Rob Sitch), hapless CEO of the Nation Building Authority, is enduring a pile-on of humiliations. These range from the trivial, when the office’s new smart fridge turns his lunch into an iceblock, to the overwhelming, when he cops the blame, in a spray of media coverage, for an aborted scheme whose failure was caused by a website malfunction. Then, when the tables are turned and he’s featured in a glossy magazine shoot in the following episode, even that turns out to be a demeaning experience.

The creation of Sitch and his Working Dog collaborators Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, this sophisticated satire on contemporary working life has always had a ruthless edge, but now an element of melancholy seems to have got into the mix. The resilient Tony, whose capacity to keep calm and carry on while all around him goes haywire, is looking older and more at risk of being beaten down.

Chirpy personal assistant Katie (Emma-Louise Wilson) replaces his coffee with chamomile tea and freezes his computer by changing the wallpaper to soothing pastels. The more assiduously the rest of the staff go about their work, the more difficult it is to get anything done. This is the essential comedic principle of the series, and in previous seasons it generated a mesh of finely crafted absurdities as everyone engaged in their own specialised form of obstruction.

The new season kicks off with a typically ludicrous example: the matter of a farewell tea for a staff member. The guy has only been around for a year and is moving on to another position, so there are no complications, at least until HR goes about the business of finding them. The crisply spoken Beverley (Rebecca Massey) sails into Tony’s office with a spring in her step and a glint in her eye to raise a few questions. His idea of a jocular impromptu speech won’t do — he must submit a draft for checking. Word-by-word vetting ensues in consultation with the legal team, and that’s not the end of it.

Workplace health and safety, media briefings, team-building requirements, liability concerns, contractual technicalities: it’s more than a full-time job serving the dictates. Yet it’s clear that many of Tony’s colleagues delight in shuttling between imperatives and embargos, implementing rules and protocols that not only defy common sense but also render it an impossibility.

This season is not as exuberantly crazy as its predecessors. Workplace pathologies are viewed with a steadier gaze, prompting questions less about the politics of the situation (this is, after all, an organisation that functions at the behest of government) and more about the shame of so avidly thwarting human intelligence at every turn. Perhaps, fundamentally, the humiliation lies in the time wasted — which can be a lot given that most of us, as Terkel observes, spend more time working than doing anything else.

Terkel, who strove to bridge the communication gap between working people and those who make the decisions that affect their lives, once suggested that any American president delivering the Labor Day address might count themselves fortunate to be spared an encounter with the spot-welder, the washroom attendant or the cleaner whose stories he recorded.

The forty-fourth president, Barack Obama, has a different sense of being fortunate. Released from the work schedules of the Oval Office he went in search of workers across the spectrum for a four-part Netflix series, Working: What We Do All Day. He serves as executive producer and narrator as well as engaging the subjects in conversation, following them into their workplaces and their homes. Terkel’s study, which he came across as a student, is his inspiration.

“What if we pick up Studs’s project for this era?” he proposes. “What if we start at the bottom and work our way up, from the service entrance to the C suite; what would it tell us about how we’re connected, about our own place in the world?” He looks at how the economic hierarchy plays out in the industries of home care, technology and hospitality in three different locations: Manhattan, Mississippi and Pittsburgh.

With this focus on connection, directing attention to the human in the role, Obama flips the humiliations theme in Terkel’s account and offers the other side of the coin from what we see in Utopia. Wry, incisive and with a personal warmth no generic training could spoil, Obama is in many ways the perfect guide. He clearly has spontaneous liking for the people (“folks,” as he prefers to say) he’s engaging with.

When he goes round the supermarket with a home care worker, he wheels the trolley with her toddler perched in the seat. As they talk, the questions about wages and costs, aims and barriers, wishes and disappointments come across as a private conversation rather than interview material. When the second episode opens he is delivering lunches to office staff at their desks — potentially the kind of appalling idea Utopia’s media manager Rhonda (Kitty Flanagan) might come up with, but it’s hard to detect a shred of pretence or image-consciousness in his manner.

Obama has been justifiably criticised for going too easy on the bosses in the series, choosing businesses that are the exception rather than the rule in their considerate attitudes to those they employ, and for generally being too relaxed and bland about working conditions. Humorous he may be, but there’s not a skerrick of cynicism here. After all, President 44 was the Hope guy, the “Yes We Can” campaigner. It’s also arguable, though, that his ease of manner encourages people to open up and offer personal reflections only elicited by someone who is so on the level.

It does leave me wondering what he and Tony Woodford would make of each other. That’s an encounter I’d like to see. •

The post Daily humiliations appeared first on Inside Story.

It might sound like the minister wants to go back to the future, and revert to a twentieth-century model in which permanent settlement was the norm and temporary migration the exception. But O’Neil has no intention of returning to the past — and that would be impossible anyway for an Australia that depends on visa holders to pick our fruit, process our meat, deliver our takeaway, care for our sick and fund our universities.

What the minister wants to do is to build a simpler, more efficient and fairer migration system that simultaneously boosts productivity, fills pressing skills gaps in the labour market and delivers greater benefits to business. She envisages a streamlined visa system with pathways to permanent residence, and eventually citizenship, for temporary migrants who want to stay and whose skills are in high demand.

In the process, she hopes to end workplace abuse and release long-term visa holders from the limbo state of being “permanently temporary.” Australia, she says, needs “a skilled worker program, not a guest worker program.”

The aims are laudable, but balancing the competing interests won’t be easy.

To take one example, O’Neil promises simpler, faster pathways to permanent residence for international students who, after graduation, possess the qualifications and capabilities Australia needs. Yet she also wants to improve the integrity of international education by “tightening the requirements for international students studying in Australia” to ensure that students are here to study rather than work.

Stricter visa rules for international students would hit the bottom line of universities and vocational colleges, who have come to rely on those students’ fees to fund their operations. They would also reduce the supply of international students to stack supermarket shelves, serve in restaurants, staff late-night convenience stores and much else besides. These are low-paid jobs, and in an already tight labour market they won’t be easy to fill with local workers.

The government’s approach is predicated on an understanding that Australia is in an increasingly intense global competition for talent. We are facing off against other migration countries — Canada is often mentioned — in a race to attract the best and brightest to our shores.

Rather than the postwar impulse to “populate or perish,” the twenty-first-century challenge is to “skill up or sink.” A simplified visa system, clear routes to permanent residency, and a crackdown on workplace exploitation are presented as the keys to success.

The government has already taken three decisive and welcome steps. The first two tackle the limbo experienced by two groups of temporary visa holders. The third seeks to “skill up” temporary migration.

Step one, in February, was to begin the process of enabling refugees on temporary protection visas to become permanent residents, fulfilling an election promise and easing the distress for people who arrived in Australia by boat and have been living with uncertainty for a decade.

Then, just before Anzac Day, step two brought a straightforward pathway to citizenship for New Zealanders who live in Australia long-term. New Zealanders have long had the right to stay in Australia permanently. But the Howard government amended the definition of “Australian resident” in social security laws to block their access to most government services and payments.

New Zealanders who arrived after that 2001 change might “settle” and build lives here but they would remain on a special category visa and never become legally “resident.” While they could work and get Medicare, they were denied most other forms of public assistance. In hard times, for instance, they weren’t entitled to unemployment benefits or other income support.

Howard’s change also had flow-on effects in some states and territories. In some places, New Zealanders might be denied emergency housing or find that their children were not eligibility for disability services. When the National Disability Insurance Scheme was introduced, New Zealanders were required to pay the levy but weren’t eligible for support.

And the only way New Zealanders could become permanent residents was by applying for another visa, usually a skilled visa. That was impossible for many, and expensive for all, with the result that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders were permanently marginal.

Long-term campaigners for a better deal for New Zealanders were surprised and elated by the Labor government’s new pathway to citizenship, which exceeded their expectations. It not only resolves a longstanding irritant in trans-Tasman relations by treating New Zealanders much more fairly but also enhances Australia’s democracy. Hundreds of thousands of long-term residents who were previously unrepresented in our political system can now join the electoral role, cast a vote and lobby their MPs as citizens.

Then came the third step, announced by Clare O’Neil in her address to the National Press Club: a sharp increase in the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold, or TSMIT. This is the minimum income that an employer must pay if it wants to bring a migrant worker to Australia on a temporary skilled visa.

The Abbott government froze the TSMIT at $53,900 in July 2013. In the decade since then, it has not risen in line with inflation or wages and has fallen far below what most full-time workers earn. From 1 July this year, it will jump to $70,000.

The new threshold follows a recommendation by the Grattan Institute, which argued that the frozen TSMIT “allowed employers to sponsor a growing number of low-wage workers with fewer skills” and left them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Grattan says these low-paid workers also lacked the bargaining power to secure wage rises. In O’Neil’s words, it allowed a skilled worker program to become a guest worker program.

For many migrants and their employers, this change will make no difference. According to the most recent data, the average nominated base salary for temporary skilled workers is already above $100,000, and it’s even higher in sectors like finance, IT, healthcare, mining and construction. More likely to be affected are sectors like hospitality, retail and agriculture, where the average nominated salary for temporary migrant workers is much lower.

More than 1000 cooks are in Australia on temporary skilled visas, for example, and they are regularly included in the top fifteen professions nominated by employers. Yet Seek reports that the average wage for a cook is between $55,000 and $65,000. How commercial kitchens will fill these jobs after 1 July remains to be seen, but a sudden rush of Australians into this hard, low-paid work seems unlikely.

Lifting the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold is the government’s first response to the review of the migration program by the former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, and migration experts Joanna Howe and John Azarias.

The government has also released the outline of a migration strategy indicating the direction it will take in responding more fully to the review.

Key initiatives include:

• A simplification of the welter of highly specific visa subclasses that create a “bureaucratic nightmare” for migrants, employers and government, and force a heavy reliance on the professional services of migration agents for even straightforward applications.

• A redesign of the points test, which tabulates factors such as age, English-language proficiency and qualifications to determine whether a skilled migrant is granted a permanent visa.

• A formal role in the migration system for the government’s arm’s-length advisory agency Jobs and Skills Australiato determine the extent and location of skills shortages. Drawing on advice from government, business and unions, this process will replace the cumbersome, complex and inflexible “skilled occupation lists” currently used to decide which occupations are eligible for visas. O’Neil says the aim is for Jobs and Skills Australia to integrate the migration system and the education and training system when it comes to meeting labour market needs.

• Better coordination between the Commonwealth and the states and territories on the impacts of migration and population growth (for example, demand for housing).

Labor’s renewed focus on Australia’s migration system is long overdue. With its obsessive focus on boats and border security, the previous government downgraded the role of migration in nation-building and social inclusion. And by profiling minority groups — remember the “African gangs” that made Victorians feel unsafe to go out at night — it undermined the ethos of Australia as a cohesive, multicultural society.

The Coalition allowed processing times to blow out, stranding hundreds of thousands of people on bridging visas for months and then years (a backlog the new government has been working hard to address). Despite consistent and mounting evidence of labour exploitation, the Coalition did next to nothing to address the workplace abuse of temporary visa holders. And when Covid-19 hit, prime minister Scott Morrison simply told them to go home.

Yet O’Neil’s claim that Australia’s skilled worker program “morphed into a guest worker program” while Peter Dutton was in charge of immigration is partisan hyperbole. The permanent shift towards temporary migration began long before Dutton’s reign and runs much deeper.

It was the Hawke government that began internationalising the education sector by allowing Australian universities to accept full-fee international students. By 1996, the immigration department was already granting more than 100,000 student visas each year and education was on the way to becoming a major export industry.

The first temporary skilled worker visa (the 457 visa) was an initiative of the Keating government, although it only came to fruition under John Howard. In 2005, when the agricultural sector was losing workers to the booming mining sector, Amanda Vanstone enticed backpackers to pick fruit by transforming the working holiday scheme from a predominantly “cultural” visa into a labour market program.

It was the Rudd government that trialled and then implemented the seasonal workers program for Pacific Islanders in 2009, and it was the Gillard government that established it as an ongoing program three years later. It was Gillard, too, who introduced the 485 post-study work visa that enabled international students to stay and work in Australia after graduation, though not necessarily in the field for which they had studied. Around 167,000 of these visa holders are in Australia at the moment, almost all of whom will end up spending at least five years here without necessarily qualifying for a visa as a skilled migrant.

The shift in emphasis from permanent to temporary migration is not the result of bureaucratic bungling by the previous government. It is a long-term trend in response to global economic change and demographic forces.

The government has signalled a pushback, at least when it comes to skilled workers. The greater emphasis on pathways to permanent residency is the right thing to do and will make Australia a more attractive destination for young, highly qualified professionals who can help build the nation’s economy and contribute in other ways to society.

Yet big questions remain, particularly about how the government will manage the demand for lower-skilled workers.

Take the example of health and aged care. “Our ageing population will demand more workers in health and aged care than our domestic population can supply,” O’Neil said yesterday. That’s true, though many of those jobs won’t be classified as skilled and attract salaries over $70,000.

O’Neil added that we need “to create proper, capped, safe, tripartite pathways for workers in key sectors, such as care.” But what this means is unclear. Will low-paid caring roles be reclassified as skilled and have a route to permanent residency?

If so, this would run counter to government programs like the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which specifically targets the aged care sector as a potential employer. The PALM scheme recruits workers from Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste to fill “unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled positions” but limits a migrant’s stay in Australia to a maximum of four years, with no prospect of settlement. It is a guest worker scheme by another name.

The same issues arise when it comes to filling lower-paid jobs in childcare, disability care, horticulture, meat processing, tourism and many other sectors.

If the government is determined not to have a class of guest workers, then the big question arising out of its reform of the migration system is how Australia fills those low-skilled gaps in the labour market. And how how does it do that without resorting to a system of temporary visas that offer no prospect of a transition to permanent residency and a shadow workforce of international students and other temporary visa holders “who bounce from visa to visa” and end up being permanently temporary.

Clare O’Neil says she wants a conversation about migration that is “direct and honest.” There are more difficult discussions to come. •

The post Skill up or sink appeared first on Inside Story.

An unnamed emergency doctor, fuelled by the desire to staunch suffering, worked long days in Afghanistan for six months treating patients with horrific injuries. It was not this experience, however, that led her to quit, but rather her time working in an emergency room of a community hospital on her return to America, where her days felt like a meaningless cycle of “rinse and repeat.”

How are we to make sense of the strange alchemy by which modern workplaces convert some workers’ enthusiasm, commitment and confidence into cynicism, withdrawal and depletion? In their new book The Burnout Challenge, organisational psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter offer two contentions about understanding and tackling these quiet workplace tragedies.

The first is a riff on the historical practice of putting canaries into coalmines to detect toxic air that could kill miners. “Let’s say our hope was to keep more birds singing in the mines. What would be our best approach? Should we try fixing the canary to make it stronger and more resilient — a tough old bird that could take whatever conditions it faced? Or should we fix the mine, clearing the toxic fumes and doing whatever else necessary to make it safe for canaries (and miners) to do their work?”

The second is the claim that an “increasing mismatch between workers and workplaces” is the cause of burnout, and that the mismatch takes six forms: work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and values conflicts. The self-described “burnout shops” of Silicon Valley are archetypal mismatched workplaces, the authors say: employers brazenly boast of having an “always on” work culture, and workloads are so obviously unsustainable that a job in a startup is only feasible for a few years.

How or why this particular chamber of the “mine” got so toxic for its canaries, though, or its relationship to the other kinds of workplaces that make up the mine, is not something the authors attempt to explain. Befitting experts who have made major professional contributions in the form of taxonomies and systems for data collection (Maslach was the creator of the “Maslach Burnout Inventory,” Leiter the “Areas of Work Life Survey”), The Burnout Challenge takes a highly schematised approach in guiding managers to incrementally improve levels of worker efficiency, health and happiness in their workplace.

It turns out that decades of peer-reviewed research shows “receiving good vibes or compliments” to be “an uplifting experience” and that involving staff in rostering decisions can increase their sense of control. Evidence also backs the idea that “there should be sensible limits on work hours and a focus on how employees will complete tasks within that time rather than be forced to donate personal or sleep hours to finish their work.” It is particularly dispiriting for employees to have an overfilled plate of tasks when those tasks are lower than their capability level. The blunt assumption that “people deliver under pressure” is wrong.

Many employers could genuinely benefit from reading this advice, and not all of them are quiet admirers of the rise-and-grind, move-fast-and-break-things management philosophy of Silicon Valley. Maslach and Leiter provide lots of neatly enumerated lists illustrated by breezy narrative vignettes and even simpler graphics (the section on “insufficient rewards” gets a thumbs-down emoji; the chapter on “values conflicts” shows a broken heart lying in a pool of blood). If you find ticking off a to-do list an appealing mechanism for keeping the complexity of the world at bay, you may find all of this soothing.

Readers drawn to thinking about the deeper causes of burnout may be struck by how eye-wateringly obvious and familiar these statements are. Since F.W. Taylor popularised “hard” scientific management in the early twentieth century, observers have noted the self-defeating and demoralising consequences of attempting to wrest maximum value from employees.

Elton Mayo’s book The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, for instance, published in 1933, included chapters on fatigue, monotony and morale, all themes taken up by Maslach and Leiter. Like them, Mayo urged managers to view employment in relational terms. What workers required was recognition, community and respect.

Rather than asking ourselves what is wrong with this kind of advice, we may be better off considering why, ninety years on, books on these themes are still in demand. A simple response might be that, like the wisdom of a kindergarten teacher, basic lessons in how to behave well at work are always relevant and it never hurts to have them repeated: listen carefully, don’t demand impossible things, practise give and take, don’t steal, apologise when you make a mistake, and it is not okay to threaten people to get what you want.

Another, less rosy answer is that books of this kind not only are easy-to-read digests of academic research but also reinforce the longstanding idea that burnout is a consequence of inadequate managerial technique rather than inadequate worker power.

For their work to resonate with their time’s commonsense ideas of wellbeing, every generation of scholars in the human relations school has to tackle their task in a slightly different way. In Mayo’s day, employers were invited to understand themselves as grappling with “problems of human equilibrium,” “social disorganisation” and anomie. Today, Maslach and Leiter suggest, employers play a six-dimensional game of workplace matching with employees, a framing of the problem that resonates well with what theorists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello dubbed the new spirit of capitalism — the emphasis on individual autonomy, initiative, intimacy, pleasure and creative expression that has prevailed for the last four decades.

The mismatch metaphor diverts attention away from the structural determinants of power and towards the agency of individual workers and their managers. Other actors — trade unions and the governments that set the terms of workplace relations — are relegated to the background.

The idea that tackling the burnout “challenge” involves aligning two puzzle pieces also invites us to assume that the parties negotiate with roughly equal bargaining power, and that if a match is not found either party may walk away in search of another, better match. If we view this drama as a mutual desire for a satisfying “click,” we are less likely to notice that the employer’s puzzle piece is usually made of unyielding metal while the employee’s is more often soft and pliable or, worse, brittle and prone to shatter.

Maslach and Leiter don’t wholly ignore unions. They credit the Australian stonemasons for establishing the norm of an eight-hour working day in 1856. But they don’t acknowledge unions as manifestations of the “beneficial social communities” they praise in other contexts. The Burnout Challenge does mention union-like formations on several occasions, but using terms like “cuddle huddle” and “social pod” that implicitly distinguish these “good,” “customised” forms of collectivity from “bad” ones that come “off the shelf.”

Digital technologies also make an appearance in The Burnout Challenge, but primarily as carriers of additional workload. Maslach and Leiter declare that “technology must be managed — and managing it means balancing on and off time.” This perspective ignores the vast potential of digital technology for workplace surveillance. Numerous observers have noted, for instance, that Amazon’s use of technology to monitor employees’ work rates is related to the dangerous intensification of work at the company. In the gig economy, of course, work may be coordinated and managed at scale in the absence of an employment relationship.

Nor do the authors touch on the digital dynamics quietly eroding anti-discrimination law, labour law, anti-trust law and privacy law through what legal scholars Richard Bales and Katherine Stone call “the invisible web at work.”

Maslach and Leiter coyly allude to the relationship between insecure employment and burnout in a discussion of “tentative relationships,” noting that workers may experience “anxious feelings about disposability” and that “it is difficult to exercise control in a relationship without confidence that the relationship will continue.” The logical extension of such observations — that it might be wise for managers to offer secure employment as a burnout-prevention measure — goes unstated.

In airbrushing power from the narrative, The Burnout Challenge also diminishes employer powerlessness, even though recognising the limits of what managers can do is surely crucial to understanding the phenomenon and its solutions.

Many of the “values mismatches” the writers refer to are the product of institutional frameworks over which employers exercise little control. Consider, for instance, the clash between market-based mechanisms and professional–client obligations in care work and other highly “emotionally connective” jobs. As sociologist Allison J. Pugh has brilliantly observed, a panoply of workers — therapists, teachers, doctors, carers and more — need to be present and receptive, and bear witness, to the emotional truths of others.

Such acts of recognition are inherently particular, and often experienced as among the more meaningful aspects of work. They are also, thanks to New Public Management approaches, subject to massive pressures from rationalisation, standardisation and accountability, via manuals, checklists, scripts, templates and digital platforms, and are organised within “regimes of scarcity.”

A generation of research has observed that psychosocial injury is linked with high quantitative demands, insecure work conditions, compromised skill development, low control of work tasks, and market-based systems. These conditions are not unfortunate accidents; they are the inevitable concomitants of treating care work as a commodity to be delivered “just in time.”

Such dynamics are very difficult to grasp when burnout is framed as a workplace-level issue, as Maslach and Leiter do when they recount what happened after the takeover of a rural hospital by a private health organisation. Following a “values clarification process” of town hall meetings, focus groups and unit-level discussions, a new hybrid values system emerged, with neither hospital nor new owner “winning.”

The authors suggest that managers struggling with similar values clashes should consider the parable of the janitor at NASA who, in 1961, encountered president John F. Kennedy. When the president asked why he was working so late mopping floors, he responded, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon!” Maslach and Leiter distil a set of “sense-giving” steps for managers from this tale: “narrow the focus on one goal; shift from an abstract description of the goal to a concrete one; set up clear milestones to the goal; give life to the idea by using persuasive language and rhetorical techniques.”

A radical indifference to context is apparent here. Not only does cold war–style talk of national purpose no longer apply, but a cleaner would now, more likely than not, be an outsourced worker with an entirely different manager from the “core” workforce to whom the “purpose talk” applied.

The assumption that healthcare is, in essence, similar to putting a man on the moon is also highly questionable. It would only be exaggerating slightly to suggest that true burnout-minimising leadership in a care context involves flipping each of the proposed “sense-giving” steps on its head: encourage employees to widen the focus from the goal to the person; embrace the abstract and expansive goal of hearing someone; reassure employees that work of this kind is not linear and that hearing someone’s needs in a meaningful way takes time; recognise the overwhelming significance of employees having the security, time, skills and trust to form relationships.

It is unsurprising, perhaps, that The Burnout Challenge also has little to say about how the stories that live in our heads and in our culture contribute to burnout. Maslach and Leiter offer scant recognition of how the idea of “passionate work” saturates our culture to the extent that it forms an “interpretative schema” for the world, long before any individual crosses the threshold of a particular workplace.

Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, communications researcher Renyi Hong has argued that passion is now a “standard post-Fordist affect.” The idea of “passionate work” fosters a sense of an ideal capitalist self: well managed, resilient and capable of coping with economic fluctuations and precarity. It is an argument that resonates closely with Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism: relationships made available at work under capitalism offer themselves as objects of desire while also representing profound obstacles to flourishing. The relevance of both ideas to employee burnout is obvious.

As a concept, “burnout” need not be bereft of political potency. It can invite critical thinking about limits, energy and reproduction, and help reframe the “non-productive” as crucial and valued. It can question the logic that intensity is inherently good. In the climate change era, these questions are excellent ones to be asking, both of ourselves as individuals and of societies as a whole.

A politics built on the refusal to be “burned out” recalls the insistence that labour is not a commodity and invites its extension to other things — such as rivers, skies, forests and all the ecosystems of which they are part — that we should not readily accept as simply raw materials for production. It asks that we consider how we will revalue and protect all of the human spaces founded on non-capitalist values — families, schools, welfare states, unions and Indigenous communities, to name a few. It would be a politics, in other words, built on deliberate and defiant mismatches.

The Burnout Challenge, needless to say, is not concerned with such a politics. While its authors may have rejected the project of turning the canary in the coalmine into a “tough old bird” capable of enduring toxicity, their book doesn’t do much to analyse or adjust the underlying sources of the mine chamber’s fumes. Much less do they consider inviting the bird to participate in the endeavour.

Maslach and Leiter offer modest and practical suggestions that may help some bad workplaces become less bad. But the bird they construct as their object of concern is a lonely and flighty one, primed to glide into the next chamber in search of better air, sustained by the hope that their “match” is just around the corner. •

The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs
By Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter | Harvard University Press | $51.95 | 272 pages

The post On not burning out appeared first on Inside Story.

Those were the days before mobile phones, when doctors still carried pagers that beeped whenever they were needed. Sleep-deprived and stressed by the onerous workload, my heart rate soared every time my pager sounded, its insistent beeping a reminder that I was, in essence, in servitude to the hospital’s consultant medical staff, nurses and patients. My time was never my own.

One weekend, in an effort to provide me with a much-needed afternoon nap, my visiting boyfriend wrapped my beeper in aluminium foil and placed it in a metal tin to prevent it from receiving a signal. It would have been much simpler to turn the awful thing off but I, in my befuddled state, had refused to do so.

In The Doctor Who Wasn’t There, a history of technological innovations in medicine, Jeremy Greene, medical historian and practising physician, devotes a chapter to the development of the medical pager, which he aptly labels The Electronic Leash. The pager was made possible by FM radio technology and marketed by Motorola and similar corporations in the 1960s as a modern tool to streamline a doctor’s professional life.

Just like the telephone before it, the pager proved a double-edged sword: greater connectivity meant more flexibility — a doctor could be out at a barbecue and still contactable if a patient took a turn for the worse — but also more accountability. If a doctor could be contacted then he or she should be contacted.

This is one of Greene’s recurring themes: the greatest enthusiasm for novel medical technologies was often on the side of those who stood to gain financially from their widespread adoption. Doctors, among the supposed beneficiaries, were usually more gimlet-eyed, not only about the extra demands this new technology might place on them, but also about how it might interfere with the doctor–patient relationship. “The medium of care is always contested by different parties with very real professional, political, and financial stakes at play,” Greene writes:

The source of contention has always been an exchange about technology and power. In the name of empowering the consumer of healthcare, technologists present their new platforms as essential passage points for the future of medicine. In the name of defending the humanity of the patient, physicians assert that no technology should displace the doctor from the bedside.

Again and again, Greene tells us, this tension played out with new technologies. Both entrepreneur and doctor viewed each innovation as having subversive potential. Those who stood to gain financially from the widespread adoption of whatever they were spruiking — the pager, wireless monitors, closed-circuit television clinics, the electronic medical record — saw only the benefits of this subversion: better access to information for health professionals, better quality care for patients.

One of the towering mid-twentieth-century figures in this debate was Vladimir Zworykin, vice-president for research at the Radio Corporation of America and, later, founder of the Center for Medical Electronics at the Rockefeller Institute. Zworykin championed a number of innovations, among them the mainframe computer. As well as seeing the computer’s potential to store all manner of medical data, he envisaged a day when the computer would become integral to the doctor’s interaction with patients.

“Zworykin insisted that the fundamental relationship between doctor and patient would only be enhanced, never degraded, by the presence of the computer in the clinic,” writes Greene:

In 1962, he asked an audience of physicians to imagine a typical medical clinic fifty years in the future, in which physicians were freed of asking the same questions, conducting the same physical exam over and over again, since a standard history and physical would be automatically performed by a human–machine interface. In the year 2012, he predicted, any “Mr Jones” stopping by Middletown Clinic for his annual check-up would see the computer before he would see his doctor.

But doctors were conflicted, and sometimes their concerns were motivated by self-interest. “Physicians believed that telephone, radio, television, and computer all enabled an extension of their professional authority,” writes Greene, “but worried they could also lead to loss of control of the conditions of their own labour, or, worse yet, might open up the private spaces of the profession for new forms of public critique.”

It wasn’t only the medicos who saw the potential downsides of an increasingly wired-up clinic. Much of the development in the field took place during the cold war, when concerns about tracking and surveillance were rife. Fast-forward to 2022, when, as Greene writes:

One out of every five US employers that offered health insurance in 2018 collected wireless physiological information from the wearable devices of their employees… Many firms now use Fitbits and Amazon Halos and other wearable sensors not just to monitor the health of their workers but also to optimise their daily work routines — and dock their pay for bathroom breaks.

Greene has meticulously researched his subject: his bibliography runs to more than forty pages. What’s more, he’s succeeded in creating a fascinating narrative from what might have been a very dry history of wires and batteries. I suspect he might himself be a gadget enthusiast, much like one of the book’s principal personages, Norman Jeff Holter, the cardiologist inventor of the Holter heart monitor, which is still widely used today. Holter’s electronics laboratory had its origin above the family grocery store, and I can imagine Professor Greene holed away in his backyard shed on weekends, happily tinkering with circuits.

I’m not a Luddite but neither can I claim to be particularly tech-savvy; still, my interest was piqued by such things as the incredibly useful spin-offs of the humble telephone: the miniature telephone, which eventually became the hearing aid, and the telephone-probe, distant cousin of our contemporary diagnostic ultrasound.

The Doctor Who Wasn’t There was partly written during the pandemic, when telehealth was the top-of-mind medical technology for healthcare workers. While the telehealth industry was already attracting substantial corporate investment in the United States before Covid-19 came along, it was still in the early stages of implementation. The sudden onset of widespread lockdowns in 2020 saw the health workforces of the United States and many other countries — those that were digitally resourced — rapidly pivot to this mode of service delivery.

Inequities quickly emerged. Reflecting on his own experiences of working in a community clinic in East Baltimore, Greene writes:

In my first full month as a telepractitioner, not a single African American or Latino patient was able to successfully access the full telemedical suite in my clinic sessions… Similar challenges of equity in access to telemedicine were reported in community health centres and other primary care practices in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Video visits were repeatedly found to be less common in telemedical encounters among Black and Latino patients, and in households earning less than $50,000 per year.

This pattern of inequitable access to novel technologies is another strong theme of Greene’s history. In 1971, for example, a physician in Boston built a microwave link connecting a remote urgent care clinic to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital, and federally funded demonstration projects for similar technology were set up in Harlem in New York, on the West Side of Chicago, in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, and on Native American reservations in Arizona. In the end, though, these technological experiments in disadvantaged communities fizzled and died when interest turned to some other emerging technology.

I was working at a metropolitan Headspace centre during the pandemic and found my young patients to be very comfortable with video consultations so long as they had a private space in which to talk. One of the common healthcare barriers for young people is physical distance and lack of good transport options: with the click of a mouse, telehealth removed this obstacle. But my experience was not the norm in Australia. As a recent nationwide survey of telehealth services during the pandemic found, people with disability, people on low incomes, people with limited education and employment, older people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and people in rural areas were most affected by the digital divide.

At first blush, writer and documentary maker Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman is the antithesis of Greene’s book. In lyrical, reflective prose, Morland charts the daily life of a female GP who works in a picturesque rural English setting. Medical technology is barely mentioned; instead the focus is squarely on the doctor–patient relationship. This relationship is precious, Morland argues, and also under threat.

Morland’s book is charged with great admiration for her doctor-subject and an anxiety that the way this doctor works may not be sustainable. Of general practitioners in Britain as a whole, she writes:

Workloads have increased. Practices and their teams have got larger. The role of technology has expanded. Part-time working has become the norm [as it] is often the only way to endure the pressures of the job. All the while, the wholesale management of risk according to standardised guidelines trumps the judgement of individual doctors… As patient numbers have risen, access to a doctor, any doctor, has become the overriding priority, and individual relationships find themselves pushed to the margins.

Morland reports “a rising sense” among GPs that these pressures constitute “nothing less than an existential emergency.” Concerns that something vital is being lost have fuelled “an intensifying research effort to understand, articulate and quantify the value of the human relationships within medical care, before it’s too late.”

What will become of the doctor at the bedside? Richard Baker

This is not a uniquely British phenomenon. Pandemic imperatives and stresses aside, many Australian GPs are struggling with the pressures of running a small business in addition to their medical work, which is intellectually demanding and time-consuming enough. Medical graduates, meanwhile, are turning their backs on general practice as a career. Recent Western Australian research shows that the number of medical graduates working as GPs more than halved among those who graduated between 1985–87 and 2004–07, dropping from about 40 per cent of graduates to about 15 per cent.

Why so? Commentators point to the negative press general practice often receives during student training and the failure of Medicare rebates to adequately reflect the cost of providing good-quality care. Yet, as Morland observes, general practice is the speciality that provides the bulk of continuity of care and disease prevention. This counts for a lot: in fact, Morland claims, there’s evidence that continuity of care is linked to lower death rates. “An existential emergency” may not be an overstatement.

Morland came to write her book soon after reading writer and critic John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, first published in 1967 and reissued by Canongate books in 2015. By all accounts this slim volume has a minor cult following in the British medical world. It takes as its subject a male GP Berger met through a mutual friend; Berger gives him the pseudonym of Dr John Sassall. Berger portrays a highly admirable GP, knowledgeable, capable and completely dedicated to his patients’ physical and psychological wellbeing. He was also mentally unwell at times. A sufferer of what was thought to be untreated bipolar depression, he suicided a year after the death of his wife.

The title of Berger’s book, then, carries a chilling irony. As Gavin Francis, a British GP and writer who contributed the introduction to the new edition, wrote in the Guardian, “A careful reading of A Fortunate Man reveals its title to be a paradox; fitting for a study of a man whose very openness to experience — his gift to the world — was also his undoing.”

Further impetus for Morland’s book came from a twofold discovery: that the bucolic valley in which A Fortunate Man was set was the same valley in which she now lived; and that the current female GP in the valley had decided on her career path after reading Berger’s book as a seventeen-year-old. A Fortunate Woman is both tribute and palimpsest. It reverentially references the text that inspired it while replacing John Sassall with his contemporary female counterpart, his style with hers.

This female GP, known throughout Morland’s book only as “the doctor,” is of a different generation, and much has changed since Sassall’s time: general practice is more regulated and bureaucratic; patient numbers have increased, as has the complexity of care; and the GP workforce in Britain is now 69 per cent female. (In Australia that figure is just over 50 per cent.) All this has implications, for both the nature of the work and how the GP responds to its demands.

Like its predecessor, A Fortunate Woman can be viewed as an extended photo essay. Berger’s book contained black-and-white photos by Jean Mohr, some showing Sassall examining and treating patients with both doctor and patients clearly identifiable. Mohr also photographed the landscape in which Sassall worked.

Richard Baker’s photos in A Fortunate Woman are in the same mould, except they were taken during the pandemic, and the doctor’s face is largely obscured by a mask, protective eyewear and visor. Patients, too, are masked, so the anonymity of all concerned is largely preserved. These images serve as a historical record of a time when some aspects of the doctor–patient relationship we took for granted — the sharing of a close physical space, the touch of a caring hand — were not always possible.

Morland’s style is beautifully measured, its tone empathic and warm. She writes perceptively and tenderly about both the doctor’s daily interactions with patients and the external environment from which she, the GP, derives much of her equilibrium. She rides her electric bike from her cottage to the clinic, then afterwards to home visits, traversing the narrow, walled roads and winding lanes of the valley, visiting breathless elderly women, stoic farmers, even a dying child. She finds solace in a quiet evening walk with her dogs. The external environment can work against the doctor, too: the winding lanes and lack of street names make home visits a navigational challenge, and a snowstorm threatens to halt proceedings on the very first day of the Covid-19 vaccination clinic.

Morland’s GP is a country doctor archetype — a wise and caring diagnostician with unbounded energy, a good sense of humour and the patience of a saint. The last of a dying breed, perhaps. The constraints of working in such a way — economic, geographic, workforce, psychological — are continuing to tighten. Can technology save the day? Will some form of AI — the “electronic brain” envisaged by Vladimir Zworykin and his contemporaries — become our standard medium of medical care? What, then, will become of the doctor at the bedside?

The stethoscope of the early nineteenth century, Greene tells us, was a new technology of the time, with its champions and detractors. Now older physicians lament the fact that their younger counterparts don’t use the stethoscope like they do, relying instead on newer modes of listening. The future of medical practice will look different from its past: this is inevitable. Both of the books under review here are concerned with this process. Morland asks that we strive to preserve the humanity of the doctor–patient relationship. Greene urges us to stay awake to the errors of the past. •

The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth
By Jeremy A. Greene | University of Chicago Press | US$29 | 336 pages

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story
By Polly Morland | Picador | $34.95 | 256 pages

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Of course, opposition parties have held commanding leads three or four months before an election on earlier occasions, only to see their advantage vanish in the weeks before the ballot. The 2019 election was a case in point, 1993’s another. Yet today’s political circumstances suggest the Morrison government may have trouble turning opinion around. Typically the Coalition runs on a program of fiscal rectitude, accusing Labor of plans to tax, spend and run up big deficits. But with a deficit this year running second in Australian history only to last year, making that theme work will be harder. Unlike in 2019, Labor won’t be proposing big tax increases.

Likewise climate change and China. How we reduce carbon can be debated, but the government is committed to reduction targets, concedes climate change is a real problem, and accepts that coal is on the way out. Portraying China as the enemy helps consolidate the Coalition vote but unless and until Labor takes the bait it is limited in effect, and Anthony Albanese and his colleagues are resolutely refusing to take the bait.

Labor still faces a big challenge in winning the additional seven seats necessary to govern in its own right. The Coalition’s bastion is Queensland, where it holds twenty-three of thirty seats. Queensland out, and Labor holds a majority in the House; Queensland in, and Labor is seven seats short of a majority. Compared to the 2019 election result, which admittedly was a calamity for Labor in that state, the party needs a state swing of more than 3 per cent just to pick up one seat in Queensland, more than 4 per cent to pick up two and nearly 5 per cent to win two more. Still, it is a volatile electorate and a big swing to Labor in Queensland is suggested by the most recent Morgan polls.

So Labor has a chance in what will be a hard fought contest. What kind of economy would it (or the Coalition) face after it is elected and the pandemic’s impact wears off?

Last week the International Monetary Fund offered the cold thought that once the Australian economy has fully recovered, growth will slip to a long-term rate below the average of the twenty years before the pandemic. Output growth next year will be 4.1 per cent, it says, but will then slip to 2.6 per cent, a rate the IMF evidently thinks is as fast as it can go in the long term. Growth in employment will account for more than half of that 2.6 per cent. The rest will come from the long-term growth in output per worker, which the IMF evidently thinks will be around 1.3 per cent, or a little less. This is below the 1.5 per cent Treasury assumed for its recent Intergenerational Report, and a little lower than the Australian experience of the ten years before the pandemic. It is pessimistic but consistent with what is happening in other wealthy economies.

According to this IMF forecast the forthcoming election will be fought in a brightly recovering economy, obscuring the likelihood that the growth of living standards will then fall significantly — and stay that way for many years to come. It will also be an economy in which both fiscal and monetary policy are on long-term tightening paths — that is, interest rates will slowly be increasing and the budget deficit will be narrowing as a share of GDP. Short of recession, the budget and interest rates won’t be deployed to stimulate growth.

When the serious electoral contest resumes in February, much of the debate will focus on spending, taxing and the deficit, and much on our energy future, China and so forth. But the economic issue that really matters for our future is unlikely to be debated at all. This is a pity because whether Josh Frydenberg is still in the job post-election or has been replaced by Labor’s Jim Chalmers, it will be among the priority long-term issues Treasury presents in its post-election briefings.

This issue is productivity, or output per worker. One reason productivity won’t be much debated in the run-up to the election is that it no longer fits into the contesting narratives around which elections are typically fought.

Over the two decades to 2020 productivity growth was slower than in the 1990s, contributing to slower output growth, slower growth in wages after inflation, and slower growth in living standards. Productivity gains account for most of the growth of after-inflation wages, and of living standards.

In its recent report the IMF staff looked closely at productivity and came up with some surprising results. It found the decline in both business investment spending and productivity in the years before the pandemic may be related to the increasing concentration ownership of Australian businesses, and the associated decline in competition.

The IMF recommends Australia spend more on encouraging research and development spending by business. It argues that investment in research and development is associated with faster gains in output per hour worked, and that Australia invests less than the average wealthy economy and very much less than the leading economies.

Similar points were made recently by Reserve Bank assistant governor Luci Ellis. In an appropriately tentative way she argued that the slowdown in productivity growth in Australia and other wealthy economies in recent years may have something to do with increasing concentration of business ownership.

In its Intergenerational Report Treasury argued that the slowdown in the growth of output per worker may be linked to the increasing share of output accounted for by sectors in which there are only three or four big producers who can make it difficult for new players to enter. It may also be related to a slow take-up of new digital technologies. “Declining dynamism” is evident, it said, impeding the flow of resources from less productive to more productive firms. “Australian firms appear to be slower to adopt world-leading technologies” with the result that “non-mining businesses in Australian have fallen further behind the global frontier firms and appear to be catching up more slowly.”

Hardly a whisper of this shift in thinking among economic advisers and policymakers reaches the general media or comes through in the election contest. For Australia’s economic future, however, it is becoming an issue too big to ignore. •

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I’m not sure how many people in Perth picked up the clue in that refrain, but those who did would have known that something distinctively Dutch was brewing. That phrase is the call sign of Buurtzorg (spoiler: in Dutch buurt means neighbourhood and zorg means care), a nurse-led organisation that has revolutionised home care in the Netherlands.

Buurtzorg intrigues policymakers around the world looking for better ways to enable elderly people (and others with care needs) to live independently with less formal care. What’s not to like about a model that KPMG found “halves costs, improves quality and makes happier caregivers,” as Forbes magazine enthused?

Admirers of the Buurtzorg model are not confined to healthcare, either. La philosophie Buurtzorg, as the French call it, has become something of a standard-bearer for a nascent movement rallying to put human values back at the core of government.

Neighbourhood Care — which is indeed Buurtzorg’s partner in Australia — launched under the radar, in difficult times. At first glance, it appears to be just another service provider competing for dollars under the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And, who knows, that may yet prove to be so. There’s plenty of noise in that crowded space, and good reason to suspect the fine intentions of new entrants. “A lot of people come into the sector with lovely values and mission statements, but they are there for an opportunity, to commodify care,” says Wollongong University health services researcher Anita Westera, who points to the rapid growth of digital care platforms like Mable and Kynd as the logical extension of transforming aged care and disability into a marketplace predicated on consumer choice.

Chief executive Arnold Stroobach tells me Neighbourhood Care employs twenty-six people. It has three teams operating in Western Australia — two in metropolitan Perth and another in Northam, an hour east of Perth — and a small presence in Ipswich, in Queensland. These self-managed teams are the central unit of the Buurtzorg model; in the Netherlands, where it is the biggest community care provider, Buurtzorg’s decentralised network has 1000 of them.

A Buurtzorg team consists of ten to twelve trained nurses. Once a team grows bigger than twelve, it splits into two (an idea pinched from an unconventional Dutch tech entrepreneur, the late Eckart Wintzen). Each nursing team works in a buurt of up to 10,000 inhabitants and typically divides the care of fifty to sixty frail elderly people between its members. Referrals come from hospitals, doctors or families.

The nurses organise everything themselves, taking charge of the complete process of caring for their patients and running their own small enterprise. They are connected to each other and the other teams in the decentralised network by an internet-based platform called Buurtzorgweb. There’s no middle management to refer problems up to. If a team has internal conflict, Buurtzorg offers the assistance of “coaches” — there’s one per forty teams — who are trained in team dynamics. If a team can’t solve its problems, it closes.

Neighbourhood Care bears only a sketchy resemblance to this model at the moment. Apart from working in disability rather than aged care, only one team is operating at full capacity, the one in Northam, and its employees are not nurses but therapists and trained support workers. The challenge for the organisation is to comply with the requirement of the NDIS — where every client has a plan with prescribed goals and line items — while trusting the operation to the team.

“You can’t copy and paste the Dutch model,” says Stroobach. “You have to find a way to adapt to local conditions.” The team dynamic is different in a non-medical sector, he says, but they haven’t changed the principles of Buurtzorg a lot. And they’ve just passed their first NDIS audit. The next step is to register for the federal government’s My Aged Care scheme.

Australia’s sprawling suburbs and isolated regional towns are a very different kind of buurt from those in the Netherlands’ densely populated lowlands. But Buurtzorg’s big idea is small teams not small areas, Stroobach says. “It’s human-scaled.” It has been a slow business finding the right people for the teams, frontline workers who know what’s expected of them and can wear the responsibility of self-management. The Dutch love it, but it’s not a familiar concept in Australia, where our default position is the traditional hierarchy.

Stroobach finds the analogy with a sporting team works well though. “In sport, feedback can be brutal, but it’s acceptable. In the workplace here it’s almost a miracle to have feedback.” And some clients aren’t comfortable with the Buurtzorg model — they don’t believe the support worker can make his or her own decisions. It’s a tricky dynamic, he says, and “you can kill it off if you’re not careful.”

When I speak with Buurtzorg’s founder, nurse turned social entrepreneur Jos de Blok, he seems happy enough with what’s happening in Australia so far. “In my opinion, they are doing very well,” he says. It’s quite an effort in the first few years, he adds. The thing is to break even: “If it is stable, you can easily grow.” He thinks it will take five years for Buurtzorg to “get somewhere” in Australia.

That’s an interesting time frame, given the speed and magnitude of Buurtzorg’s growth in the Netherlands. From a standing start in the winter of 2006, Buurtzorg attracted enormous interest, both from nurses who deserted its competitors to join Buurtzorg teams, and from the ministry of health, which actively promoted the development of the model.

Within a decade, Buurtzorg was employing more than half the country’s community nurses, and the government had adjusted the payment system to make room for its flat-rate billing. By 2015, two independent audits (by KPMG and EY) had assessed the model’s impact on some of the most chronic problems facing Dutch healthcare — dissatisfied patients, overstretched and disillusioned staff, and a constant pressure on budgets. Those reports were immensely helpful, de Blok says. “When you are able to show that our model is 40 per cent cheaper for society, you get political acceleration.”

Buurtzorg employs more than 14,000 people in the Netherlands. It is mostly engaged in nursing frail elderly people in their homes, but it also has teams working in mental health, family and child services, and domestic help, and there is discussion in the Netherlands and elsewhere about whether and how the Buurtzorg principles can be applied to education, policing and other social services. De Blok doesn’t argue with that. “For me, it is not really a business model, it is a way to look at society,” he says.

De Blok is driving while we talk, heading to The Hague for a meeting with the Dutch health minister. It’s a Monday morning, but traffic is light. He’ll be on time, which is a good thing because Hugo de Jonge is “not particularly a friend,” he says. Previous ministers of health have been helpful, but de Jonge has been critical of Buurtzorg. Plus, he has a “top-down way of doing things.” You can see where this is going. Top-down would press all de Blok’s buttons.

But he’s not necessarily meeting his minister as a supplicant. The Buurtzorg model is one of the Netherlands’ more famous exports these days — perhaps not up there with edam or windmill biscuits, but active in twenty-five countries. Moreover, a lot of Buurtzorg’s competitors have adopted its model. De Blok estimates up to 70 per cent of healthcare organisations in the Netherlands have switched to self-managed teams. “My ambition in Holland was to change the healthcare system,” he says. “We succeeded quite well.”

Reducing complexity: Buurtzorg’s founder, Jos de Blok. Linelle Deunk/Lumen

He has no need to blow his own trumpet when so many others are ready to do it for him. Frederic Laloux devoted a section of his influential management book Reinventing Organizations to Buurtzorg’s model; the Royal Society of Arts awarded de Blok its Albert Medal in 2014 (other recipients have included Francis Crick and Tim Berners-Lee). The young Dutch historian who famously disrupted the 2019 Davos meeting, Rutger Bregman, is a fan. The list goes on. De Blok and his organisation are a global phenomenon.

The minister would know that. He would also know that everything has its season. Has Buurtzorg already fulfilled the potential that Dutch management professor Sharda Nandram suggested it had “to permanently change the landscape of the healthcare sector” or is it only just hitting its stride? It’s hard to know. There are still a lot of blanks in the picture.

Buurtzorg is de Blok’s brainchild and he is a gifted communicator, in an understated Dutch way. If you watch him giving a TED talk, it isn’t difficult to appreciate why his ideas have such a wide reach, not just in Europe but in places where Dutch ideas have historically had little purchase, like China, India and Japan.

He makes eliminating overpaid managers, luxurious offices and layers of bureaucracy — and giving teams of nurses the authority and responsibility for providing care to housebound older people with chronic disease and disabilities — sound incredibly obvious.

De Blok is no innocent. It’s not that he doesn’t see the problems that healthcare systems all over the world have — who doesn’t? — but rather that he makes a virtue of reducing complexity.

“What I see in a lot of countries is that systems are increasingly complicated and frustrations are becoming worse and worse,” he told University of Cambridge business professor Jaideep Prabhu, whose new book about government tells the Buurtzorg story in detail. “I want to show that it’s easy to change.”

But that’s the question, isn’t it? How easy?

It’s worth spending a little time looking more closely at how Buurtzorg developed in the Netherlands before exploring why full take-up of the model has not quite happened yet — even in Britain, where enthusiasm for Buurtzorg is high, as former Buurtzorg staffer Paul Jansen wrote recently, but many promising teams have been absorbed back into their organisations. Jansen was chief operating officer at Buurtzorg Britain and Ireland between 2018 and 2020.

Much of the intense international curiosity and speculation about Buurtzorg centres on the question of its adaptability. Can its successes be replicated in countries with similar healthcare problems, or is it something that only the Dutch, with their famous openness to new ideas (like reinstating old water courses to avert extreme flooding, and demanding farmers cull their cow herds to reduce ammonia pollution), can pull off?

So, a short detour is needed to put Buurtzorg’s origins into context. In the early 1990s, in response to rising costs and an ageing population, Dutch politicians threw away the old public service playbook and put their faith in the three Ms of markets, managers and metrics. Even if you’re not a student of government — who would know this trend as New Public Management — you’ll recognise the ideological shift. It changed the way public services throughout the world were delivered, and nowhere more so than in Australia, where NPM retains an iron grip across government.

De Blok was working in a village with a few colleagues as a community nurse when the political winds changed. He told the journal People and Strategy that being a community nurse under the traditional, pre-NPM model of healthcare gave him everything he wanted. “I had the freedom to decide how to take care of patients. I had very good colleagues. There was no management structure, we didn’t have strategic plans, and we didn’t have planning tools. We just did what was needed. It was effective.”

And then came a directive from the top that small district nursing teams should be merged to form larger organisations run by professional managers. This would bring economies of scale, with competition driving down costs and driving up the quality of care.

That was the theory. What actually happened was that the focus of healthcare moved from caring for patients to delivering products — products like nursing, nursing extra, personal care, personal care special, guidance, guidance extra, and so on. As products proliferated, more managers were hired to control the process.

Nurses, on the other hand, were authorised only to deliver certain products in an agreed time frame and lost the personal bond they’d had with patients. Sometimes up to thirty different healthcare professionals visited an elderly person at home in a month to administer different tasks or interventions, yet there was no oversight of an individual’s health and wellbeing.

(Melbourne public health researcher Sarah Russell has made similar observations about My Aged Care, where the most common complaint about providers is the high turnover of unqualified, inexperienced and untrained support workers, strangers being sent to the homes of older people who have to “just trust they will be treated with respect and kindness.”)

Care organisations became like factories, systems replaced relationships, and the perception of what was good care and what were good solutions changed — but to what end? Patients were confused and unhappy. Nurse sick leave rates soared. And, instead of driving down costs and improving the quality of care, the reforms had the opposite effect.

De Blok spent a decade trying to work within the new system. He retrained as a manager, did a master’s degree in innovation and eventually became a managing director. But by 2004 he understood that if he wanted to recover what had been lost — the sacrosanct relationship between patient and nurse — he’d have to start his own organisation, designed and run by nurses. It would deliver only one service, which was helping people in the quality of their daily life.

The idea, de Blok has said, was to “have people around these problems who feel connected to them and can make the choices they think are the best choices… The support systems should be logical and simplified but you should not underestimate the complexity of what’s going on.”

To understand that complexity better, listen to him talking to Richard Atherton on the Being Human podcast about the kinds of decisions nurses make when they’re caring for patients in the last phase of their life. “In our society, we try to make everything explicit, we try to put it into protocol and regulations and so on, but most of the work of nurses is in the heads of people, based on years of doing things and understanding patterns. You need the environment, you need the autonomy, and the space to do these things based on your practical wisdom and intuition.”

Feeling connected: a Buurtzorg team meeting in the German city of Münster. Buurtzorg Germany

De Blok spent eighteen months designing Buurtzorg with his wife Gonnie Kronenberg and other nursing friends. He had figured out most of it, but it wasn’t until he got talking to a former colleague and IT expert, Ard Leferink, that the model came together. Leferink showed him how to scale up his idea. He would design an internet-based platform (which became Buurtzorgweb) that could be built quickly and cheaply to support nurses in their work, freeing up their time to focus on care.

Nursing teams manage their frontline workload on their iPads (the platform also allows Buurtzorg to monitor how each team is doing), and other administration is picked up by the back office operation run by Kronenberg. It’s lean: forty-five people deal with contracts, billing hours to health insurers, and supporting nurses when they have difficult cases. Overheads are low, at 8 per cent. In Australia, administration fees in the home care system average almost a third of package costs.

In its first full year of operation, 2007, Buurtzorg began with one team of ten nurses in Almelo and ended the year with twelve teams in different places and a turnover of €1 million. De Blok wasn’t surprised. He knew that if it worked then everyone would want it. It was good for nurses, good for patients, and — as would be proven within a few years — good for the system. But they did get lucky.

In the summer of 2007, the then minister of health, who’d seen de Blok on television, asked if she could join a team of Buurtzorg nurses on her bicycle. She liked what she saw and invited Buurtzorg to visit the ministry of health, and from there came an initiative that led to Buurtzorg being asked to develop a national policy based on its model. “She was wanting to find ways to change [the system] herself,” he remembers. “So she said, ‘Let’s do this together.’” Not everyone was convinced, though. There was some pushback from other care organisations and from insurers, which withheld funds, but eventually they came on board.

That’s the conundrum: people around the world like what they see in Buurtzorg, and want what it offers, but on their terms. People in top government roles can have big issues with trust and relinquishing control. “There is a lack of trust in devolving power and funding to communities that know their people best,” says Travers McLeod, chief executive of the Centre for Policy Development in Melbourne, which has invested a lot of thought and energy on the ground in community-led programs.

Trust-based organisations like Buurtzorg are difficult beasts to understand if your view is that people are fundamentally selfish. That was the starting point of NPM — that people need tangible incentives to serve the public good, which means their performance has to be measured so managers know who deserves punishment or reward. And people who ask for help must be assessed to see if they really need help, or are just trying to grab more than their share.

We’ve all grown used to thinking this way, so it’s hard work persuading policymakers that other motivations can bring out the best in people.

“Working within a system that is not open to these kinds of things is one of the most difficult parts,” de Blok tells me. “I’ve been talking for ten years with the NHS [Britain’s National Health Service]. It is so complicated in that system to create space and an environment where you can experiment and show an impact. It fits completely with the NHS first principles, and the nurses understand it, but the system is so complicated.”

Even the Danes, whose culture is highly compatible with the Dutch, are struggling to keep their first concrete experiment with two Buurtzorg-style home care teams on track. The social enterprise running the pilot filed for bankruptcy on 31 August, a week before a midterm evaluation was published by VIVE, the Danish Center for Social Science Research. The project’s director put the financial failure down to the hybrid nature of the project — citizens loved it, he said, and growth was steady at 15 per cent a month, but “systems could not keep up and we got too much resistance.” The VIVE review was ambivalent. “Buurtzorg challenges the Danish way of organising elderly care,” it reported, “and therefore there are also divided opinions about the model’s relevance and applicability in a Danish context.”

De Blok tells me he was in Denmark the previous week, and that “they want to adopt all the ideas of Buurtzorg.” He would be there again the following week for more conferences. And this is how it seems to go. A lot of conferences but remarkably little evidence yet for how the idea plays out in practice anywhere but in the Netherlands.

That said, there are sizeable Buurtzorg organisations in France, Sweden and Germany, and the European Union has invested €8 million in Transforming Integrated Care in the Community, a four-year research project guided by the principles of Buurtzorg. There are also several Buurtzorg partners in Asia, including in China, India, South Korea and Japan.

Buurtzorg Asia took some time to bed down, according to its boss Stephan Dyckerhoff. In Japan, for example, the first nurse team left after a few months, “overwhelmed by the situation of having to manage themselves,” Dyckerhoff wrote in a guest blog post for Agile Australia. “We now work using a ‘step by step’ approach, encouraging nurses to take more responsibility over time but having a lead nurse and/or general manager in place at the beginning.”

BMJ Open reported something similar in a 2018 study of an English neighbourhood nursing team using an adapted Buurtzorg model. The nurses loved it, the patients loved it, but it messed with the system. “Challenges were reported… in relation to the recognition and support of the concept of self-managing teams within a large bureaucratic healthcare organisation.”

Of course they were: the whole point of Buurtzorg, with its motto of “humanity over bureaucracy,” is to sideline bureaucracy, and that is never going to be popular with management.

There is one glaring absence from Buurtzorg International’s line-up — the United States. A home care organisation modelled on Buurtzorg began in 2014 in Stillwater, Minnesota, with financial support and guidance from the Dutch. It had four nurse employees and cared for its first few home care clients on a private-pay basis, but the team had to deal with multiple payers, each with its own rules and procedures. That made it difficult for nurses to follow the approach of their Dutch counterparts, who do their own billing and therefore make the savings in administration costs that underpin the Dutch organisation. Buurtzorg pulled out of the United States in 2017. De Blok says Americans keep calling him, attracted by Buurtzorg’s growth, but they miss the point. “It is designed on trust… not to make as much profit as possible.”

But he’s not suggesting everyone Buurtzorg partners with must be a not-for-profit. In fact, Neighbourhood Care is owned by Future Proof Australia, a management services firm run by Stroobach, who has a background in medical informatics, and his partner Brett Parker, an accountant. It needs to make a profit to survive, but Stroobach volunteers that the NDIS is very generously funded — and in aged care there’s a huge demand for home care services.

In 2017–18, almost a million Australians accessed home care services (versus 200,000 people living permanently in residential aged care), and part of the federal government’s response to the aged care royal commission was additional funding to deal with the 100,000-strong waiting list for home care packages. What the royal commission failed to do, according to Wollongong University’s Anita Westera and her colleague Kathy Eagar, was to “make recommendations to end excessive price gouging, particularly in home care, and to regulate excessive profit.”

This is not to suggest that Buurtzorg is looking to make money from vulnerable older Australians, but simply to note that the model — rather like the Montessori education model — is open to adaptation and interpretation, both within aged care and more broadly. All over the world, people are trying to rewire power structures. People like New York–based digital activist Jeremy Heimans, for example, who is better known in Australia as the founder of Get Up! He frequently uses Buurtzorg to describe what the future of work looks like. “What Buurtzorg gets right is it puts human beings front and centre,” he wrote in a piece published by LinkedIn.

A lot of people know intuitively that NPM isn’t working — that “you can’t successfully micromanage delivery of complex services from the centre,” as one former senior public servant put it to me — but don’t necessarily have the language to express what an alternative would look like.

Thea Snow, who runs the Melbourne office of the London-based Centre for Public Impact, has met some of these people in webinars she’s run throughout 2020–21 in conjunction with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government. Thousands of public servants have signed up to explore themes like humble leadership, power sharing, systemic thinking and meaningful measurement. They’re not only from  the social services, but also from areas like defence, fisheries, agriculture and planning.

For Snow — as for others — Buurtzorg represents “something bigger, a movement. It is about a new belief in what the role of government is, what frontline works are, how citizens interact with government… It is not mainstream, but I feel energised and positive about the ways this conversation is attracting people who are extremely passionate about reimagining government.”

As for Arnold Stroobach, he’s walking the talk over in the west. “We have similar conditions in Australia as there were in 2006 when Jos de Blok started Buurtzorg… What I hope is that just like in the Netherlands, it becomes a dominant model in healthcare with everyone working in the Buurtzorg way.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Of course, teaching is not as simple as transferring a half century of life lessons into grateful young minds. Even so, the profession exerts a pull on many midlife adults seeking a second career. Studies find that they are often motivated by desires to do more meaningful work, to have more flexible work schedules and to share what they have learned with young people. In the words of Dan, a former winemaker profiled on the website of Teach for Australia, an organisation that helps people make the transition, “It sounds trite, but I genuinely wanted to give back.”

Lucy Kellaway’s new book, Re-educated, is an affecting account of her own fateful decision to leave one outwardly successful life behind and begin another in front of a class at a disadvantaged London school. Working in “an office full of hacks” at the London Financial Times for two decades as the writer of a celebrated column, mother of four children and dutiful daughter of an ageing father (an émigré from 1940s Melbourne’s “cultural desert”), she was inwardly stagnant. Two years later, her father dead, she has quit her job, separated from her husband, bought her dream home and trained as a teacher. Along the way, and before even stepping into a classroom, she co-founded Now Teach, a charity that facilitates the career shift she is navigating.

Kellaway’s description of her pre-revolutionary life is unsentimental. She was more bored than burnt out by her work. “What sustained me all those years was a personality flaw that is common in journalists,” she writes. “I was both insecure and a show-off.” As the status anxiety and fear of failure that sustained her work diminished, she lost interest. At least in the telling, the dissolution of her marriage was equally deflating, more a matter of frustration with her husband’s tendency to clutter up the house than of bitter fighting.

Kellaway recognises herself as someone with a constant need to be busy, and it is her energetic pragmatism that drives her “to do something more useful” as a teacher and to launch Now Teach. Its success in attracting middle-aged recruits is a pleasant surprise to her, although not without wrinkles. One applicant signs up only to withdraw his application the next day after being reminded by his wife that he doesn’t like children.

In her illuminating treatment of the everyday experience of teaching, Kellaway observes that she works harder than she ever did as a journalist, although perhaps not as hard as in her first job as a banker, which she describes as “a lethal combination of stress and boredom.” The challenges of enforcing student discipline and buckling under the institutional discipline of endless forms, guidelines and new educational technologies are made vivid in a chapter that sketches a typical day.

Kellaway is astute on how teaching is both harder and easier for mature-age teachers than for their younger peers, and how the former’s success hinges on feeling comfortable with public failure, being bad at something all over again, and experiencing a loss of status and ambition. Over time, interestingly, she becomes more favourably disposed to aspects of teaching practice that can seem cynical or authoritarian to outsiders, such as teaching to the test and firmly enforcing arbitrary rules of behaviour and dress. Carrots must, at times, be supplemented by (non-literal) sticks.

Re-educated is mainly a story about the concrete realities of becoming a teacher, but much of its charm and heft come from its broader personal narrative. It demonstrates the value of female friendship, the disappointments of midlife dating, and Kellaway’s struggle with abandoning hair dye and going grey, accompanied by some characteristically sharp-witted remarks about “follicle sexism.” Men tend to come off poorly, but the embrace of family is celebrated.

Kellaway’s reflections on educational privilege are telling. “[T]he just-be-happy-darling school of education was a luxury for the middle classes,” who have a safety net in case of underachievement that is unavailable to other students. Her own elevation from indifferent high school student to gilded Oxford undergraduate to overpaid City of London banker is a case in point.

This memoir of reinvention makes an interesting contrast with American journalist David Brooks’s The Second Mountain, which I reviewed for Inside Story in 2019. Like Kellaway, Brooks underwent a midlife career switch and exited a longstanding marriage. His book chronicles a similar experience of stuckness followed by a pivotal decision to follow a new path through the remainder of life. That’s where the similarities end. Where Brooks likens the new path to climbing a second mountain, Kellaway presents it as not so much a grand quest as a process of stumbling through incompetence towards being a good-enough teacher. Her path is not so much up as down or sideways.

Brooks’s second mountain demands a profound moral transformation, in his case accompanied by a spiritual awakening, whereas Kellaway sees herself not so much uplifted as simply more useful. For Brooks, the first mountain represents individualistic achievement, the greying mountaineer leaving it for a second peak of belonging and community. Kellaway’s new life has its social benefits — she enjoys pub nights with her fellow teachers — but part of what motivated it was a desire to escape from the demands of belonging: the decades spent looking after children, husband and ageing parents.

Kellaway scripts her change-of-life direction half as comedy, complete with humiliations and faux pas, and half as factual reportage on the nitty-gritty of daily life in school. Throughout, she avoids generalising her experience to others, let alone pronouncing on the human condition, and she makes few prescriptions aside from recommending we become second-career teachers. She concludes that her life’s sharp turn has not really changed her, but merely changed the settings in which she operates and brought out aspects of herself that had been neglected.

Brooks’s script is more of a romance and a rallying cry. He documents a redemptive personal transformation, theorises it as a moral calling, and advocates it to others. The reader can decide how much these different ways of storying life changes should be attributed to transatlantic cultural differences, and how much to gender or personality.

Re-educated is an enjoyable and edifying read. Without having any of the usual trappings of inspirational writing, it somehow convinces readers of a certain age that life change is an enlivening option, while reminding them that it is neither easy nor reliably fun. Kellaway doesn’t pretend that we can change who we are merely by acts of will, or that all of us can sustain a new calling without disillusionment.

What is refreshing about this story is that it focuses on changing not who we are but what we do. The key is to be “released from the force of habit,” to take the leap into new environments, and to declutter one’s priorities. Her message is heartening: “it is possible, desirable and perfectly natural for people to start again in their 50s.” •

Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair
By Lucy Kellaway | Ebury Press | $39.50 | 256 pages

The post New tricks appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the stories come from the “golden age” of Australian journalism, bathed in the sweet light of nostalgia but also revealing a dark side. Others describe what happened when the golden age ended with the collapse of the business model that supported most journalism.

Although the collapse is seared into journalists’ consciousnesses, it isn’t well understood in the community. Recent research by the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra found that two-thirds of Australians aren’t aware that commercial news organisations are less profitable than they were ten years ago. And yet this is the story that underlies almost every failure of today’s journalism.

The book being launched was Upheaval, edited by journalism academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, which draws on interviews with fifty-seven journalists conducted in partnership with the National Library’s oral history program. Rich with anecdote and personal perspectives, it includes vivid accounts of the traumatic loss of a vocation.

There are prominent names here. Amanda Meade tells us about working for the Australian, and how she got into trouble for being seen speaking to the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien at a time when the Murdoch paper was attacking the public broadcaster. George Megalogenis confides his thoughts when he put his hand up for redundancy at what he correctly deduced was a tipping point for the industry — in 2012, when both Fairfax and News Corporation shed up to a fifth of their editorial staff. David Marr details the twists and turns of his career. Cartoonist John Spooner recalls realising that he was considered more disposable than the Age’s other flagship cartoonists, Michael Leunig and Ron Tandberg.

All of this raises a question. Were things better “back then” — by which I mean in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, when newspapers earned rivers of gold from classified advertising, families gathered around a single screen to watch the evening news, and newsrooms were awash with resources and largely unquestioned power.

I am as prone to nostalgia as anyone. I started my career as a cadet at the Age in 1982. (Matthew Ricketson was part of the same intake.) In the years that followed, I succeeded in grumbling my way through and out the other side of what I now know was the golden age.

I remember newsrooms that, as Upheaval puts it, smelt “of stale sweat from the adrenaline and anxiety that drive daily journalism; of beer-soaked, never-quite-cleaned carpets and… cigarette smoke.” I remember the extraordinary resources we had: drivers to take us to stories; many, many subeditors to check our work; an army of “readers” who were employed to spot the mistakes that had still been missed.

As Marr recalls, newsrooms were unusual workplaces, “crazy universities” full of experts on the strangest of things. Newspaper men — and they were mostly men — were a breed apart. They were not the polished, tertiary-educated journalists who now dominate the newsrooms. They had a hard, twinkly-eyed charm, a knockabout empathy, a quick wit, and an intelligence that, if they had belonged to a different generation, would have sent them to university.

They dominated not only numerically but also because of their liveliness of mind. They were not in any sense intellectual — in fact, they were largely anti-intellectual. But they could grab a telephone and file a story in no time at all. They marshalled their thoughts quickly, put them forcefully and moved on. They were arrogant, of course. But that arrogance was masked by the real power that came with having access to the means of publication and broadcast.

Upheaval also documents some of the dark side. Jo Chandler talks about concealing her pregnancy at the Age in the knowledge that it could rob her of an expected promotion. Michelle Grattan recalls being denied the trades hall round because she might be exposed to “bad language.” Worse than this are the accounts of sexual harassment and assault, of women who could not bend down in the office without attracting offensive comments. Quite literally, it was hard for women to move, or even to exist, in these workplaces.

What brought this world to an end? It’s a complex story, but the dominant theme is the collapse of the business model, brought about by the internet.

The destruction came in two waves. First, the classifieds disappeared to dedicated online sites that better enabled people to search for jobs, cars and homes. At the same time came the beginning of the end of “appointment television,” with people able to view whenever they wished.

The industry was still struggling with that disruption when the second wave hit, starting around 2007. This was the rise of Google, Facebook and other social media platforms. They quickly grabbed most of the remaining advertising revenue.

Reliable estimates of job losses are hard to get. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance estimates that 5000 journalists’ jobs have been lost over the last ten years. Data provided to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission by the main media companies show that the number of journalists in traditional print media businesses (including their websites) fell by 20 per cent between 2014 and 2018, at a time when Australia’s population and economy were growing strongly.

The easy conclusion, of course, is that things must have been better “back then.” More outlets, particularly local newspapers. More reporting of local courts, councils and public figures. More interstate and overseas correspondents. More specialist journalists with depth of expertise. In Canberra, more and deeper engagement with thinking at the highest levels of the public service.

But not everything is worse. In the golden age, newsrooms were overwhelmingly run by white men, and nobody saw that as a problem. We told ourselves that it was our job to reflect the community we served, but we were almost completely blind to the absurdity of that claim when women were sidelined and people of colour almost completely absent from the newsroom. Things are a bit better now, with a long way still to go.

The mainstream media has undoubtedly lost power, and with it some of its arrogance. Even the Murdoch press can no longer turn an election through sheer vote-swaying heft. Instead, it attempts to fix the parameters of public debate — though even that power is under challenge.

The ranks of professional journalists might have thinned, but many more people are actively engaged in the newsmaking process. Consider, for example, how data analysts, putting their work out on Twitter, have contributed to our understanding of the pandemic.

The professional media attempts to maintain its position at the centre by corralling the work of others, largely in the format of the “live blog” — a kind of aggregation of things that are happening “out there,” including on social media. There is plenty to celebrate in the rise of social media platforms: voices once excluded from public debate can now be heard. And there is also plenty to fear, for the same reason.

Above all, the thinning of journalistic ranks affects just about everything about the media. Surely one of the reasons the pandemic has been politicised is because it is being reported by political journalists. The specialists of old — the medical reporters, the science reporters — are largely gone. And the disruption is not over.

Plenty of experimentation with business models has taken place. For serious media, clickbait didn’t work. Now the name of the game is persuading people to pay to access news online.

What will people pay for? We are still finding out, but there are encouraging signs that good journalism is the answer. The world’s serious newspapers now earn more than half their revenue from subscriptions.

Countering that optimism, the University of Canberra’s research tells us that only 13 per cent of Australians are paying for online news, which is below the global average of 17 per cent. The vast majority of those who are currently not paying say it is unlikely that they will pay in the future.

I don’t think I am only being nostalgic when I say that it is more important than ever for society to pay attention to and care about its journalistic capacity, which these days is more an ecosystem than a monoculture. •

The post Bylines and bygones appeared first on Inside Story.

But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bundaberg is not an isolated case, or even the worst. The same stories are heard in many other horticultural regions around Australia. The industry relies on a vulnerable, largely non-unionised pool of casual workers, some of them islanders brought here from nine neighbouring countries under the federal government’s Seasonal Worker Programme, a lot more of them foreign backpackers needing their eighty-eight days of farm work to renew their visas for a second year (or six months for a third year).

In a third category of exploitable labour are the mostly Asian workers variously called “overstayers” and “undocumented” who come into Australia on visitor visas and then either apply for refugee status — a process that can take three years while they go out and work — or go off the radar. An estimated 70,000 of them are working in rural Australia. Some were visible in a strawberry field I passed near Childers, a town inland from Bundaberg, and they moved nervously behind a line of trees when they noticed Geoff Smith and me looking at them.

“What’s the difference between 160 years ago and now?” says Smith, a retired construction worker and union delegate. With his wife Jane, granddaughter of a cane worker kidnapped as a boy from Tanna island in what is now Vanuatu, he provides pro bono pastoral care and advocacy for the many workers from Vanuatu among Bundaberg’s seasonal labour force.

Smith answers his own question: “It’s the aeroplane, rather than the schooner.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but with a kernel of truth.

According to Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary in the immigration department, exploitation of foreign workers has been on the rise in Australia. That has happened despite federal parliament’s passing the Modern Slavery Act in 2018, which requires employers with turnover of $100 million or more to report any such slavery in their supply chains.

“The issue is not just confined to undocumented workers but extends to migrant workers brought to Australia under a range of visas,” Rizvi writes in a book he’s finalising for publication. “Over the last six years, there has been a major increase in the misuse of visitor visas and the asylum system to bring in migrant workers, effectively as indentured labour.” Employers and labour hire companies are unlikely to be caught, he adds, and the penalties are comparatively minor. “The rewards from exploitation of migrant workers are substantial; the risks are small.”

But the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted this modern system of exploitation. With the numbers of foreign backpackers in the country down to about 50,000 from the usual 140,000, and with seasonal workers reduced to about 7000 from the pre-Covid 12,000, Bundaberg is sharing in a nationwide shortage of farm labour. At least temporarily, bargaining power has been reversed.

“There’s not enough workers to go round,” says a Bundaberg grower I’ll call Dudley. (He asked that his real name not be used.) “Once all this bullshit’s over and all the backpackers come back, the boot’ll be on the other foot. Now the boot’s on their foot, kicking our arses.”

Anecdotal evidence points to a lift in wages. “I had a bloke ring me the other day, and he’s whingeing that some other prick’s paying his workers a couple of dollars a bucket more than what he is,” Dudley tells me. “I said, mate, I was telling you this was going to happen.” A labour recruiter in Bundaberg tells of a sweet potato grower offering a bonus of $2 on top of the $24.90 hourly award rate, to be paid retrospectively if the worker stays at least five weeks.

The same recruiter says some growers are even willing to consider hiring local Australian workers. He has placed a few, including some with disabilities. Bundaberg has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 11 per cent in the December quarter, but the recruiter says it’s hard to induce young people off the steady, if low, lifeline of JobSeeker for work that has a reputation of being short-term and brutally demanding.

“They have been shut out from the unskilled labour force and are now entrenched in the Centrelink system,” says the recruiter. “Some are only interested in putting down that they applied for our jobs, and 50 per cent don’t turn up if they are given positions. But it’s getting better, and we are committed to the 50 per cent who do turn up.”

The growers’ association’s Bree Grima says farmers increasingly rely on local workers. But the federal government’s offer of $6000 relocation assistance has not helped much in bringing in workers from elsewhere in Australia, she says, with only a 0.3 per cent vacancy rate in Bundaberg’s rental housing.

The labour shortage has allowed workers to bargain down charges in backpacker hostels, which are often tied to labour hire companies, or move to independent accommodation in motels. They can also pick the more congenial work — picking avocados, macadamias and passionfruit, for instance, rather than collecting sweet potatoes or watermelons in vast unshaded fields.

“I’m up on my cherry picker among the avocado trees,” says one British backpacker taking a break from his finance sector job back home. “I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can smoke weed all day.”

The islanders face more uncertainty. They’re here under the Seasonal Worker Programme, administered by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, or DESE, or are among the 2500 or so unskilled and semiskilled workers in the parallel Pacific Labour Scheme, run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which targets a wider range of industries.

Coming from Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tuvalu and Timor-Leste, they are normally tied to one employer — the seasonal workers for up to two consecutive six-month periods, the Pacific labour staff for one to three years. With the Covid crisis, workers have been allowed to stay in Australia after their visas expire. They are free to change jobs as they wish, though some seem unaware of this rule and others fear being dubbed absconders or unsatisfactory workers — and sent home — if they complain or seek a new job.

Two workers from Vanuatu I meet have worked around the Queensland towns of Emerald, Maryborough, Childers and Bundaberg, picking grapes, oranges and mandarins, watermelons and avocados. They’ve paid up to $230 a week for accommodation, sometimes for bunk space so tight they couldn’t sit up.

They mention “ethical” employers, naming one big avocado grower, and others who don’t fit that description. “One never explained the piece rate,” says one of them. “He changed it so it equalled the hourly rate for the fastest worker. The rest got lower. You didn’t have a choice.”

Both now have work with a grower who hopes to keep them long-term, one earning about $1500 a week on piece rates, the other around $1000 a week on the hourly award rate. They worry about illness, and whether the insurance the employer says it has taken out will actually cover them. “It would be better if we had proper healthcare like the Australians have,” one says. “We work here the same way, and pay tax — why not?”

According to ANU Pacific affairs experts Richard Curtain and Stephen Howes, some 48 per cent of seasonal workers are employed by four labour hire companies, and the rest by smaller labour recruiters or approved growers. The reliance on intermediaries creates a gulf between the islanders and farmers that contrasts with the goals of New Zealand’s longer-running Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, which makes a greater effort to incorporate pastoral care for visiting workers.

Under the NZ scheme, island workers return repeatedly to the same farms and vineyards, and in some cases employers visit them in their home villages in the off-season. The aim is to build a group of workers “who keep coming back,” says Jill Biddington, an organiser with Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA in Sydney, who monitors Pacific island workers in Australia. “Australia just wants cheap labour. I’ve never seen an Australian farmer over there.”

In many cases, labour hire companies in rural Australia work closely with hostel owners, or operate hostels themselves. Until the pandemic, in fact, the hostels were the only channels for employment. Seasonal worker papers or a foreign passport were prerequisites and, says Geoff Smith, “locals didn’t get a look-in.”

One such hostel in an inland town is essentially a collection of temporary cabins, with gas burners in semi-enclosed spaces for cooking and a central block of toilets and showers. It was raining when I visited, and a group of backpackers sat out unpaid downtime looking at their computers and phones. One young woman pointed to a square camping tent for which she was charged $110 a week. Down the hill, two young men from Vanuatu pointed to a long corrugated iron shed where they live four to a room.

At my motel in Bundaberg, Aurora Garcia, a Spanish-Canadian backpacker, tells me she had paid $215 a week for a bunk bed at the inland hostel for several months early last year. The rooms were stifling hot in summer and frigidly cold in winter. The flammable walls meant that heaters weren’t allowed. The washroom was an open walk away, with three toilet cubicles and three showers for forty or fifty women, and the same ratio for men. When everyone returned from work late in the afternoon, the shower queue stretched across the compound. Then, eight people per gas burner, they tried to cook dinner.

“When I went down the hill to talk with one of the Vanuatu guys I met out picking, the manager came and ordered me back, and threatened to kick me out,” says Garcia. “It was like racial segregation: white backpackers up here, islanders down there, and no mixing allowed.”

She worked next at an avocado farm whose product was recently featured by a major national supermarket chain. There, she says, the supervisor exercised discipline fit for a military drill squad, ordering pickers who fell behind to do star jumps and push-ups as punishment.

Until February this year, a converted pub in Bundaberg housed nearly one hundred seasonal workers and backpackers, each paying $200 a week for a bunk bed, with up to twelve to a room. Some had been brought there when the owners, operating as an unauthorised recruiter, drove a bus out to Childers and recruited seasonal workers with the promise of better pay. According to Smith, they were delivered to growers nearer town and told that, as “absconders,” they were at risk of deportation if they complained.

Then, in February, the owners told the workers to move out, for reasons that are not clear. The move roughly coincided with a visit by Vanuatu’s high commissioner, Samson Vilvil Fare, who was told the exodus was to allow for renovations. When I went into the hotel to enquire, I was met by a young man who, in a menacing manner, ordered me to leave.

Vilvil Fare didn’t consider that the hostels he saw in Childers and Bundaberg met the standards he would expect from a “first world” country. “When I’m visiting those areas I am having lots of questions raised — I’m also dumbfounded, I’m shocked, I’m worried,” he tells me. Media reports about the conditions seem to have had no impact, and nor has academic fieldwork. “Since I’ve been here I haven’t seen much change when it comes to welfare for our people.”

Backpackers don’t usually have to endure these conditions for more than a few months; they aren’t generally saving money for their families; and they often have parental credit cards to fall back on. But Pacific islanders are much more culturally adrift and financially constrained.

Many don’t have the command of English needed to understand contracts, payslips, superannuation deductions, bank accounts, medical insurance, tax return requirements or avenues for complaints. Geoff Smith has to check they’ve cut off recurring subscriptions for phones, streaming services and so on before they leave, so that refunds of tax and super are not eaten up when they are eventually paid. Employers don’t explain how costs like airfares can be recovered. Young workers from the Polynesian islands in particular can have unrealistic expectations of how much money they’ll be able to send back for church projects as well as their own families.

Gouging is rife. The Bundaberg recruiter tells me of workers being charged $400 each for transport from work on the Sunshine Coast to a new workplace in Bundaberg. (A train fare is around $35.) “The contractors rip them off,” says Dudley, the grower. “Then the farmer gets the bad name for not paying the worker properly.” He now refuses to use labour hire companies, hiring individual staff himself.

The inclusion of female workers in the schemes has added the new problem of sexual coercion and assault. Geoff Smith says he’s been told of several cases where male islander team leaders tell women in their work gang, “You are my woman while we are here.” Smith says the problem is largely ignored. “The women don’t want to make a fuss. They have a fear of being sent home.”

Islanders unused to driving conditions in Australia are sometimes expected to drive work vehicles, or buy old cars to get to their workplaces, despite having experienced only the slow and sparse traffic back home. So far, says DESE, twenty-five seasonal workers have died in Australia since its scheme started in 2012, mostly as a result of car accidents or “pre-existing” illnesses. No one I met can remember any inquests. “Twenty-five is just extraordinary for such a small visa,” says Abul Rizvi.

Both of the federal departments administering the labour schemes are reluctant to comment on how they exercise pastoral care and enforce regulations. DESE says it is in the process of appointing “up to nineteen” “mobility officers” to carry out these roles, but it seems they will be located in state capitals. Last October the department announced that $9 million would be spent on seasonal worker welfare, and this April it gave $1 million to the Salvation Army for pastoral care.

Geoff Smith says he has only seen DESE officials when Vanuatu’s high commissioner came to look around Childers and Bundaberg, and after Bundaberg’s Federal hostel burnt down in July last year (without loss of life). Jill Biddington says she has never seen any DESE officers in the field and suspects most are satisfied with photos sent by hostel operators. “No one is enforcing standards,” she says. “It’s all self-regulation, tick-a-box stuff.”

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s office says it pays special attention to complaints by the vulnerable migrant workers, and has an agreement with the Department of Home Affairs that they won’t be subject to visa action for complaining. In 2019–20, it says, 44 per cent of matters it took to court involved visa-holder workers. The total amount recovered for these foreign workers was $1.7 million, while the ombudsman also won nearly $3 million in court-awarded penalties. Only 12 per cent of the cases the ombudsman acted on were in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Rizvi’s observations about the odds of getting caught and penalised, or even exposed, seem to hold.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade set up a Pacific Labour Facility to administer its Pacific Labour Scheme in October 2018. At some point the facility was outsourced to the international private aid-management company Palladium. Its office in Brisbane refers media queries to the department. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop, who supervised the disbanding of the widely admired AusAID agency within her portfolio and a huge reduction in Australia’s foreign aid program, joined Palladium’s board soon after she left politics in 2019.

Amid widespread criticism that the Pacific and backpacker schemes lack proper supervision at ground level, calls are being made for responsibility to be shifted. Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA’s Biddington suggests the Seasonal Worker Programme be shifted from DESE to Foreign Affairs. “DESE just fails to have the sensitivity needed for working with people from different cultures,” she tells me.

No one is suggesting that the two Pacific island worker schemes should be scrapped. When they work well, they allow villagers from nine Pacific nations to learn new skills and work practices, and to save up several thousand dollars to invest in small businesses, cyclone-proof housing or higher education for their children. While much official aid gets consumed by urban political elites or recycled back to Australia, the two schemes direct money from Australia to productive, grassroots use. They also build people-to-people contacts between Australia and its inner ring of neighbours.

But the behaviour of some labour hire companies and farmers risks tainting some Australian products — meat, fruit, vegetables and wine — with the modern slavery label, and denying them certification as ethically sourced. This would be a propaganda gift to countries smarting under criticism for their own forced labour. China and Xinjiang leap to mind. Trade sanctions could follow.

With the federal government now predicting international travel will not open up until mid 2022, regions like Bundaberg face another year of labour shortage. Rather than waiting and hoping for the old conditions to return, Australia could seize the opportunity for structural change in the regional labour supply, and implement measures to disperse backpackers around a wider range of sectors, increase opportunities for workers from the Pacific, and get Australians into the farm work from which they have been effectively excluded. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Bitter harvest appeared first on Inside Story.

This approach was on full display after former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins told her story in February. Caught off guard by the outpouring of outrage that followed her devastating claims, the Morrison government ordered no fewer than five reviews.

Not counting the continuing police investigation, there’s the Foster review of how serious incidents are handled at Parliament House, the Gaetjens review of who knew what and when about the alleged rape, the Kunkel inquiry into the behaviour of the prime minister’s media staff, the Hammond review of how Coalition offices operate, and the Jenkins work on parliament’s workplace culture.

Three months later and counting, with parliament back and Senate estimates in session, we have had several (painstaking) opportunities this week to learn where these inquiries are up to.

After estimates yielded little information on Monday morning, Anthony Albanese’s first question to Scott Morrison in question time was why none of the reviews had been concluded. Probably having guessed something like this was coming, the prime minister said he was expecting the Foster review “very, very shortly.”

As it turns out, Stephanie Foster — a deputy secretary in his department — finished her report at 8pm that evening. Later the same night, she also learned Morrison would issue a media statement about her key recommendations the next morning. The two had not yet talked about her final report.

Foster appeared at estimates on Tuesday, alongside finance minister Simon Birmingham, who was representing Morrison and is heavily involved in the government’s Higgins response. Birmingham said he only learned of the announcement that morning and had not read the whole report. Despite a barrage of questions from an unimpressed Penny Wong, he couldn’t say whether it would be released publicly.

Pending the detail, the headline recommendations seem sensible. On top of a previously announced 24/7 support line for current or former parliamentary staff (“1800 APH SPT”), they include face-to-face education for managers and staff, and an independent, confidential complaints mechanism. The report will go to cabinet next week and will indeed — as we later learned from Morrison in question time — be released publicly for more consultation.

But the rush and confusion around the report’s release struck a worrying note. It also came after the officials who run building security (a different part of the bureaucracy from Foster) told estimates there have been “no formal changes” in the policies governing how parliamentary staff handle serious incidents. No changes, that is, during the two years since Higgins’s alleged rape in a ministerial office, after she returned to the building late at night with a senior colleague, obviously intoxicated.

Another review head, prime minister’s department secretary Phil Gaetjens, also appeared before estimates. Gaetjens has the delicate job of examining exactly when the prime minister’s office found out about the alleged rape. This was paused in March so as not to clash with the Federal Police’s investigation, but has since restarted.

Well before this week, the vibes were bumpy. Remember how Morrison declined to mention that Gaetjens’s work had paused when asked about progress back in March? And remember how it emerged that no plans had been made to speak to Higgins?

It was hard to feel more confident following Gaetjens’s appearance. He could only provide a loose time frame for completion, saying he needed “probably weeks… certainly not months.” Nor could he say how many staff members had been interviewed or if the report will be made public. The interviews with staff have been done confidentially, he said, and although he still hasn’t talked to Higgins, a meeting is now “scheduled.”

But while Gaetjens’s release is still to be confirmed, and we don’t have the full detail of Foster’s work, another report landed, complete and public, on Tuesday afternoon. These were the findings of Morrison’s chief-of-staff, John Kunkel, who has been examining claims the PM’s political staff negatively briefed journalists about Higgins’s partner, David Sharaz.

Higgins made a formal complaint a month after the backgrounding claims were first reported by the media, writing to Kunkel that “numerous journalists” had told her about a campaign against Sharaz. On Tuesday morning in estimates, Labor made repeated attempts to unearth details of Kunkel’s work. But come question time, Morrison tabled the report unexpectedly, declaring emphatically that Kunkel had “found in the negative.” On that basis, some media reports suggested his office had been “cleared.”

If you read the four-page report, you’ll find that Kunkel actually wrote that he wasn’t in a position to say for sure because he had found no “first-hand” evidence. (Not surprisingly, most press gallery journalists weren’t forthcoming about what they’d been told in private conversations.) On top of this, Higgins reportedly had no warning Kunkel’s review would be released, and didn’t know that parts of her discussion with him would be quoted in the document.

And the other reviews? In February, Morrison asked Liberal MP Celia Hammond (who took over Julie Bishop’s old seat) to look at the culture of Coalition offices; in March, sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins was appointed to look at parliament’s workplace culture. If Morrison was seeking to shine a special spotlight on his own party, the intention was shortlived. Within weeks, the Hammond review was rolled into Jenkins’s. This certainly avoids double-ups and provides a more arm’s-length way of reviewing Coalition offices (something Hammond was concerned about), but sceptics also point out that Liberal Party practices and culture in Canberra will escape a focused review.

Jenkins is seeking submissions from anyone who has worked at Parliament House. Her independent process — funded by the government but run by the Australian Human Rights Commission — is due to provide an initial response in July and a final report in November. Both will be made public.

Leaving aside Jenkins’s inquiry, the treatment of the four other reviews has created a growing and disturbing pile of niggles. Confusion, obfuscation, a lack of detail, a lack of warning and, in some instances, a lack of respect for Higgins — it doesn’t look like a government sincerely doing everything within its power to deal with a problem and try to get ahead of it. It looks much more like a government going through the motions in the hope that will be enough to make the whole thing go away. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Come in spinner appeared first on Inside Story.

To these basic errors of human evolution, computer scientist and author Cal Newport would now add the invention of email. Our lives, he argues, have been made wretched by this brilliant technological innovation.

In his new book, A World Without Email, Newport makes a strong case against this pervasive method of communication. We live in servitude to our email servers, he says: always reachable by anyone, all the bloody time. At the heart of this digital catastrophe is something he dubs “the hyperactive hive mind,” the new reality in which everyone, everywhere, can communicate with everyone else with ease — and so they do.

Numerous studies have shown how dominant email has become in ordinary office life. The average knowledge worker sends and receives 126 of the things every working day. In an eight-hour day, that’s more than one every four minutes. Ping. Ping. PING!

“There’s something uniquely deranging about digital messaging,” Newport argues. “We depend on email, but we also kind of hate it.” It renders office workers less productive and more irritable, creating a debilitating scarcity of uninterrupted time. Those essential parts of the day when the real work gets done have been invaded by streams of customer satisfaction surveys, announcements of new training modules, and badly written email chains from colleagues in far-off time zones.

All of this might be bearable if it weren’t for one little problem: the incompatibility between modern-day electronic messaging and our own information-processing capacity. As Newport puts it, “Our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.” Multitasking, he says, is a dangerous myth. Our prefrontal cortex just ain’t up to the dual challenge of thinking coherently while dealing with an overloaded inbox.

We also thrive on conversations held in synchronous time. In other words, we like meetings where we get updated about the project we’re working on at the same time as everyone else. “Meetings, bloody meetings” may have been the collective moan of the pre-email age, but it was better than our fellow workers responding tardily to no-longer-urgent requests.

For most of human history we lived in small groups in which, Newport says, we felt anxious if we didn’t talk to everyone else in the tribe at least once a day. Now we live in massive digital villages, and our atavistic desire to make and maintain connection means we have conniptions if we don’t answer every damned email.

Our social anxieties about communication have also created what Newport calls a “cycle of responsiveness.” We quickly learn that the etiquette of the digital world means always being available online, no matter how grumpy it makes us. Before we can say “sleep deprivation is death,” we’re sharing our bed with a smartphone.

Despite his book’s title, Newport isn’t against electronic messaging as such; what drives him to despair is how we use it. Having got office workers of the world nodding in furious agreement, Newport courageously offers some solutions.

In 2017 a German entrepreneur named Lasse Rheingans invented the No Email Working Day. Productivity went up, even though he allowed his workers to arrive at 8am and leave by one in the afternoon. “Rheingans’ goal was for everyone to slow down,” writes Newport. “To approach their work more deliberately and with less frantic action.” Emailing is often just a hollow masquerade of real labour.

Newport also wants companies to use software packages that allow projects to be undertaken without giving everyone involved carte blanche to email everyone else in an unstructured, time-wasting manner. An applications called Trello, for example, allows organisations to work on projects without using email at all; everyone in the team can access the necessary data and decide when they need to jump in and get things done.

Autonomy at work is one of life’s greatest satisfactions. Dealing with email when it’s out of your control is a lot like being pecked to death by a flock of geese. But like a lot of bad things in modern life — the third glass of wine, the overuse of Uber Eats — it will be hard to vanquish.

In the end, I think, Newport underplays the barriers to change. What he calls Attention Capital — the ability to think without interruption — is in constant tension with the Dopamine Economy. Somewhere in Palo Alto, frazzled, email-tormented workers spend long, exhausting days trying to make staying online as addictive as possible for all their miserable counterparts by tapping into those parts of our ancient brains that derive pleasure from constant stimulation. •

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Despite the lack of fanfare, the message could not have been plainer. “Urgent” action was needed to deal with workplace sexual harassment. A national survey in 2018 had found 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men had been sexually harassed at work in the past twelve months.

“It occurs in every industry and at every level across Australia,” sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins warned. “This is not simply the story of ‘a few bad apples.’” Having spent eighteen months looking at the issue, she had fifty-five recommendations ready to fix it, including changing the Sex Discrimination Act, simplifying the complaints system and putting more onus on employers to eliminate harassment.

Porter and women’s minister Marise Payne said they would “carefully consider” the report. And then thirteen months went by. Granted, things have been happening elsewhere for the government (and, more lately, for Porter). But this excuse only travels so far. Most of Australia has been out of lockdown since mid 2020 and parliament has been back since August. And the pandemic hasn’t stopped the government pursuing non-Covid issues like industrial relations and university fee reforms.

All this blurred into the background on Thursday when Scott Morrison and new attorney-general Michaelia Cash held a sombre press conference in the prime minister’s courtyard to announce their “roadmap” response to Respect@Work. Morrison said the government was “embracing” the report, describing it as a “game-changer.”

New legislation will be drafted to make it easier for employers to fire sexual harassers. MPs, public servants and judges will no longer be exempt from the Sex Discrimination Act. More funding will come in the May budget.

Jenkins praised the response as “constructive,” but it’s hard not to be cynical about how Respect@Work is being used. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but the government is now taking the credit for establishing the review, when it was very much a joint initiative with Jenkins.

The government’s headline message is it is either agreeing to — “in full, in part or in principle” — or noting all the recommendations. Sound confusing? Well, the detail of its response to the fifty-five recommendations didn’t reach journalists until more than an hour after the press conference, and the chance to ask informed questions, had ended.

Indeed, despite its embrace of the report, the government has only “noted” one of its key recommendations — that a “positive duty” be imposed on all employers to take “reasonable and proportionate measures” to eliminate sex discrimination. For UTS law academic Karen O’Connell, who provided advice to the Respect@Work inquiry, this is a “significant missed opportunity to genuinely prevent sexual harassment.”

Then there is the pre-emptive finger-pointing. Cash is talking about how the states need to get involved and has written them a letter asking about their plans. Morrison says “issues” with the draft legislation still remain to be worked through, and is ominously pleading for “bipartisanship.”

There’s nothing shocking about a government sitting on a report and then trying to avoid being pinned down. Or trying to claim more credit than it deserves. But this is no ordinary report and this is not an ordinary political time. It comes as the government scrambles to regain a sense of authority (and, dare we suggest, empathy) over the “women’s issue” and arrest the anger and frustration felt both within the walls of Parliament House and well beyond it.

It is difficult to believe we would be seeing this response at this time had it not been for Brittany Higgins. Respect@Work was hidden away at the back of the political freezer until advocates and non-government MPs started to call for a response in the wake of her story.

Polling suggests the government really does have a problem. Between last November and 29 March, according to the latest Essential Report, women’s approval of Morrison dropped from 67 per cent to 49 per cent. Men, though, haven’t budged from 65 per cent. Labor’s internal research is showing a similar gender gap. Women are disappointed and angry with Morrison’s response to both individual survivors and issues of harassment and inequality more broadly.

Liberal strategists are similarly aware that women have been moving away from the party for years, and this ties in with a broader international trend regarding female voters and conservative parties. But they also know they have a specific problem among women under forty. Or not so much a problem, as one Liberal MP notes, as “a horror show.”

Within the Liberal camp, there are those who think the government is taking sensible, concrete steps (setting up a women’s cabinet, changing laws, holding summits) and needs to be patient. According to this reasoning, the climate at the moment is unforgiving and the Coalition will be damned for whatever it does. As long as there is demonstrable change, it can ride this out.

But there are also those who think their party leadership doesn’t “get it” and (still) sees the issue as a purely political problem. And this means the current response won’t be good enough. Many might find it hard to reconcile the prime minister’s stated commitment to eliminating bad behaviour with Andrew Laming’s remaining on the government benches.

But Labor strategists aren’t celebrating either. As one told me, male voters are “staring at the floor, waiting for the conversation to move on.” Morrison may have taken an enduring hit to his standing among women, but at least one half of the electorate won’t bust him for it.

Meanwhile, Jenkins is busy with another inquiry. And this is one the government really did commission. Due to report in November, she is examining what it’s like to work at Parliament House. The Human Rights Commission is recruiting more staff to help her, hopes to open submissions next month and will provide an update in July.

Staff around the building — both Liberal and Labor — are being encouraged to contribute and the government sees this as one of its key planks for a gender reset. So long as Jenkins doesn’t come up with anything too ambitious or impractical (such as a mechanism to sack MPs), the government will be able to show some evidence it is sorting out “toxic” parliament, ahead of the election, earlyish next year.

Provided it doesn’t sit on the report for fifteen months. •

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By the time McManus took the podium, the crowd on the lawn before Parliament House was well primed. If it was anger that brought them together, a sense of common purpose was to the fore. Host Julia Zemiro kept the mood buoyant, emphasising the diversity of the assembly and the fact that this was in every sense a “safe” gathering, albeit one too risky for the prime minister to front up to.

After a gracious welcome to country from Aunty Violet Sheridan, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, a Traditional Owner from Central Queensland, spoke further about the importance of Capital Hill as ancient ceremonial ground and called for attention to “the quiet stillness of our country.” She evoked the principle of deep listening, and as they listened to her, those who had come for a protest march more closely resembled a mob in the Aboriginal sense of the term, a collective bonded by fundamental commonalities.

Not that anger was left out of the equation. According to march organiser Janine Hendry, the rollout of protests across forty cities was “an outpouring of rage about gendered violence.” Saxon Mullins, who heads a sexual assault and advocacy centre, spoke of lives stolen by years of trauma. Ballarat lawyer Ingrid Irwin appeared in a gown and wig to denounce a criminal justice system that fails to give sexual assault victims the right to a lawyer. Madhumitha Janagaraja, president of the ANU Students’ Association, introduced herself as an abuse survivor and emphasised the increased risk for those with disabilities in a system that is “not on our side.”

Canberra journalist Virginia Haussegger appeared with Biff Ward, founding member of the Canberra women’s liberation movement, whose proclamation, “It feels like a tidal wave of rage out there,” appeared in headlines a few hours later. Katharine Murphy, writing in the Guardian, declared that “voices raised in anger are echoing through the land.” The rage factor commands attention, and has certainly captured the imagination of journalists.

Soon after Ward finished speaking, Nine correspondent Chris Uhlmann took up a position at the upper end of the lawn, overlooking the march, and commenced a report to camera with the words, “Rage outside parliament is washing over politics.” The camera operator stopped him. “There’s no rage,” he said, gesturing towards the crowd which, shortly before, was illustrating Ward’s pronouncement very effectively. “Got to wait for the rage,” he added. And so they waited. The crowd, however, didn’t oblige. Those gathered were listening in deep silence to Brittany Higgins, who, battling to maintain her composure, had made an unscheduled appearance “out of necessity.”

Brief bursts of clapping and other sounds of encouragement punctuated her speech, but these were quiet moments, and the quietness itself was perhaps the most important message of the day. Sometimes you have to just listen. The three generations brought together in this crowd harboured reserves not just of rage, but also of generosity, social maturity and moral intelligence.

Little of that was on display inside Parliament House when, as the marchers dispersed, the government assembled for question time. Forced to acknowledge what was happening outside, prime minister Scott Morrison embarked on a waffling address full of double negatives (“this is not to suggest that good faith and genuine efforts are not being made”) and vacuous parentheses (“I would hope”; “… as it has, until now, and I hope into the future”). This was ready ammunition for opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who remarked that Morrison was displaying “not so much a tin ear as a wall of concrete.” There followed a succession of opposition questions drawn from statements made by Brittany Higgins.

Those on the government frontbench may have looked somewhat uncomfortable, but not acutely so. Here they were, in their place of greater safety, and for every challenge from across the floor there came a question from its own ranks about the marvels of the current economic recovery, to which Morrison and Josh Frydenberg responded with all the impassioned conviction that was entirely missing from the government’s responses to the urgent and fundamental demands for social justice delivered on its doorstep.

So what are we left with, after this extraordinary day of reckoning? Not much, if those at the rallies walk away carrying the burden of what is now a tired old adage about maintaining the rage. In an insightful article about rage and the rise of the women’s movement, Haussegger quotes American writer Soraya Chemaly confronting the question of “what to do with all this rage?” When properly understood, she says, it is “an outstandingly clarifying emotion.”

Some of the turning points of political history are marked by the surging of rage as a clarifying moral force, others by the blind rage of mob violence, as evoked in A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s chronicle of the French Revolution. It’s doubtful whether fear of the latter really lurks in the hearts of our leading federal politicians. They know they are safe at work, and they know the women gathered outside Parliament House acted in a spirit at the opposite end of the spectrum from the sentiments that prompted Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.

The image of Uhlmann standing on a wall outside Parliament House waiting for the rage is strangely appropriate. Rage is not the heart of the story here. The new generation of protesters is asking, first and foremost, for safety. But their sense of being under threat is caused, as Grace Tame so cogently insists, by a chronic imbalance of power. Rather than maintain the rage, perhaps we should adopt another old adage: “Don’t get mad, get even.” That might be done effectively if half a dozen of the impressive speakers who fronted the marches around the country ran for federal seats, swelling the ranks of brilliantly effective female independents in parliament so as to hold the balance of power. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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As we celebrate International Women’s Day, we should recognise the economic pain women have borne through this crisis. They were more likely to lose their jobs, more likely to pick up extra unpaid work, and less likely to get government support.

It isn’t too late to right the wrongs. In a new Grattan Institute report we argue that federal and state governments should boost support for women’s employment to build a broader recovery and avoid exacerbating economic inequalities between women and men.

Women were more likely to lose paid work during the pandemic because they are more likely to work in the “social consumption” businesses that were forced to scale down operations or close entirely during lockdowns. About two-thirds of hospitality and personal service workers, for example, are women.

Women are also more likely to have part-time or casual jobs, which were much more vulnerable than full-time jobs. And that meant they were much more likely to lose jobs and hours than men, and less likely to be eligible for JobKeeper.

Since lockdowns lifted, the employment bounce-back has been faster than expected. But it is still incomplete. In January, 55,000 fewer women were in work than before the crisis, and 9000 fewer men. Unemployment and underemployment remain too high for both women and men, and are expected to stay that way for years.

Most of the industries that continue to be affected by restrictions — higher education, tourism and hospitality, for instance — employ a majority of women. Prominent among the vulnerable groups that haven’t experienced a bounce-back are single parents, 80 per cent of whom are women.

The divergence between men and women at work has been compounded by a divergence at home. Women already did the lion’s share of housework, caring and other unpaid work. With many adults working from home during the crisis, and children learning from home, that load only grew. Everyone did more, but women, and especially mothers, took on a bigger share of the extra work.

More unpaid work means less time for employment and education. Many women reduced their paid hours, left the workforce altogether or stopped studying. These choices, made out of short-term need, have long-term ramifications for women’s earnings, careers and economic security.

For many women who lost jobs or reduced their paid hours, 2020 will be another interruption in a stop–start career. And that means a wider earnings gap between men and women: even six months out of work can add another $100,000 to the $2 million average lifetime earnings gap between men and women.

What can be done? In the short term, governments must give priority to reducing unemployment and underemployment as quickly as possible. More stimulus is likely to be needed, and governments should take this opportunity to build a broader recovery.

The extra spending should be targeted to the sectors that are still struggling, many of which are major employers of women. This could include vouchers to encourage spending on hospitality, tourism and entertainment, and temporary expansions of social programs and services.

The federal government should also strengthen support for people who are still out of work. It should expand the JobMaker hiring credit and, as has been widely advocated, further increase the JobSeeker payment and Commonwealth Rent Assistance. This would boost economic activity, help unemployed people to look for work, and improve the living standards of Australia’s most vulnerable people, including single mothers.

As they focus on rebuilding in the longer term, governments should invest in the care economy to boost economic growth and improve the living standards of all Australians, while reducing women’s economic disadvantage. Making childcare cheaper is the most significant thing the federal government can do to support women’s employment. Investment in aged care is also urgently needed and would create jobs for women while improving the living standards of older Australians.

So far, the federal government has failed to meaningfully tackle the economic costs borne by Australian women in the Covid-19 recession. It should use the next budget, due in May, to ensure Australia really does build back better. •

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Her number is not connected. Perhaps she has changed it; I hope so. The pandemic has been disastrous for workers like Silvana in Latin America’s informal economy — the bread sellers on the streets in La Paz, the cardboard collectors in Buenos Aires, the domestic workers in Santiago, the fruit sellers on the streets of Lima — and she will have encountered many hardships since we last met.

The coronavirus arrived in Latin America on 26 February 2020 when Brazil confirmed the first case in Sao Paulo — a sixty-one-year-old man. The region is currently a global epicentre of Covid-19.

The pandemic struck Latin America and the Caribbean at a difficult economic time, with the region already experiencing low economic growth. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, or ECLAC, now projects a 9.1 per cent drop in the gross domestic product across the region, which is home to more than 652 million people. “Preliminary estimates so far indicate that we are experiencing the worst economic recession since we started recording it,” says Fabio Bertranou from the International Labor Organization’s South Cone of Latin America section. A recent report from the US Congressional Research Service notes that “the decline in economic growth in 2020 is expected to exacerbate income inequality and poverty throughout the region.”

In the region’s largest sector, informal work, the effects of this health and economic crisis are particularly brutal. Nearly 140 million people — about half the working population — make up the informal economy in Latin America and the Caribbean, and present what Bertranou describes as “a huge structural labour challenge.” These workers have “low or no labour rights, and lack social security, occupational safety, and health and unemployment protection.” The only way out, he says, is to achieve the ILO’s goal of promoting decent and productive work for all people.

This goal is particularly daunting now, though. In May 2020, the ILO estimated that in Latin America and the Caribbean 89 per cent of informal workers would be severely affected by the pandemic; and it is likely that the informal economy will only increase in the near future. “We can speculate that when confinement measures are relaxed and economic activities open up, informal employment will increase considerably again,” says Bertranou. To minimise this problem, the ILO is “providing technical assistance to governments, workers’ organisations and employers.” The final objective, he says, is “to transition to the formal sector of the economy.”

Peru, home to approximately thirty-three million people, has one of the largest informal economies in Latin America. At the time of writing, the country also has one of the world’s highest Covid-19 mortality rates, with over 45,000 deaths.

“Plague has been throughout history one of humanity’s worst nightmares,” Peruvian writer and 2010 Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in March 2020. And in his own country, the pandemic has indeed sparked nightmarish human and economic conditions.

The Peruvian formal economy has lost over six million jobs, according to the country’s National Institute of Statistics and Informatics. At the same time, the informal economy has bloated. “Millions of Peruvians who have lost their jobs have been forced to work on the streets,” says Armando Chunga, president of the Association of Street Vendors of Metropolitan Lima. There were approximately 300,000 street workers in metropolitan Lima before the pandemic hit. “Now there are more than 900,000,” Chunga says. “And around 10 per cent of them are infected.”

Born and bred in this city of nine million, Chunga fears the virus. In the streets of Lima’s historic centre, he sells “clothing, leggings, track pants and t-shirts.” He fears for his life every time he hits the streets, he tells me. When we speak on a Saturday evening, he is coming back from fourteen hours of street work. “In this pandemic, when we go to the street, we are risking our lives,” he says. “But my family depends on me.”

And he is not alone. In Peru, 70 per cent of households depend on the informal economy. It is the economy of the poor, and serves not only those who sell but also those who come to the streets to buy — mostly low-income people.

Lima’s Central Market, for example, has been a source of affordable food since its foundation in 1850. But in May last year, the Municipality of Lima closed it after fifty-nine traders tested positive for the coronavirus. This came after former president Martín Vizcarra described Lima’s food markets as one of the primary sources of contagion. After enormous public pressure, however, the market opened up again only a few days later. “All the evidence suggests that informal food sellers are playing a key role in food security in general and for the urban poor in particular,” says Caroline Skinner from the global organisation Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. The closure of the markets, she tells me, could “lead to increased food insecurity, poverty and exclusion.”

But while those who sell essential products can, for now, continue to work in the markets and on the streets, the majority of informal workers, like Armando Chunga, trade in non-essential goods and have not been so lucky. Chunga says that street vendors and other informal workers are concerned with the rising level of violence they are suffering at the hands of the police. “They are using the pandemic as an excuse to harass us,” Chunga tells me. “The police brutality against us is on the rise.”

Chunga’s association has denounced the police treatment of vendors, which includes arrests and confiscation of merchandise. “According to our information, more than 21,000 people, including street vendors and other workers in the informal economy, have been arrested,” says Chunga. “They have been arrested for not staying at home, but if we stay at home, where will our food come from?”

It’s a problem that extends well beyond Lima. In Chile’s capital, Santiago, the coleros are also struggling. Literally translated as “those in the queue,” coleros are street vendors found around the margins of the established city markets. They’re on the streets, without official permits, displaying their merchandise on blankets while keeping an eye out for the police.

Jorge Vitta is the president of the Independent Workers’ Union of Santiago. “We sell products that are not essential,” he tells me. “We sell whatever.” On one day, he says, he might sell socks, on another, body cream, stationery or hats. “Yes, I know we disobey orders. Yes, we don’t have permission. But what else can I do?”

In the Chilean city of Ovalle, 400 kilometres north of Santiago, the city market has been a source of food security and affordable products since 1986. Ovalle is situated in one of the most impoverished regional zones of Chile. “To close the market, where a large number of farmers sell their products, would have caused a major problem,” Pia López Eccher, media officer at the city’s council, tells me.

Ovalle, the birthplace of internationally celebrated writer Luis Sepúlveda — who died of Covid-19 in April 2020 — is among the Chilean cities worst affected by the virus. Many residents blame street vendors for the sharp spike in cases in mid August 2020, after Ovalle was flooded by street vendors from the neighbouring cities of La Serena and Coquimbo after both went into lockdown at the end of July.

Street vendors feel stigmatised as spreaders of the virus, but Dr Carlos Flores, an epidemiologist from Ovalle, tells me, “There is no medical evidence that the visiting street vendors caused the surge of cases in the city. My study shows that most cases emerged from inside the city.”

There is concern and anger among street-vendor organisations across Chile — and throughout Latin America — that authorities are using the pandemic to stigmatise and bully an already marginalised group of workers. “To demonise us is not new,” says Vitta. “We have always been associated with delinquency, with drug trafficking, and now we have been accused of spreading the virus.”

Of the two billion informal workers worldwide, just over 740 million are women, and the pandemic has hit them hard. The ILO reported in May 2020 that most lack access to social protection and don’t have sufficient savings to deal with the crisis. Many are domestic workers who “work for private households, often without clear terms of employment, unregistered in any book, and excluded from the scope of labour legislation.”

In Latin America, between eleven and eighteen million people are employed as domestic workers, 93 per cent of whom are women, according to a 2020 report from UN Women, ECLAC and the ILO. The report notes that more than 77 per cent of female domestic workers are informal, working in precarious conditions and without access to social protection.

Frequently, domestic workers must travel a long way to reach their employers’ home. “When I was working, it took me around one and a half hours to get to work,” Cristina Quintanilla tells me. Quintanilla lives in La Pintana — an impoverished suburb of Santiago. “I had to leave home at 4am and take two buses to get to my employers’ home at 5.30am.” Her employers live a world apart from La Pintana, in Las Condes, one of Santiago’s wealthiest suburbs.

Like Peru, Chile has been severely affected by Covid-19. And since March 2020, Santiago has been in and out of different stages of lockdown. “I can’t go to work now, but la señora told me she would employ me back after the pandemic,” Quintanilla says. Only time will tell if “the madam” — as domestic workers usually refer to their employers — will honour her promise. After all, I’m told by Chile’s Private House Workers’ Union, thousands of domestic workers have already been dumped by their employers during the pandemic, a considerable number of them fired because their employers saw them as a possible source of contagion.

According to the union,  approximately 300,000 women are employed as domestic workers in Chile. A spokesperson from Chile’s National Coordinator of Private Home Workers’ Organizations tells me that the Covid-19 crisis has left more than 120,000 of them out of a job, “in a state of total vulnerability” with no state social protection.

For people who work in the vast informal economy of Latin America and the Caribbean, the pandemic has added to their daily human drama and further revealed their abandonment and marginalisation. As the ILO notes, “Not working and staying home means losing their jobs and their livelihoods. ‘To die from hunger or from the virus’ is the all-too-real dilemma faced by many informal economy workers.”

“From the crack of dawn to the end of the day — every single day — we roam the streets selling what we can sell,” Armando Chunga tells me in an exhausted voice. “You know, we are fathers, mothers and children, like anybody else — we just need to work.”

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Workplace bullying and harassment have become endemic in a workplace characterised by precarious employment, high pressure, long hours and the demands of party loyalty. Unlike other employers, politicians can’t generally be dismissed for behaving badly towards their staff. Complainants find that partisan interests trump commitment to any kind of equality, and often echo a response recorded in a European survey: “I didn’t want to make the incident public. I didn’t want to damage my party.” And with political employment now the most common pathway to elected office, the perceived hostility of the parliamentary workplace has obvious implications for women’s political careers.

For the past twenty years the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, joined more recently by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, has sought to set standards for what the two organisations call gender-sensitive parliaments. Inter-Parliamentary Union members, including Australia, endorsed a plan of action for gender-sensitive parliaments in 2012, and individual parliaments have responded in different ways.

In the Canada, Iceland and European parliaments, MPs must sign a commitment to help create a work environment free of sexual harassment. A failure to do so in the European Parliament disqualifies an MEP from being appointed as a rapporteur — responsible for steering a piece of legislation — or participating in official delegations. The European Parliament also provides training for parliamentarians in managing and staffing their offices.

Most relevant to Australia are the policies, codes of conduct and complaints mechanisms recently adopted in Canada and Britain. In both countries staffers are publicly funded but directly employed by MPs with the power to hire and fire, creating the same structural problem as exists here.

Canada’s House of Commons led the way in 2014 with a policy to prevent harassment of political staffers. But it was criticised for lacking a fully independent grievance process, with staffers required to raise matters first with their employing MP, despite their employment being largely dependent on the MP’s goodwill.

Under the latest version of the policy, approved in January, the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer has primary responsibility for training all new MPs and employees within three months of their arrival, and again every three years. The office also handles complaints and publishes an annual report on the parliamentary website. In 2019–20 it handled two complaints of abuse of authority, two of harassment and one of sexual harassment. A separate code of conduct is designed to eliminate sexual harassment among MPs.

In Britain an independent inquiry into the bullying and harassment of staff, headed by Dame Laura Cox, was established in the wake of the 2017 “Pestminster” scandal. Even before the inquiry reported, the House of Commons adopted a Behaviour Code, with accompanying policies on bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct. These were to be implemented through an independent complaints and grievance scheme, a process in which Cox recommended MPs should play no part. Since last year an independent expert panel has had the power to recommend an MP be suspended or expelled, or face other serious sanctions. Such recommendations need to be approved by the House of Commons, but without debate, in the interests of the complainant’s confidentiality.

Another independent inquiry, this one by Gemma White QC, heard from many staffers and emphasised their uniquely vulnerable position. Many considered that complaining about bullying and harassment was career suicide. The UK grievance scheme has now been extended to former staffers — the group most likely to take advantage of it, White noted — which it is hoped will influence MPs’ behaviour. In Britain, as in Canada, all newly elected MPs are required to attend training sessions.

Despite staffers being employed centrally in New Zealand, many of the same dynamics are in play. In 2018 the parliamentary speaker, Trevor Mallard, initiated a review by independent consultant Debbie Francis that found evidence of serious bullying of staff and other unacceptable behaviour, including sexual harassment and even sexual assault. A new code of conduct, drafted by a cross-party group of MPs, has been signed by all parties on a voluntary basis, leaving the speaker and party whips to enforce it. Although no agreement has been reached on the creation of an independent complaints commissioner, Mallard said last year that he had begun requiring “the worst-behaving MPs” to undergo workplace training before being allowed staff in their office.

What can Australia learn from these initiatives? First we need to acknowledge the problem. Then we need an independent inquiry to assess the extent of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, and make recommendations informed by the views of staffers themselves — particularly former staffers, who are freer to speak. Out of that inquiry must come a code of conduct and an independent body to take responsibility for implementing the code and handling complaints, which would require amendment of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act. Finally, as in comparable parliaments, training in office management and harassment prevention must be mandatory.

Those working in parliaments need the same rights as employees in other workplaces. Those employing staffers need to be accountable for their behaviour. Parliaments need to model good behaviour, not bad, if they are to earn respect. Above all, now that women are present in sizeable numbers as both parliamentarians and staffers, they need to be given an equal opportunity to perform well without the career-limiting constraints imposed by bullying and harassment. Let us hope this is parliament’s #MeToo moment. •

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The revival of the governess and the accompanying debate about privilege and educational advantage gives historian Patricia Clarke’s new book more contemporary resonance than its 1985 edition, The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862–1882. This revised version of that book is also exquisitely illustrated with nineteenth-century landscapes, lithographs and cartoons that further enliven a forgotten yet suddenly relevant subject.

Beyond governesses, Clarke’s oeuvre has pushed Australian female writers into the biographical canon, especially her invaluable history of women’s journalism in the nineteenth century, Pen Portraits (1988); biographies of novelists Rosa Praed (1999) and Jessie Couvreur (1994), journalist Louisa Atkinson (1990) and feminist Eilean Giblin (2013); her edition of Judith Wright’s memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999); and the book she co-edited with Dale Spender, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (1992). Her eye for archival life writing that reveals hidden histories is similarly evident in Great Expectations, which is drawn from governesses’ letters to the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, or FMCES, the organisation that funded their passage to Australia between 1861 to 1886.

While today’s governesses (or the male equivalent, “governors”) presumably have a teaching degree, Clarke’s young women were characters straight from Bridgerton who offered their students little more than basic literacy and numeracy, possibly with art, French and music, and a posh accent that hid their genteel poverty. Along with their books and other luggage, they packed the rigid English class system, and before they even embarked they were complaining about travelling second-class, an early warning of the trouble ahead.

Those who found work with a family complained about the colonial children: “[They are] wild and impetuous,” wrote one. “The floor is the place for everything and it is no use making yourself unhappy because they will not acquire English manners for they do not like them.” They also struggled with the colonial mothers, who, they opined, were far too interested in their children, “do not like to be made to feel inferior” and were “indolent and untidy.”

Clarke responds empathetically to the entitled but naive women who arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, blinded by the southern light and the reality of their new situation. She argues that they were lured down the colonial garden path by promises that were clearly at odds with news reaching the FMCES’s founder, Maria Rye, that the colonies didn’t need more governesses.

By the 1860s, in a colonial version of the skilled occupation list, colonial governments assisted only those whose skills were in demand: artisans, labourers and domestic servants. To overcome this hurdle the FMCES offered loans that covered a governess’s expenses, to be repaid once she secured employment as a governess in the colonies. But getting a job was becoming increasingly difficult as school systems created expectations of education outside the home. In this respect, Great Expectations offers a history of the efforts — at the governesses’ cost — to establish formal private and public schooling in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Despite warnings, Rye believed that dumping more of England’s problems on the colonies was a good idea — if no longer convicts, why not single women? In Clarke’s telling, she is a tunnel-visioned, anti-Catholic evangelist who wilfully ignores her scheme’s problematic premise to the detriment of more than 300 young women. Great Expectations is as much about Rye’s great illusions as the governesses who experienced her scheme’s great disillusionment.

Through extracts from their letters to the FMCES, Clarke gives voice to the governesses’ culture shock and isolation. They expected to be met by FMCES contacts, but most found little help. As late as 1874 — a decade after the scheme began — Ellen Ollard wrote to the FMCES that “never while I live, shall I forget the feeling of despair that took possession of me” on arriving alone in Melbourne. They competed for the few available governess jobs and by and large found themselves to be no more than glamorised servants, especially if they couldn’t teach music. Those who were willing — or more often compelled by a lack of work in the city — travelled hundreds of kilometres to remote stations.

Some of the more resilient, adventurous governesses adapted; some of the entrepreneurial began their own schools; a few married, which was another lure of the scheme that had been nicknamed the Export Wife Trade by the Saturday Review back in London. Clarke quotes Rye — “Teach your protégées to emigrate; send them where the men want wives, the mothers want governesses” — and then, like a Twitter moderator, flags another false promise: the colonies were already fine on the marriage front.

Placed in Clarke’s wider context, the governesses’ struggle to adjust reveals the women to be more than haughty and hapless snobs. Great Expectations is written in a clear if brisk style that will appeal to a wide, non-specialist readership. Where possible, Clarke provides brief details of the governesses’ lives and employers using archival information beyond their letters, but sometimes I wanted to linger with some of these women and more fully understand, as much as factually possible, the situations they found themselves in and the people they found themselves among.

After recurring references to her “friendlessness,” we do learn more about the miserable Rosa Phayne, begging for help to return to England from her rural station post. Her last letter to the FMCES is in 1872: an appeal for help finding work in London, written as she was about to board a ship home. It’s to be hoped that present-day pandemic “governesses” and “governors” are writing about their lived experiences for a future historian to continue Clarke’s work. •

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Casuals were unlikely to join a union, partly because of the higher potential chance of losing their job and partly because both their attachment to work and the financial stakes were lower. Without unions, their power declined even further, leaving a power imbalance that employers could take advantage of. Casuals were generally paid at a lower rate than their “permanent” equivalents, especially in low-paid occupations.

Companies also used casual employment as a low-wage pathway into permanent positions. In the mining industry, for example, companies used labour-hire workers alongside permanent employees, full-time, doing identical work. Although these “contractors” were paid substantially less than the mining companies’ own workers, they were rostered like any other employee. They knew, up to a year or more in advance, what time they would be working on which days. After a while, some of them were selected to be permanent employees.

In this way, casual employment — either through labour hire or directly with the mining company — became the only way most blue-collar workers could get a permanent job in the industry. Less fortunate “contractors” might work on mine sites for many years without becoming permanent.

Other industries varied in their use of long-term casuals. Universities, for example, used sessional teachers for five, ten or more years. Nationally, at any point in time, around 340,000 casuals had been with their employer for at least five years. Forty thousand had been with that employer for more than twenty years. Thousands of people, classed as casuals, deprived of leave, worked to the same patterns year after year.

So, casual employment was not especially about flexibility of work. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that most casuals expected to be with their employer in a year’s time, and at least half worked the same hours week to week. Their working arrangements weren’t a response to any employer’s need to flexibly deploy labour over short periods in a variety of situations. They were cheap, stable, disposable and easily controlled.

Not that employers often did dispose of that labour. It was easier to hang on to it. But the option of reducing hours, or cutting off all work, gave the employer substantial power over these employees.

The one thing that united casuals was that they had no leave entitlements. They were better described as “leave-deprived employees.”

All that changed quite recently. One day, a leave-deprived employee in the mining industry took his former employer to court seeking compensation for unpaid leave. He won. In effect, the court said that the employee was not a genuine casual, and had to be paid for the leave he was owed. The company took the matter to appeal, and lost. Another leave-deprived employee took the company to court, and again the company lost.

This is the origin of the omnibus employment bill recently introduced into parliament by the federal government but unlikely to be voted on for several months. Employer organisations had a long wish list for industrial relations reform, but most of all they wanted to overturn these decisions. Another appeal is to be determined by the High Court, but the employer organisations don’t want to risk the outcome.

A key element in the omnibus bill would render that appeal irrelevant by enshrining employers’ right to define someone as casual. If they do that when the worker’s employment begins, and make clear there is no promise of continuing employment, then the employee is indisputably a casual. That’s the case even if continuing employment follows. The employee is without leave entitlements, and can have his or her hours cut, or cut out, on a whim.

But the bill does hold out the prospect of a better life. If, after a period of twelve months, employees want “permanent” status, they can ask for it, and the employer should grant their wish unless there are reasonable business grounds not to. Casual employees can at least take that question to court, if they have the money.

Some see this, or at least a variant of this, as the key to overcoming the chronic insecurity of casuals. Some want a stronger right for employees to convert from casual to permanent status after a defined period. They point to the fact that the bill’s provisions don’t adequately prioritise employee interests, and make appeals too expensive.

But there are problems with seeing the issue in this way.

First, the stronger the right, the stronger the incentive for employers to cut casuals’ hours, or sack them, before the designated date. This is, for example, what I saw happening in Korea. “Temporary” and “dispatched” workers (mostly women) had access to additional rights after twelve months’ employment, so employers would sack them after eleven months, or swap them between employers.

Second, and perhaps fearing this fate, some casuals may decide not to take their chances by asking to change status. The concept of “choice” can be problematic when it is constrained, especially for leave-deprived employees.

A third, probably bigger, matter is that many leave-deprived workers become financially dependent on the casual loading (if they get it). This 25 per cent premium on their ordinary pay is intended to compensate for their lack of entitlements or security. When you’re on a low income, that extra amount can make a big difference. This shouldn’t be ignored.

Other countries don’t allow employers to buy out of their obligation to provide annual leave, and nor should Australia. The challenge is to find a way to overcome that inequity while preserving the interests of this low-paid group.

A way forward would be to allow every employee access to paid annual leave and sick leave, regardless of their status and proportionate to the duration of their job. They would also have access to protection against unfair dismissal.

Employees who have no guarantee of minimum weekly hours would still be paid a loading. At present, the majority (71 per cent) of leave-deprived workers with variable hours have no guarantee of a minimum number of hours, but that proportion would fall if employers had to pay a loading for workers without the guarantee. Existing leave-deprived workers could be protected by a “grandfathering” clause, which would allow them to keep the current casual loading if that’s what they want.

In this way, the casual loading would shift from being a compensation for loss of entitlements and security to being a genuine compensation for unpredictable hours. It would be an unpredictability loading rather than a casual loading.

Over time, the casual loading would become less common and the unpredictability loading would take its place for those people who really are employed for short and irregular periods. Work would be more secure. And almost everybody would have a right to a paid annual holiday. •

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A team of editors was dispatched to a “disaster recovery centre” up the road, one of countless backup sites that businesses worldwide have long funded so they can keep going should calamity strike their offices. After a few frantic hours, all was well and the paper came out.

How quaint that moment seems after Covid-19.

When the first lockdowns emptied the FT’s office in March, they revealed something mildly shocking: you could publish an entire daily newspaper with everyone working from home. From Goldman Sachs to Google, the story was the same. It turned out that an astonishing amount of office work could be done with no one in the office.

What’s more, once workers were given a taste of commute-free, tracksuited life, survey after survey showed they were not inclined to rush back to the five-day office week.

So what next for the office, a centre of working life for more than a century? Will it survive? Should it? And if it does, what might it look like?

If anyone has at least some of the answers, it should be journalist Gideon Haigh, a prolific author best known for his elegant cricket writing, whose interests also span crime and corporate history. His prize-winning 2012 book, The Office: A Hardworking History, weighed in at 624 pages and won much praise for its sweeping view of office culture. Now he is back with a much shorter volume (his fortieth), The Momentous, Uneventful Day: A Requiem for the Office.

The subtitle suggests Haigh thinks the office is dead, but the book is less definitive. Readers expecting a compelling forecast of what lies ahead will be disappointed. Yet the questions Haigh tackles are important, starting with the matter of why it took a global pandemic to reveal the gaping holes in office life that we have known about for years.

As far back as the 1970s, he writes, early telecommuting advocates such as American scientist Jack Nilles were arguing that workers freed of gridlocked commutes could lead happier, more productive lives. The cost savings for employers would be so considerable that teleworking programs would pay for themselves “in a year or less.” (As it happens, the Dell computer group says its flexible working programs have saved it US$39.5 million over the past six years.)

As personal computers began their remorseless advance, the futurist Alvin Toffler suggested the home would become more central as workers retreated to their “electronic cottages.” In 1980, Haigh reports, the Washington Post dispatched a journalist to see if this seemed possible; she returned with the news that people were already running small businesses from their homes, and what’s more they liked it.

“Being able to work at home freed them for more personal life,” the journalist wrote. “You don’t have to get dressed to see your computer. In fact, the morning bathrobe seems a not uncommon uniform for the first hour or two of work, with jeans appearing later.”

Sound familiar?

In 1985, Harvard Business Review published “Your Office Is Where You Are,” an article Haigh deems “one of the most perceptive analyses of office design ever published.” Its authors didn’t advocate full-time home working. But they did foreshadow the idea that plonking people at open-plan desks (or, later, their evil twin the hot desk) for eight hours a day was fine for some types of work but hopeless for anything requiring privacy or hours of deep concentration.

Yet the office stayed much as it was for another thirty-five years. Or, as Haigh puts it, “Somehow we have continued flocking to offices as rigidly as migratory birds following the change of seasons.”

Indeed, some things grew worse as cost-conscious companies cut floorspace in the wake of the 2001 tech bust and the 2008 financial crisis. The twenty-five square metres each average worker could have expected twenty years ago has now shrunk to ten, Haigh writes. “Office workers, like slowly boiled frogs, have coped, but not without discomfort.”

This leads to a notable insight: “A key reason that Covid-19–induced working from home has proven popular, I suspect, is that it has involved a restoration of privacy that the worker has lost over the last half century.”

At this point Haigh seems convinced, as many of us have been, that the genie is out of the bottle: neither employers nor the employed are likely to return to five-days-a-week office work now they know what remote working can offer. Yet he remains ambivalent, pointing out the benefits of the socialising and collaboration that come with face-to-face office work.

He rightly argues that home working does not always work for parents of young children, especially mothers. A scattered, atomised workforce, moreover, is harder to organise to resist incursions that could become more serious. How long might it be, he asks, before “the relative ease of supervision of a manager passing by becomes, in the home office, the electronic ankle bracelet of webcams and chair sensors?”

These are serious questions, and perhaps ambivalence is inevitable for a writer who has spent so long studying office history. Indeed some of the book’s most enjoyable passages come in the detours Haigh takes when looking at turning points in office history, such as the striking efforts made to deal with the arrival of female workers.

“Bosses created different male and female entrances, staggered male and female starting times, and cordoned off work and luncheon areas,” he writes. “The first female employee at the US Board of Agriculture was installed in the basement, with a firm order that no male member of staff older than fifteen was to visit her.” At Kleinwort, Sons & Co., the first female typist worked behind a screen “because one of the partners had consented to her employment only if he never saw her.”

Even the book’s title is a diversion. It comes from an 1885 novel by William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which tells of a young man who discovers his place in the world through the uplifting qualities of “work we can do well”: “Every little incident of the momentous, uneventful day was a pleasure in his mind, “from his sitting down at his desk… till his rising from it an hour ago.”

As Haigh writes, “paid work need not always involve a profound contribution to humanity. It can be every bit as satisfying to execute a simple task excellently.” This is true, though its connection to the office is less clear.

Enjoyable as these moments are, the book could have used at least a glancing look at what remote working pioneers can tell us about dealing with a far-flung, office-free workforce.

A case in point is Sid Sijbrandij, chief executive of the GitLab software development company, all of whose 1300-plus staff in sixty-seven countries work remotely. Sijbrandij thinks that most companies have no idea of the effort needed to make remote working work. Attempts must be made to replicate informal chats and gatherings that happen naturally in an office. Rules must be set on how to run a meeting. And so on.

But there is one other question this reviewer would have liked to have seen Haigh answer. This is his fortieth book; his career has been studded with successes. Has he achieved all this while working in an office? Or has he been quietly working away at his kitchen table all along? •

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Garbage collection is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Each year, around one in 2000 workers in the industry lose their lives. Standard economic theory tells us that a risk of this magnitude should be accompanied by substantially higher pay. But the median hourly wage for American garbage collectors is only US$17.40, which hardly seems sufficient to make up for a death rate comparable to serving in a war zone, not to mention the daily risk of other injuries.

In You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy, sociologist Jake Rosenfeld outlines many of the injustices that underpin the American economy. In Oklahoma City, Walmart workers took up a canned goods collection to support people who couldn’t afford food. The beneficiaries? Fellow Walmart employees who weren’t able to make ends meet on the company’s meagre salaries. Across the United States, home-care workers subsisted on an average hourly wage of $10 an hour. Many couldn’t find full-time work, so they worked multiple shifts at different aged care homes. This precarious arrangement not only made life tough for workers, it also helped to spread Covid-19 among aged Americans when the pandemic struck.

It’s not as though American workers aren’t keeping up their end of the bargain. Rosenfeld cites research showing that truckers are almost twice as productive today as they were in the 1970s. Yet in some cities, their wages have fallen by a third in real terms. Deregulation, declining union power and the pressure on owner-drivers has made a dangerous job even riskier, yet their real take-home pay buys much less than it once did.

Even in manufacturing, often touted as the sector that guarantees stable employment and respectable earnings, the number of good jobs has diminished. When Tesla opened a production facility in Fremont, first-level workers earned US$17 to US$21. Rosenfeld presents evidence that chief executive Elon Musk discouraged unions while touting the fact that employees could enjoy free frozen yoghurt and high-speed rollercoaster travel around the factory.

Across industries and occupations, the past generation has been tough on American workers without post-school qualifications. As MIT researchers David Autor, David Mindell and Elisabeth Reynolds report in The Work of the Future, the real earnings of men with less than a university degree are now 10 to 20 per cent lower than in 1980, while men with a university qualification have seen earnings gains of 25 to 50 per cent. Productivity has continued to grow, but the gains have flowed to shareholders and executives rather than regular employees. A gap between productivity and earnings gains has opened up in many advanced nations, but it is twice as large in the United States as in Australia.

Other worrying trends have emerged. For much of the postwar era, American cities have served as an escalator to social mobility. Traditionally, moving from a regional area to a major city boosts the earnings of all workers, high-educated and less-educated alike. But this no longer holds true for less-educated workers. High-wage professionals get a pay bump from working in a large metropolis; workers without a university degree do not.

While trade has been criticised for hollowing out the labour market, technology has had significantly more impact. Autor, Mindell and Reynolds show that around 60 per cent of Americans work in jobs that did not exist in 1940, including occupations such as chat room hosts, sommeliers and drama therapists. Yet technological change tends to be skill-biased, meaning that less-educated workers are most at risk. The change will not be as dramatic as some have predicted — there are still few robots in small firms — but workers in routine jobs remain vulnerable to automation.

How might the United States improve the quality of work? Rosenfeld argues that no job is inherently bad, and cogently discusses how the quality of work can be lifted. Following the publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel about meatpackers, the sector became safer, more sanitary and better paid. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s meatpackers earned more than the average manufacturing worker. Similarly, unionised garbage collectors receive fair compensation and decent conditions. Bad jobs can be made good.

Rosenfeld also offers a series of sensible reforms that would help tweak the balance in favour of employees. Because pay secrecy tends to advantage the stronger party, its abolition would especially help women. Reining in the temporary help industry would provide more stability of employment. Aligning occupational licences with consumer safety would make over-protected industries less of a closed shop. Banning non-compete clauses would facilitate worker mobility and encourage innovation. Preventing firms from accruing too much market dominance would ensure that workers have more than one employment option in their local area.

At a deeper level, Milton Friedman’s theory of the primacy of shareholder value is coming under increasing challenge. During the 1990s, Coca-Cola chief executive Roberto Goizueta had a computer installed in a room adjacent to his office so he could track the company’s share price. Market analysts rebelled when firms paid their workers a living wage. Boards paid executives in share options, providing a lucrative incentive to focus on shareholders, and leading to a situation in which the chief executive of Starbucks earns as much in two hours as one of his baristas makes in a year.

No law of nature says companies must be run only for the benefit of the shareholders. In 2019 the US Business Roundtable, comprising 181 chief executives, issued a “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” They pledged to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, suppliers, communities, shareholders — and yes, employees.

The MIT report also emphasises the need to improve the quality of training. While online education has been patchy, Autor, Mindell and Reynolds point out that the pandemic has rapidly increased the investment of firms and educational institutions in improving it. They describe how IBM uses artificial intelligence to suggest to its employees which training modules they should undertake, and expects every worker to complete at least forty hours of training a year (the median IBM employee does fifty-two hours). They describe how “intermediary programs” can work effectively by building close relationships with employers and making sure educational providers are responding to what firms need.

Interestingly for an Australian audience, the MIT report is also critical of how US tax law shapes firms’ decision-making. “A series of tax law changes enacted over the last four decades has increasingly skewed the US tax code toward subsidising machinery purchases rather than investing in labor,” they write. “Tax policy offers firms an incentive to automate tasks that, absent the distortions of the tax code, they would accomplish with workers.” Far from advocating an expansion of accelerated depreciation tax breaks — as the Morrison government did in its 2020 budget — the MIT economists call for the complete elimination of accelerated depreciation, so as not to favour investment in machines over investment in workers.

Together, You’re Paid What You’re Worth and The Work of the Future offer the kinds of proposals that are likely to animate the thinking of the Biden administration: tilting the balance back towards organised labour, reimagining on-the-job training, encouraging corporations to serve the whole community, not just their shareholders. Right now, low-skilled Americans are paid an average of US$10 an hour, well below the US$17 earned by the average low-skilled Australian worker. Although it’s hard to know for sure what impact each measure might have, the net result of a package of progressive labour reforms would surely be to increase the family incomes of millions of working-class families.

But perhaps a single-minded focus on earnings ignores the crocodile in the corner. In Time for Things: Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption, social theorist Stephen Rosenberg argues that the central omission from this kind of analysis is time. Why should the gains from higher productivity keep going into pay, at best, rather than leisure? Shouldn’t employment be a means to an end rather than an end in itself?

The nub of Rosenberg’s argument is encapsulated in two predictions made by economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. Productivity growth, he predicted, would enable an eight-fold increase in real incomes over the coming century. And much of that would translate into shorter working hours, so the typical person might work around three hours a day, or fifteen hours a week.

Both Keynes’s forecasts turned out to be wrong, but in opposite directions. On economic growth, the indications are that he understated the gains, with incomes rising not by a factor of eight but by perhaps as much as a factor of seventeen. On working hours, he overstated the gains. Full-time employees are working about forty hours a week, much the same as full-time workers in 1940.

On the face of it, Keynes’s predictions were utterly reasonable. His growth projections assumed that the rate of growth he had witnessed since the late 1800s would continue. Thanks to innovation, education and urbanisation, though, economies grew even more rapidly than expected.

In terms of working hours, Keynes was also extrapolating from what he had seen. Average hours for full-time American workers fell from about sixty hours a week in 1900 to fifty hours a week in 1920. By 1940, the average was down to forty. American workers had gone from working six days a week, ten hours a day to five days a week, eight hours a day.

This didn’t happen because of the beneficence of company owners. It was a result of the campaigning of the union movement. In 1866, the General Congress of Labor met in Baltimore and resolved that “the first and great necessity of the present is to free the labor of this country from capitalist slavery in the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in the states of the American union.” Six years later, more than 100,000 New Yorkers went on strike to campaign for an eight-hour working day. By the end of the 1800s, it was said that almost all economists and social reformers favoured a reduction in working hours.

Such a movement certainly accords with economic theory. In first-year economics classes, we show students models in which leisure brings “utility” (also known as wellbeing or happiness), while work brings “disutility.” Raise someone’s wage, and you might reasonably expect them to work a little less. As Mark Twain once quipped, “If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.”

In this case, however, the joke was on Twain. A century after his death, high-wage workers were not pursuing leisure — they were chasing work. Plenty of people buy copies of Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek, but few take its advice. Industrial campaigns shifted, too: since the end of the second world war, the focus of unions has been on higher pay rather than shorter working weeks or longer holidays.

Why was Keynes wrong? Rosenberg points out that it wasn’t as though a reduction in hours was impossible. Suppose that just a quarter of the productivity gains in the postwar period had been put into shorter hours rather than fatter profits and pay packets. The work week would be about half what it is today. Yet it didn’t happen. As Rosenberg observes, “the effort to limit hours at work, somewhat mysteriously, almost vanished in the second half of the century.”

Various theories might explain why. Perhaps what matters isn’t getting ahead, but getting ahead of the Joneses. If what counts is your earnings relative to other people, then it might be impossible to get off the treadmill. For example, the price of land is largely determined by the demand of others, so if you’re in a society where everyone else works forty hours a week and spends a quarter of their money on housing, then dropping back to fifteen hours a week might mean living in a shoebox.

Another possibility — not one raised by Rosenberg — is that work is addictive. Economist Daniel Hamermesh points out that when people work long hours, their friends become office friends, their jobs come to define their identities, and their leisure activities dwindle. In many occupations, the top jobs are only available to those who are willing to put in extremely long hours. It’s impossible to become an Olympic athlete, High Court justice or university vice-chancellor without sacrificing nights and weekends. Many more with the ambition to take on such roles will put in the hours yet not attain the goal.

Ultimately, however, Rosenberg settles on an intriguing explanation: that the reason workers stopped pushing to reduce working time is that products got better, and consumers began to demand more of them. The car, he argues, was the ultimate consumer commodity. In the 1920s, repayments on a car loan might have cost a quarter of an average person’s wage, but workers were obsessed by them. Within a generation, Rosenberg writes, American towns moved from a horse culture to a horsepower culture. He quotes one union organiser who claims that workers’ infatuation with cars made people less likely to join unions. The individual lure of the automobile, and the status it represented, provided a new benefit for working hard. “The automobile was thus well suited to serve as compensation for work, a counterbalance to the loss of freedom represented by having to sell labor for a wage.”

And so it went for other goods. Rosenberg devotes chapter after chapter to intriguing explanations of the many ways in which consumer products became tangibly better during the twentieth century. As brands emerged, companies had a reputational incentive to ensure that their products performed as well as they claimed. Companies began to offer warranties rather than simply selling them with a “buyer beware” warning. Governments stepped in to ensure that potentially harmful items were tested before they reached the market. Products were rated so that buyers could make an informed choice.

The “inexorable expansion of the industrial economy,” writes Rosenberg, was not merely due to business owners chasing profits but also to “ever-increasing consumer demand.” People stopped campaigning for shorter hours because they wanted to buy more stuff. And why did they want to buy more stuff? Because the stuff on offer was better than ever.

The move away from working-hours campaigns affected not just business, but unions too. Rosenberg observes “a stark contrast between the long tradition, stretching from the 1830s to the 1930s, of American labor fighting for a shorter working week and the postwar era of collective bargaining and productivity-based wage increases.” In the first era, workers wanted more leisure time; in the second era, they wanted more money. Radical reformers had once seen a fundamental unfairness in exchanging labour for money. Consumerism undercut this moral critique of the economic system.

Could this change today? In the realm of consumer products, the online economy may turn out to be easier on the hip pocket. The cost of an android-powered smartphone and a generous data plan is falling fast, while the number of entertaining things that can be done with such a phone continues to grow. A similar trend can be seen with cars and clothing. Yet housing costs continue to grow faster than wages, making it difficult for many people ever to envisage downshifting.

As a result, housing costs matter even more than we might have thought. In Australia, housing affordability has worsened badly over the past generation, with the price of a typical home rising from twice average incomes in the 1980s to around seven times today. The home ownership rate is at a six-decade low, and the decline has been especially marked for people of modest means. Generous tax concessions to landlords mean that housing has moved from being a consumption good to an investment good. As a result, a few people have multiple homes, and many have no home at all. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a country like Germany has cheaper homes than Australia and its workers enjoy six weeks of annual leave.

This isn’t just individually unfair. If overpriced homes are preventing people from enjoying more leisure, then that has a social cost too. If working longer hours to pay the mortgage reduces the time I have available to watch television, then that’s just an individual cost. But if the effect of longer working hours is that I give up coaching the school soccer team, then it affects others. It’s harder to build a strong community when people are toiling long and unpredictable hours to pay down gargantuan mortgages.

As Jake Rosenfeld and the MIT economists have documented, there is a lot to dislike in the way the American labour market has operated over the past generation. Getting middle-income workers a fair share of their productivity gains, improving workplace safety, and making bad jobs good should all be important goals for a civilised society. No one should have to risk losing a finger just to earn a living. Together, such sensible reforms would reduce inequality in the United States, which has grown to levels that match the Great Gatsby era.

Stephen Rosenberg’s work brings a much-needed social dimension to our understanding of work and shows that another campaign is waiting in the wings. If workers can get a fair share of their output, and housing can be made more affordable, it should be possible to provide employees with more leisure time. There is no reason why union campaigns for shorter working days and more generous holidays should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

No constitutional provision would prevent the United States from moving from two weeks’ annual leave to four weeks. Similarly, no iron rule says it is impossible for Australia to follow the European example of providing six weeks annual leave to the typical worker. Indeed, at a time when Australian community life has frayed, increased leisure time might provide a way to build a more reconnected Australia. Prioritising family and community time might mean that we become a nation more of “we” than of “me”: a nation where we don’t just live to work, but work to live. •

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Despite promises of an economic “snapback,” it’s becoming increasingly clear that the world of work is likely to change significantly as a result of coronavirus. One of the likely shifts will be the rise of teleworking. If Covid-19 has taken us back a decade in terms of globalisation, it’s taken us forward a decade technologically. Large swathes of the workforce are working from home and the trend is likely to endure, with one US study projecting the share of working days spent at home to rise from 5 per cent to 20 per cent after the pandemic passes. Having fewer desks than employees may become the norm for white-collar firms.

One of the valuable changes will be a move away from open-plan offices, which were always more about corporate symbolism than productivity. We know from a bevy of studies that workers are more stressed, more dissatisfied and more resentful when they work in an open-plan setting. Compared with regular offices, employees in open offices experience higher levels of noise and more interruptions. They are less motivated, less creative and more likely to take sick leave.

Yet in their anxiety to save on rents and give the impression of being “collaborative,” firms pushed towards open plan regardless. Like other critics of open-plan offices, I never gave much thought to their potential to allow diseases to spread more quickly, but this may well be the clincher that shifts firms back to regular offices. If the research is to be believed, this is likely to be good for productivity.

For others, home will be the new office. People used to joke that there were three problems with working from home: the bed, the fridge and the television. But as the evidence rolls in, most of us appear less distractible than we might have feared. Certainly, working from home requires good technology (wouldn’t it be terrific if everyone already had fibre broadband, rather than trying to retrofit it?). It also helps if you’re not trying to juggle work and children. But once those conditions are met, an hour of working from home can be at least as productive as an hour in the office. In one randomised trial, employees in a Chinese firm were 13 per cent more productive working from home. During the pandemic, two-thirds of American GDP has been produced from people’s houses, and the stress levels of American workers has fallen by 10 per cent.

But remote work isn’t without its challenges. One is management quality. Great managers judge people based on their outputs and treat everyone equally. Lousy managers focus on inputs and favour their friends. This means that a major constraint on teleworking will be the quality of managers. Firms may quickly find that managers whose approach was “good enough” in 2019 won’t cut it in 2021. Organisations will struggle if they lack fair benchmarks for performance and good training systems for managers.

It doesn’t help that management training can be faddish, differing considerably across institutions and over time. If firms don’t have consistent performance appraisal systems, workers are more likely to feel that working from home is too much of a career risk. As the Economist recently put it, “the emotion that is most likely to lure workers back to the office is paranoia.”

Remote work is fine for knowledge workers, but if you’re a cleaner or a cashier it’s clearly not an option. According to a study by Harvard PhD student James Stratton, 41 per cent of Australian employees have the kind of job that lets them telework. Yet, as he notes, this simple average masks huge differences. Among low-wage employees, less than one-fifth can telework; among high-wage employees, it’s more than three-fifths. Most of those who have jobs in education or science can readily telework; hardly anyone employed in agriculture or hospitality can.

The consequences for inequality could be profound. In a recent report, MIT economists David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds note that a rise in working from home could markedly reduce demand for cleaners, security workers, building maintenance workers, hotel workers, restaurant employees, taxi drivers and ride-sharing drivers. The pair predict that the decades-long shift towards urban densification is likely to slow or even reverse, reducing the demand for city workers.

Autor and Reynolds anticipate that a wave of mergers will cause employment to become increasingly concentrated in large firms, which tend to spend a smaller share of their earnings on workers and a larger share on managers and owners. And they forecast an increase in “automation forcing,” as Covid-related restrictions cause companies to adopt labour-saving technologies. When the pandemic is over, the economists point out, firms won’t unlearn these ideas. Retailers, cafe owners, car dealerships and meat packers will need fewer staff after the downturn than they did before.

What can government do? The starting point must be that the labour market of 2019 is not coming back. While it’s hard to forecast specific occupations, we can be sure that the demand for skilled workers will be stronger than ever. This makes it critical to ensure that disadvantaged students get the schooling they deserve. The Grattan Institute has called for intensive small-group tutoring to help a million vulnerable young people catch up to their more advantaged peers. It’s also crucial to ensure that underprivileged teens don’t drop out of school, potentially locking in a lifetime of disadvantage.

With overseas student enrolments falling for the first time in decades, Australia could expand opportunities for domestic students. Just as the early-1990s recession saw a surge in school completion, this recession is a chance to increase the university attendance rate. Why wouldn’t we create a university place for a talented young person who might otherwise be unemployed? Expanding education keeps young people engaged today, and makes them more productive tomorrow.

Crises can lead to astonishing changes. The Black Death helped usher in the Renaissance. The collapse of Chinese dynasties massively reduced inequality. The second world war paved the way for a huge expansion in Australian home ownership. The challenge today is to recognise how the recession will change the world of work, and how we can secure prosperity and equality for Australians in the decades to come. •

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Except for now. This quarter, there’s little growth to be seen, and the tall buildings are relatively empty. Many office buildings in the CBD report occupancy rates below 30 per cent. In Sydney, where much of life has opened up, it’s the suburbs that are bustling. The relative emptiness of the CBD means money is staying away, no longer coursing freely through shops, cafes and restaurants. Busy intermediaries weave through the suburbs on bikes or in vans, delivering goods and food to shoppers who remain closeted away with their devices.

If the relative emptiness of the central city feels like a shock, we’d do well to remember how relatively novel is the particular, pre-pandemic form of the city we’re familiar with. Skyscrapers stacked tight in the centres, with radial train networks transporting commuters in and out of dormitory suburbs, represent distinct configurations of home and work, domesticity and commerce, that might be slipping. Has the “age of dispersion” arrived? Will investors continue to capitalise on the empty air above certain streets, building more towers for more offices, extending the decades-run of speculative property investment centred around CBD locations — or will another urban form take root?

As it happens, the tall building wasn’t welcome in Australia’s biggest cities for many years. The City of Sydney’s first modern skyscraper, the AMP building on Alfred Street in Circular Quay, was only completed in 1961, well after the first tall buildings were emerging across American cities. When it arrived at its harbourside address, it was a gargantuan structure, towering twenty-two storeys over neighbouring buildings like some kind of alien life-form. It shattered the human scale of the street, delineating new sightlines for speculative growth.

The building was only possible because of the lifting, in 1957, of the Height of Buildings Act 1912, which had been used for decades to prevent the onslaught of American-style skyscrapers on Sydney’s city centre. The Act, known as the “anti-skyscraper law,” was driven by fears that tall buildings were particularly vulnerable to the ravages of fire. Sydney’s CBD had been scarred by the events of 1901, when a massive fire in an eight-storey department store resulted in five deaths, including a young man forced to jump from a window in front of lunchtime crowds.

Gamechanger: the newly completed AMP Building in Alfred Street, Circular Quay, in 1962. City of Sydney Archives

Melbourne, too, moved quickly to limit its building heights to 130 feet, a constraint maintained during the interwar period. Architects, firefighters, fire insurers and politicians were united in their view that any building exceeding the range of fire-fighting technologies was unsafe. As a consequence, for many years our cities continued to grow outwards, not up.

Many Australian urbanists of the early twentieth century considered tall buildings to be ugly expressions of the unbridled greed of speculative capitalism. As skyscrapers spread across America, Australian architects, including those working abroad, worried they would sully the rare beauty of Sydney and its glittering harbour. A group of architects, writing from London, called for special consideration to be given to Sydney as a city of rare beauty: “the idea that such an enormous asset as this beauty… should be so recklessly undervalued as to be left at the mercy of private speculation” gravely concerned them.

During this era, the ideal form of urban progress — or what we might now call “innovation” — was to be found in the pioneering form of the suburb. Though it later became unfashionable, the suburb was born of public health crises and designed as a harmonious balancing of privacy, hygiene and social cohesion. Where English cities had been afflicted by ill-planned slums that spread death and disease, Australian cities could experiment much more freely with new spatial configurations. Ready access to nature spaces, whether public parks or private gardens, gave rise to numerous planning laws explicitly designed to protect citizens from ill-health.

This aspirational urban form emerged in the 1830s, when the wealthy and well-educated looked to the ideas of Scottish gardener and publisher John Claudius Loudon, who popularised the potential of the “suburban villa with garden attached” to create health and happiness. Another Scotsman, biologist Patrick Geddes, would devise novel ways of seeing the city as a “bio-social” unit, taking account of health, ecology and wellbeing.

Shocked by the overuse of slum clearance to eradicate disease in India in the late 1800s, Geddes, now credited as one of the founders of the urban planning movement, pioneered a different kind of public health response to city pestilence. Governments, he argued, should not only clear away slums, disrupting countless lives, but design more intelligently, placing large gardens and parks, offering fresh air and communal spaces, at the centre of communities.

Likewise, the influential idea of the “garden city,” which gained expression across English and American cities and suburbs after the first world war, was seen as a way of improving the health of the working classes. Devised by planner Ebenezer Howard, it aimed to better integrate the experience of town and countryside, doing away with the crowded and unhealthy experience of the inner city.

Health Living: City Planning Diagram 2, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd, 1922)

So, if today’s coronavirus sparks a rapid dispersion from dense urban cores, it certainly wouldn’t be for the first time. But nor would it mean an end to the city as such. If public health crises of earlier eras gave us suburban ideals of healthy living and generous urban parks for our leisure, the lasting changes resulting from this pandemic may well lie in the new spatial patterns that emerge from how we work.

Gone like a flash, perhaps forever, is the expectation that work necessitates being in an office; just as the “internet” is no longer a thing to dial up. It’s been fifteen years since Australian urban futurist William Mitchell decried as obsolete the workplaces of the industrial revolution, those essentially Taylorist constructions that required working at the same place at regimented times. And yet it took invisible strains of virus, not wireless broadband, techno-utopianism or even the rise of a knowledge-based workforce, to accommodate widespread teleworking.

From open plan to open air?

So what comes next? When you listen to those with a stake in commercial property markets, this is just a blip. Businesses will still need their offices to differentiate themselves, cultivate workplace culture and attract the top talent. But why exactly should workplace culture and connectivity only be forged in an office?

The answer may lie in reassessing the very function of the “work space” and its role in an organisation. Many are now rethinking what these spaces need to feel like if they are focused less on providing technology for computer-based tasks — after all, these can be done anywhere — and more on the need to promote workplace culture and nourish wellbeing. These spaces must now be “healthy” — with the “healthy building” tag now a feature of premium office spaces that tout their superior air and variety of lifestyle support services. Office space designers are embracing a greater symbiosis between natural and built forms, known as biophilia, interweaving green walls, natural materials and outdoor spaces. The airconditioned nightmare of the modern, monotonous layout just might be coming to an end.

For an image of what this might look like, look at Atlassian’s new headquarters next to Sydney’s Central Station. When completed, the tech company’s headquarters are projected to be tallest hybrid-timber building in the world, featuring elevated parks, mass timber interiors and an energy-generating glass façade. This green vision accompanies the recent announcement by Atlassian’s founders that employees may work from home permanently if they choose. No doubt they expect the quality of this space to attract plenty of tenants, if not their own workers.

Beyond changes to the look and feel of premium office spaces, we should also recognise something more radical going on. The nature of work is finally catching up with the affordances of digital tech. Distances are dematerialised; computing is “ambient”; organisations are becoming more “liquid.” My colleagues may be as much in Sydney as in Singapore. The local is no longer a place to depart in the morning, but a space to dwell in while working.

Like the radical suburban experiments of a bygone era, this public health crisis may yet allow for renewed kinds of making and connecting in previously dormant suburbs and neglected peripheral spaces. It may not be a “flight to the suburbs” in a retrograde sense, but a casting off of rigid modes of separation between home and work, industry and nature, as expressed in city forms. Australia’s suburbs may yet be well-suited to a coming era of biophilic urbanism, one that embraces “green infrastructure,” regenerative agriculture and productive allotments of either low or high-density urban farms.

Indeed, many are calling for more urban farming in a post-pandemic era, building in more local, resource-efficient food supply chains across suburban landscapes. Start-ups are springing up to deliver modular, stackable, automated vertical farms. With the right vision, the sleepy Australian suburb, places we once left for a busy day in the office, may again prove vital to a healthier urban future. For those like Rebecca Scott, chief executive of Melbourne social enterprise STREAT, post-pandemic Melbourne needs to be imagined as a “huge, edible urban food bowl,” a productive foodscape created by supercharging investment not just in green infrastructure but edible infrastructure as well.

If escaping pestilence and plague gave us the suburban dream, perhaps this pandemic will seed new patterns of work–life dreaming across the low-rise landscapes of the Australian suburb. Imagine a localised urban food hub in your area that also includes co-working spaces, tech supports, arts spaces and some outdoor dining. Would you return to the CBD? Perhaps only sometimes. But meanwhile, food supply chains would be diversified, carbon offset, water saved, transport networks declogged, with working families given more time, perhaps, to spend together.

Of course, these are just speculations. Perhaps train stations in the CBD will again be at bursting point during peak hour before too long. But as previous generations of urban visionaries and designers remind us, public health crises are often times of intensive urban innovation, when radical ideas actually gain purchase and are put into action. Perhaps this, too, will be one such time. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Strikingly, the technology to do this has been available for years. It took the pandemic to make people try something different, work through the initial difficulties and conclude that the new way is better. The shift in sentiment has been such that the stock market value of Zoom exceeds that of the world’s seven largest airlines combined.

But the really big change has been the transformation of income support. On 1 March, when Australia recorded its first fatality as a result of the coronavirus, the government was still committed (at least officially) to a budget surplus. It had resolutely refused to increase the Newstart unemployment benefit, frozen in real terms by the Howard government in 1997.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary — including sharply increasing rates of underemployment — the government’s operational assumption was that anyone who wanted a job could get one, and an individual’s unemployment reflected his or her personal defects (a lack of job readiness, misguided job searching or just plain laziness). This assumption was reflected in a range of policy initiatives, including punitive compliance regimes, the Work for the Dole scheme and the rollout of cashless welfare cards.

Within a few weeks, everything changed. The government suddenly discovered that none of the usual rules applied. Unemployed workers could be paid a liveable income, called JobSeeker, at twice the value of the grossly inadequate Newstart. Under a second program, JobKeeper, businesses could continue to employ workers even if there was no work for them and no money coming in to pay them. Contracts were not inviolable laws of nature but social conventions that could be varied to meet the needs of the crisis.

The JobSeeker and JobKeeper programs have been highly effective in maintaining income for Australian households, even as the economy has gone in to what the government has called hibernation. There has been little evidence of the widespread economic suffering experienced in countries with weaker responses, most notably the United States.

But these schemes can’t last forever in their current form. The fact that JobKeeper is higher than the age pension is hard to defend, either politically or in terms of social welfare. It is an emergency response to the very specific circumstances of the pandemic, in which many businesses have been forced to close temporarily.

The Morrison government’s “snapback” would simply end JobSeeker and JobKeeper in September, six months after their inception. But most economists, notably including Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe, doubt that this can be done without pushing the economy into a deep recession. Regardless of the macroeconomic analysis, there’s a more important question: even if we could return to the policies of the pre-pandemic years, should we?

The free-market economics underlying the desire to cut back public spending were discredited by the experience of the global financial crisis and the disastrous failure of austerity in Europe and elsewhere. The politics of welfare restriction are those of division and culture war, and are now directly opposed to the “we’re all in this together” lesson of the pandemic.

One way of extending that lesson into the post-pandemic era would be to adopt the concept of a liveable income guarantee or — to use the term put forward just before his untimely death by the great British economist Tony Atkinson in his book Inequality: What Can Be Done? — a “participation income.”

The idea of a participation income rests on the principle that everyone has a right to a living income along with an obligation to contribute to society. The first part of that principle has long been recognised in systems of income support for those unable to work because of age, disability or unemployment, or because they need to care for young children.

Under the market liberal ideology that has held sway since the 1970s, eligibility and support in all these categories have been tightened. The qualifying age for the pension has been increased to sixty-seven (from sixty-five for men and sixty for women). The Austudy scheme has been restricted to students over twenty-five. Applicants for disability pensions face increasingly stringent tests. Supporting parents are pushed onto Newstart as soon as their youngest child turns eight. Unemployment benefits have been frozen and compliance measures made ever more punitive.

The first step towards a participation income would be to reverse the changes of the past thirty years by setting all benefits at the same rate as the age pension and restoring more generous eligibility criteria. If we could afford these policies thirty years ago, we can afford them now.

Apart from jobseeking, what kinds of activity might we consider to be participation? Most of the many possibilities have precedents, but they haven’t been considered as part of a comprehensive program of social participation. They include:

• volunteering in support of organisations and causes, which might include firefighting and surf lifesaving, women’s refuges, or major public events like the Commonwealth Games

• working on grant-funded community projects, along the lines of the Community Employment Program introduced under the Hawke–Keating government

• setting up a small business

• artistic and creative activity (which were a notable aspect of the New Deal–era Works Program Administration in the United States)

• full-time study.

Obviously, the participation payment would not be available to people who are already in full-time employment. And, as with the age pension, assets and means tests would apply to people who receive investment income.

How we deal with intermediate cases — people with limited income from part-time work, for instance — would be guided by the principle that a well-integrated tax–welfare system should avoid creating the high effective marginal tax rates that result from the interaction of marginal income tax rates and the rates at which benefits are withdrawn through means tests.

Compliance measures within the tax and welfare systems should also be integrated. Currently these are massively asymmetrical, with the tax system essentially operating on the basis of self-assessment, subject to auditing, and the welfare system working on the assumption that recipients are cheats and must therefore be subject to draconian compliance rules.

The extreme example was the robodebt scheme (abandoned for now, but still set for a comeback) in which repayments were demanded from recipients on the basis of a mechanical and unreliable estimate. The asymmetry is even more striking when we remember that a single form of tax avoidance (profit-shifting by multinationals) is estimated to cost the Australian public nearly $10 billion a year, many times the amount recouped (and often then repaid) through the robodebt scheme.

As with the tax office’s business activity statement, the appropriate compliance regime for a participation income is a return, submitted quarterly and subject to audit. The assumption should be one of social solidarity rather than division.

How much would this cost? The current JobSeeker supplement is estimated to cost $14 billion over six months, or $28 billion if it were extended for a full year. If the benefit were set permanently equal to the age pension, the cost would be about half this much at the high rates of unemployment associated with the pandemic, and no more than a third (less than $10 billion a year) in the context of a recovery.

The number of people potentially eligible for a participation income but not currently receiving a benefit is harder to estimate. The largest group that might fall into this category, totalling around one million, are those who would like to work but are not currently searching. But many of these people are already receiving benefits or live in high-income households. Assuming half a million additional recipients and a cost of $24,000 per year, the budget cost would be $12 billion a year. Some of this would flow back to the government through a higher level of demand and resulting increased tax revenue.

The cost of the proposal may be compared with the revenue cost of the federal government’s Stage 3 tax cuts proposed for 2024–25, most of which benefit high-income earners. Treasury has estimated this as $95 billion over six years, or $16 billion a year.

Some observers might worry that people will be tempted to drop out of the paid labour force and rely on a participation income instead. As mentioned, the high prevalence of underemployment suggests that this would not be a huge problem. Most people would rather have a full-time properly paid job than a welfare benefit. To the extent that the system is incapable of providing this, a participation income is a reasonable alternative.

As we emerge from the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis, and also look back on the global financial crisis, we can, if we choose, try to patch up a system that is manifestly failing to deliver good outcomes. Or we can draw on the success of our collective response to the pandemic and start building something better. Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark, There Is An Alternative. •

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For many conservatives, industrial relations reform is little more than a way of attacking the power of trade unions. Yet cooperation with the union movement has played an important role in creating an effective response to the pandemic.

The same was true in the Accord era following the severe recession of the early 1980s. The original Accord, negotiated between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Hawke–Keating government, allowed increased government spending to produce a rapid economic recovery while winding down the rate of inflation. Any post-pandemic weakening of the union movement through industrial relations reform would make this kind of cooperation much less likely.

The other major thrust of industrial relations reform has been the replacement of standard forms of full-time permanent employment with a variety of alternatives that provide more flexibility for employers while in most cases reducing workers’ control over their own lives. Permanent employees working under award conditions have been replaced by casuals, converted into supposedly independent contractors, outsourced to labour-hire firms or pushed into the gig economy. This has reduced the effectiveness, and complicated the implementation, of the JobKeeper program, which starts from the premise that workers have jobs with the employer for whom they do their work.

The same point can be made about unemployment policy. Reforms to welfare policy since the end of the 1990s recession have been premised on the assumption that jobs are plentiful. Hence, if people are unemployed for more than a short time, they must either be deficient in employability or shirking. The consequent policy is a combination of “case management,” designed to improve job readiness, and coercive measures to force the unemployed to seek work.

The assumption is that no one needs to be unemployed in the long term, so there is no need to provide an unemployment benefit sufficient to meet basic needs over an extended period. Unemployed workers can simply draw on savings or defer non-urgent expenditures.

Beyond reducing working conditions and demonising the unemployed, not much else is left in the neoliberal reform toolbox. Scott Morrison has referred to the Productivity Commission’s five-yearly Shifting the Dial review, which he received as treasurer in 2017. As I observed at the time, that report was a grab-bag of policy recommendations dating back as far as the 1990s; the fact that they were still on the agenda was mostly because — as in the cases of carbon pricing and road pricing, for instance — they were in the too-hard basket. Not surprisingly, hardly any of them have since been implemented.

Shifting the Dial’s most significant contributions focused on improving “human capital,” the workforce skills and capabilities generated by better education and better health. This would undoubtedly be a good starting point for a long-term reform agenda, if the will exists.

Any reforms to employment and unemployment policy should be based on Australia’s successful response to the pandemic rather than a doubling down on policies that, even before the crisis, produced stagnant wages, growing inequality and high levels of underemployment.

The ideal response would be to use the JobSeeker and JobKeeper schemes as the basis for a fundamental transformation in our approach to work and welfare. JobSeeker could become the basis of a “participation income,” set at a liveable level (say, equal to the age pension) and available to anyone with no market income and a willingness to contribute to the community, whether through job search, full-time study, volunteer work, or caring for children or disabled or elderly relatives.

JobKeeper could be the starting point for a renewal of the commitment to full employment that was a central feature of the decades of widely shared prosperity after the second world war. In the absence of continued support from the federal government, neither the Reserve Bank of Australia nor the business sector has the capacity to prevent sustained high unemployment, even after lockdown restrictions are relaxed.

If we truly want reform, we should not trawl through the remains of the neoliberal agenda of the late twentieth century. Rather, we should aim to achieve a positive transformation of our society and economy, and end this crisis better than we started it. •

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History can offer insight, but it can just as easily mislead. So what I do here is refer to three historical analogies — the first world war and Spanish flu epidemic, the Great Depression, and the second world war and postwar reconstruction — and to see where they might take us.

The first is perhaps the most obvious, given that the crisis we have faced has been, at its heart, one of public health. By 1918, the war had killed millions of soldiers and civilians. But when American troops arrived on the Western Front that year they brought with them a virulent strain of influenza that, according to some estimates, would eventually kill as many as one hundred million people.

Its first Australian victims were soldiers far from home. But, as in 2020, Australia was in the fortunate position of having advance warning of what was on the way, and a maritime quarantine was imposed. That probably minimised the damage, though Australia still probably lost somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people to the illness — many more, one hopes, than now seems likely from Covid-19.

Is there anything in this experience that might point to the fate of progressive ideas on the other side of our own pandemic? Not much, I’m afraid. Australia’s gross domestic product had shrunk during the war, and it grew in the wake of the Spanish flu. The flu, with its absenteeism, closure of businesses, and state border and port restrictions, certainly disrupted economic activity, as did industrial conflict during 1919, some of it related to workers’ concerns about the flu. But much of life went on as before. While restrictions were most severe in New South Wales, they were on the whole much less onerous than at present. The Victorian Football League, for instance, predecessor to the Australian Football League, continued its season as usual.

Neither the war nor the flu unleashed any burst of policy creativity among progressives. It’s true that the Labor Party moved leftward, adopting a socialisation objective in 1921, but the lean interwar years saw no great advance in social protection, as distinct from efforts to protect Australian urban and rural industry with tariffs and subsidies. Australian society had been divided by the war and its aftermath, and progressive advance of an enduring kind in this country has generally emerged out of policy consensus, not fierce contestation.

The Great Depression struck just as dramatically. Australia’s unemployment rate peaked at perhaps 25 per cent in the early 1930s, and the economy again shrank. It is hardly surprising that pessimists in the present wonder whether we’re heading into a comparable situation. My answer to that is that while there are likely very tough times ahead, we should be careful about easy comparison.

The macroeconomic capacity of the federal government in 1930 was much weaker than today. The monetary capacity of the central bank of the day, the Commonwealth, was piddling compared with the kind of activity we’ve witnessed just in the last few weeks. Our welfare state has many deficiencies in 2020, but it was rudimentary in 1930, lacking an unemployment benefit, for instance, leaving aside a new and very basic system of insurance in Queensland. Australians in 2020 will demand and receive more protection from their government than those of ninety years ago.

On the other hand, Australia’s economy was very simple in 1930, and ours isn’t. Exports then were dominated by wool and wheat; the crisis for Australia, to a great extent, arose from the plunge in prices for those commodities, with an accompanying retreat of overseas loan funds. The growing manufacturing sector, developing behind a rising tariff wall, was mainly engaged in import replacement. Few married women were in paid work and it’s quite possible that the women who were — often young and single — were generally less affected by the downturn because the industries in which they worked were a little less vulnerable to the bust than male-dominated building and construction, and transport. The household economy usually comprised a man engaged in paid work, and a woman in unpaid labour in the home.

The unfolding economic crisis of the present is obviously different, but no less potentially devastating for that. Initially at least, jobs in the services sector have seemed extremely vulnerable to social-distancing measures, and the women — a much greater proportion of the workforce than in 1930 — who are so well represented in this sector are vulnerable to lay-offs. Our export sector depends on services — education, for instance, and tourism — to an unprecedented degree, and our economy is integrated and interconnected globally, through movements of people, capital and goods, in more complex ways than in 1930. Australia had accepted many immigrants in the 1920s, but it is now arguably more vulnerable to the drying up of immigration, which plays a more complex role in the economy than a century ago.

In the 1930s, Australia’s economic recovery was shaped to a great extent by that of Britain. Today, we tend to look nervously to China, but our fate will also be tied to that of the United States as the world’s largest economy.

The Depression remains Australia’s emblematic historical experience of economic collapse and social distress. But I’m unsure that it offers us too many clues about what the coming crisis will be like. At best, it might act as a reminder that progressive policies don’t usually flourish in times of such distress; that economic crises, in our country’s history, have more often provided a cover for conservative reaction, as they did in the 1930s and the 1970s.

It is with the second world war and postwar reconstruction that the optimists come into their own. Parallels have frequently been drawn between our current circumstances and the reconstruction policies developed from 1942 on, which remain our paradigmatic case of post-crisis reorganisation and renewal. While I don’t want to pour cold water over such hopes, I think it’s well to be cautious. But here are a few things we might take from that experience.

First, it began early, years before the war ended, and was intimately connected to the Allies’ articulation of war aims. In other words, it was connected to wartime propaganda and morale. I’ve seen few indications of our government, or any other, raising the hope and expectations of the population of a new world order afterwards. On the contrary, our own federal government, with its talk of “snapback,” has made it plain that, as far as possible, it will promote a return to business as usual. The hope of progressives is that this will prove impossible, as well it might.

Second, as Stuart Macintyre shows vividly in his brilliant study of postwar reconstruction, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, decisions made long before the end of the war were critical in shaping postwar Australia. If Labor had used the crisis of 1942 to push harder for more powers to be handed to Canberra, for instance, postwar governments would have experienced fewer constraints than they ended up facing.

In the present crisis, our federal government is making a lot of decisions right now that reflect its longstanding ideological preferences. These decisions will not be easily undone. Alongside proposing a massive handout to private schools, it seems to be using the opportunity to shrink the higher education sector even more drastically than is likely to occur anyway. Again, this is a long-term ideological preference, born of the conviction that too many Australians are attending universities and thereby wasting resources. We can expect much more of this kind of thing, some of which may well be nothing more complicated than the usual suspects seeking to loot the Treasury in familiar ways.

Third, unlike during and after the second world war, I see little or no evidence of an emerging policy consensus, which is usually a solid basis for progressive advance. Keynesianism emerged as the basis of government macroeconomic policy in Australia not under the Labor governments of John Curtin or Ben Chifley, but in November 1939, in the first Menzies government’s war budget. More generally, all of the political parties shifted decisively towards a greater emphasis on social protection and the welfare state in the 1940s. Child endowment was introduced by a conservative government, not Labor, in 1941.

Australia’s renovated economic policy and welfare state were forged more in consensus, underpinned by a new economic stability and emerging prosperity, than against a background of serious contention. And these changes were based, in large part, on recognition that the mass suffering of the Depression must be avoided at virtually all costs — that the war had shown that government actually had the instruments to ensure that ordinary people were not blown this way and that by whatever the prevailing economic winds happened to be.

I would like to believe these conditions currently exist. But I see a lot of evidence to the contrary. I see conservative politicians gearing up to use the level of debt we are likely to take out of this crisis as cover for reaction: for business tax cuts, for more assaults on unions, for cuts to the public sector, for a winding back of “red tape” and “green tape.” I see Labor politicians agreeing with them. Malcolm Turnbull’s recent memoir is a good reminder of how business tax cuts are as much an article of faith for Liberals like him as climate change denialism is for those he spends so much of his book excoriating.

There are other parallels with the 1940s that are other than reassuring. Many of the policies of the Labor governments of the 1940s ran into a rhetoric from the new Liberal Party that appealed to people’s desire to restore the status quo ante: a prewar order. This might seem odd given that before the war there had been the Depression, but I’ve read many letters written to Robert Menzies by ordinary constituents in the 1950s, and they are full of this kind of nostalgia. And he knew how to appeal to it.

This was the 1940s and 1950s version of snapback, and it’s a very powerful vision in times of uncertainty, as the global successes of the right-wing populists have already shown us. So when the Liberals complained of socialist regimentation and overregulation in the 1940s, they were appealing to the impulse — the fantasy — that life could be returned to what had been there before. But just because something is a fantasy doesn’t mean that it’s not based in realisty and powerful in its own way.

This is not a counsel of despair. It’s rather a warning that if we want change, if we want a more equal and a fairer society, it’s not going to fall into our laps compliments of coronavirus.

Clearly, some good things have come from the awful tragedy of the present crisis. Some welfare payments, especially for the unemployed, have been drastically increased to an extent that would otherwise have been impossible. Governments have been forced to recognise that the markets of neoliberal imagination are hopeless in responding to adult problems — something that should have been clear after 2008 but that has been muted in this country by our better economic performance compared with most other developed countries over the last decade or so. The federal system has worked more effectively than we might have expected. The unions are being consulted and listened to; the right-wing, climate-denialist commentariat isn’t.

And, perhaps most promisingly for social democrats, some degree of public trust in government has been restored. They need that. Rising public trust in government, in science, in the rational corners of the media: these are all really valuable resources for people who want to engage in evidence-based policymaking. We need to do our best to preserve and nurture these developments, along with the capacities for personal empathy and social solidarity that progressive policies ultimately rest on.

The federal government today has a deep and principled commitment to inequality, and no crisis is going to cure it of that. It is backed by business that would like nothing better than to be offered a few free kicks at a time when many industries will struggle for profitability, and that will be looking for relief from the tax office, the consumer and its own workforce. And Australia’s commercial media has never been better geared for giving conservative government and business what they want. While most kinds of business as usual are still a long way off, the familiar patterns of politics will probably be with us fairly soon. They could well be ugly. And we need to be ready. •

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Likewise hoping that her daughter might avoid the fate of a father who was “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Ada’s mother, Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke, ensured that she was schooled with precision and discipline in mathematics from her earliest days, and closely watched her for any signs of the troubles that had plagued her father. Lord Byron, abandoning them weeks after Ada’s birth, died when she was eight; his legacy cast a ghostly shadow over her life.

Ada’s schooling marched ever forward, toward an understanding of the world based on numbers. “We desire certainty not uncertainty, science not art,” she was insistently told by one of her tutors, William Frend. Another tutor was the mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan, who cautioned Ada’s mother on the perils of teaching mathematics to women: “All women who have published mathematics hitherto have shown knowledge, and the power of getting, but… [none] has wrestled with difficulties and shown a man’s strength in getting over them,” he wrote. “The reason is obvious: the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

But Ada was never going to be denied the opportunity to learn about mathematics. Lady Anne was a talent herself, dubbed “Princess of Parallelograms” by Lord Byron. Having managed to outlive him, the desire to expunge in her daughter the slightest genetic tendency for mad genius and kinky sex took precedence over any concerns about Ada’s feminine delicacy.

Married at nineteen years of age, Ada, now Countess Lovelace, demonstrated curiosity and agility of mind that would prove to be of great service to the world. Just a year before her marriage, in 1833, she had met Charles Babbage, a notable mathematician with a crankish disposition (he could not stand music, apparently, and started a campaign against street musicians). Together they worked on plans for the Analytical Engine, the world’s first mechanical computer. It was designed to be a mechanical calculator, with punch cards for inputting data and a printer for transcribing solutions to a range of mathematical functions. Babbage was a grand intellect, with a penchant for snobbery and indifference to many of the practicalities of getting things done. Lovelace was his intellectual equal but arguably better adapted to social life.

Like the proverbial genius, Babbage struggled with deadlines and formalities. When one of his speeches was transcribed for publication in Italian and neglected by Babbage, Lovelace picked it up and translated it. She redrafted parts of it to provide explanations to the reader. Her work ended up accounting for about two-thirds of the total text. This became her significant contribution to the advancement of computing: turning the transcription into the first-ever paper on computer science. It became a treatise on the work she and Babbage did together.

There remains some controversy about the extent of Lovelace’s participation in this project, but ample historical evidence exists to dismiss the detractors, not least the direct praise bestowed on her work and intellect by Babbage. Lovelace applied her mathematical imagination to the plans for the Analytical Engine and Babbage’s vision of its potential. She sketched out the possibility of using the machine to perform all sorts of tasks beyond number crunching. In her inspired graphic history of Babbage and Lovelace, Sydney Padua describes Lovelace’s original contribution as one that is foundational to the field of computer science: “By manipulating symbols according to rules, any kind of information, not only numbers, can be operated on by automatic processes.” Lovelace had made the leap from calculation to computation.

Padua describes the relationship between Babbage and Lovelace as complementary in computational terms. “The stubborn, rigid Babbage and mercurial, airy Lovelace embody the division between hardware and software.” Babbage built the mechanics and tinkered endlessly with the physical design; Lovelace was more interested in manipulating the machine’s basic functions using algorithmic formulas. They were, in essence, the first computer geeks.

The kind of thinking needed to build computers is precisely this combination of artistry and engineering, of practical mechanics and abstract mathematics, coupled with an endless curiosity and desire for improvement. The pioneering pair’s work blurred the division between science and art and navigated the spectrum between certainty and uncertainty. Without Babbage, none of it would have happened. But with Lovelace’s predilection for imaginative thinking and education in mathematics, a perfect alignment of intellect allowed for the creation of computer science. Lovelace and Babbage’s achievements were impressive because they challenged what was possible while at the same time remaining grounded in human knowledge.

And beyond all this, Lovelace was a woman. (A woman!) In direct contradiction to her tutors’ warnings decades earlier, Babbage wrote, Lovelace was an “enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our country at least) could have exerted over it.” Lovelace showed it was possible to transcend not only the bounds of orthodox mathematics but also her socially prescribed gender role.

No doubt all this caused Lovelace’s mother considerable worry. The madness seemed to be catching up, much to her consternation. In the years after her visionary publication, Lovelace poignantly beseeched Lady Anne: “You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”

For Babbage, the perfect was the enemy of good, and he never did manage to build a full model of his designs. In 1843, knowing that he struggled with such matters, Lovelace offered, in a lengthy and thoughtful letter, to take over management of the practical and public aspects of his work. He rejected her overtures outright yet seemed incapable of doing himself what was required to bring his ideas to fruition.

Lovelace’s work in dispelling myths and transforming philosophy was cut short when she died of cancer aged just thirty-six. Babbage died, a bitter and disappointed old man, just shy of eighty. The first computers were not built until a century later.

Technological advances are a product of social context as much as of an individual inventor. The extent to which innovations are possible will depend on a number of factors external to the individuals who make them, including the education available to them, the resources they have to explore their ideas, and the cultural tolerance for the kind of experimentation necessary to develop those ideas.

Melvin Kranzberg, the great historian of technology, observed that technology is a “very human activity — and so is the history of technology.” Humans are responsible for technological development but do not labour in conditions of their own choosing. Had Babbage been a bit more of a practical person, in social as well as technological matters, the world may not have needed to wait an extra century for his ideas to catch on. Had Lovelace lived in a time where women’s involvement in science and technology was encouraged, she might have advanced the field of computer science to a considerably greater degree.

So too, then, technological developments more generally can only really be understood by looking at the historical context in which they occur. The industrial revolution saw great advances in production, for example, allowing an economic output that would scarcely be thought possible in the agrarian society that had prevailed a few generations earlier. These breakthroughs in technology, from the loom to the steam engine, seemed to herald a new age of humanity in which dominance over nature was within reach. The reliance on mysticism and the idea that spiritual devotion would be rewarded with human advancement were losing relevance. The development of technology transformed humanity’s relationship with the natural world, a process that escalated dramatically in the nineteenth century. Humans created a world where we could increasingly determine our own destiny.

But such advances were also a method by which workers were robbed of their agency and relegated to meaningless, repetitive labour without craftsmanship. As machines were built to do work traditionally done by humans, humans themselves started to feel more like machines. It is not difficult to empathize with the Luddites in the early nineteenth century, smashing the machines that had reduced their labour to automated work. In resisting technological progress, workers were resisting the separation of their work from themselves. This separation stripped them of what they understood to be their human essence.

Whatever the horrors of feudalism, it had allowed those who laboured to see what they themselves produced, to understand their value in terms of output directly. Such work was defined, at least to a certain extent, by the human creativity and commitment around it. With industrialisation and the atomisation of craftsmanship, all this began to evaporate, absorbed into steam and fused into steel. Human bodies became a vehicle for energy transfer, a mere input into the machinery of production. It gave poetic significance to the term Karl Marx coined for capital: dead labour.

Though the Luddites are often only glibly referenced in modern debates, the truth is that they were directly concerned with conditions of labour rather than mindless machine-breaking or some reactionary desire to turn back time. They sought to redefine their relationship with technology in a way that resisted dehumanisation.

“Luddites opposed the use of machines whose purpose was to reduce production costs,” writes historian Kevin Binfield, “whether the cost reductions were achieved by decreasing wages or the number of hours worked.” They objected to machinery that made poor-quality products, and they wanted workers to be properly trained and paid. Their chosen tactic was industrial sabotage, and when their frame-breaking became the focus of proposed criminal law reform, it was, of all people, Lord Byron who leaped to their defence in his maiden speech to the House of Lords. Byron pleaded that these instances of violence “have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress.” “Nothing but absolute want,” he fulminated, “could have driven a large and once honest and industrious body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.”

The historical effect of this strategy has been to associate Luddites forever with nostalgia and a doomed wish to unwind the advances of humanity. But to see them as backward-looking would be an interpretive mistake. In their writings, the Luddites appear more like a nineteenth-century equivalent of Anonymous: “The Remedy for you is Shor Destruction Without Detection,” the Luddites wrote in a letter to the home secretary in 1812. “Prepaire for thy Departure and Recommend the same to thy friends.”

There is something very modern about the Luddites. They serve as a reminder of how many of our current dilemmas about technology raise themes that have consistently cropped up throughout history. Another one of Kranzberg’s six laws of technology is that technology is neither inherently good nor bad, nor is it neutral. How technology is developed and in whose interests it is deployed is a function of politics.

The call to arms of the Luddites can be heard a full two centuries later, demanding that we think carefully about the relationship between technology and labour. Is it possible to resist technological advancement without becoming regressive? How can the advances of technology be directed to the service of humanity? Is work an expression of our human essence or a measure of our productivity — and can it be both?

Central to understanding these conundrums is the idea of alienation. Humans, through their labour, materially transform the surrounding world. The capacity to labour beyond the bare necessities for survival gives work a distinct and profound meaning for human beings. “Man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually,” Marx wrote, “and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.” Our impact on the world can be seen in the product of our labour, a deeply personal experience. How this is organized in society has consequences for our understanding of our own humanity.

What happens to this excess of production — or surplus value — is one of the ultimate political and moral questions facing humanity. Marx’s critique of capitalism was in essence that this surplus value unfairly flows to the owners of capital or bourgeoisie, not to the workers who actually produce it. The owning class deserve no such privilege; their rapacious, insatiable quest for profit has turned them into monstrous rulers. Production becomes entirely oriented to their need for power and luxury, rather than the needs of human society.

Unsurprisingly, Marx reserved some of his sharpest polemical passages for the bourgeoisie. In his view, the bourgeoisie “resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

This experience of exploitation gives rise to a separation or distancing of the worker from the product of her labour. Labor power becomes something to be sold in the market for sustenance, confined to dull and repetitive tasks, distant from an authentic sense of self. It renders a human being as little more than an input, a cog, a calculable resource in the machinery of production.

For those observing the development of the industrial revolution, this sense of alienation is often bound up with Marx’s analysis of technology. The development of technology facilitated the separation between human essence in the form of productive labour and the outputs of that labour. Instead workers received a wage, a crass substitute for their blood, sweat and tears, a cheap exchange for craftsmanship and care. Wages represented the commodification of time — they were payment for the ingenuity put into work. The transactional nature of this relationship had consequences. “In tearing away from man the object of his production,” Marx wrote, “estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”

As Amy Wendling notes, it is unsurprising that Marx studied science. He sought to understand the world as it is, rather than pursue enlightenment in the form of spirituality or philosophy alone. He understood capitalism as unleashing misery on the working class in a way that was reprehensible but also as Wendling put it, “a step, if treacherous, towards liberation.” There was no going back to an agrarian society that valued artisan labour. Nor should there be; in some specific ways, the industrial revolution represented a form of productive progress.

But how things were then were not how they could or should be forever. Marx’s thinking was a product of a desire to learn about the world in material terms while maintaining a vision of how this experience could be transcended. Navigating how to go forward in a way that valued fairness and dignity became a pressing concern of many of many working people and political radicals in his time, a tradition that continues today. •

This is an edited extract from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology, by Lizzie O’Shea, published last month by Verso.

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But even as news headlines are dominated by the latest Trump outrage or the ongoing stupidity of the Brexit process — Trump and Brexit being emblematic of all the failures that confront us — I wonder if we can’t discern the stirrings of something better beginning to take shape.

They are apparent in the rising number of books, articles, documentaries and lectures that are invoking concepts such as “the commons”; that are urging us to rethink the place of work in our lives; that are offering alternative methods of distributing wealth, from cooperative ownership to a universal basic income; and that are theorising new approaches to politics, including concepts such as citizen juries and even the ambitious approaches embodied in the so-called Green New Deal.

Such stirrings are definitely only nascent — they have little mainstream organising power as yet — but they are there if you care to look. If you tilt your head the right way, you might even begin to believe that we are on the verge of positive change. Certainly this is the view of Inside Story columnist Jane Goodall, whose new book, The Politics of the Common Good, is a worthy addition to this emerging school of thought.

Goodall herself is aware of the transitional nature of our moment, and begins her book with a quote from Matthew Arnold: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” She writes:

Surely we are at such a moment. Neoliberal orthodoxy with its economic credo continues to inspire government policies that play out through ever more radical cuts to public services and civic institutions… Yet as the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the mood for change is as strong as it has been in previous periods of revolutionary upheaval.

Her book is very much about defining and explaining neoliberalism as the dead world we are leaving, while setting it against the new period of “the commons” that is waiting to be born. In the process of drawing out the ramifications, she has an interesting argument with herself about “what qualities are intrinsic to human nature” and whether these are “susceptible to alteration through external influence.” Her concern is that “through the course of the twentieth century… claims about what is ‘essential’ to human nature are laden with ideological determinations that have set the policy directions in many countries.”

Essentially, her argument is about whether humans are intrinsically competitive or cooperative creatures, and I think it is fair to say that her conclusion is that we embody both qualities, and so it matters how we design our institutions of governance. Will they encourage competitiveness or cooperation? Neoliberalism, as the dominant ideology of the recent past, has unequivocally favoured a competitive approach to the allocation of resources, and its all-pervasiveness has brought us to our current impasse.

Our response cannot be to simply will more cooperative behaviour into existence: we must design institutions that take cooperation as a governing principle. Like other writers and thinkers working in this space, Goodall reaches into history to revive sometimes ancient methods of cooperation and governance to provide us with examples of what might be possible.

At the heart of her approach is the idea of “the commons” — shared spaces of human interaction that properly belong to nobody and to everybody. These spaces — in the world of information embodied by the internet as much as in the natural world — represent not just a shared resource but also a general inheritance, a wealth if you like, that should not be “enclosed” by private ownership and individual profit.

But Goodall highlights something more about our understanding of the commons, and I think it is the most challenging and potentially most revolutionary contribution her book makes. She argues that “the commons are more than communal property. The very fact of common ownership and benefit implies work.” She quotes David Bollier saying that “the commons consists of working, evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship,” but she takes the argument about commons-as-work in an interesting direction beyond this:

In the work of the commons, philosophy, knowledge and labour are fundamentally related. It is not simply that the commons involve work, it is that the commons are created and defined through work, and work draws meaning and purpose through its service of the common good.

The reason I think the idea that the commons are “created and defined through work” is such a valuable insight is because, as we increasingly move into a period in which various forms of artificial intelligence and automation fundamentally alter the social relationships involved in work, we need to make decisions about what role we want that technology to play. This means we have to think about work differently, and Goodall sets out to do that in an insightful way. (In this, she is a kindred spirit with another Inside Story contributor, Frances Flanagan.)

In a neoliberal world that is dying but still powerfully flapping about, technology is increasingly not just displacing humans from work but undermining conditions of employment and thus contributing to inequality. Such technologies might also create new jobs, but those jobs are offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and with remuneration insufficient to ensure a decent life. The work that is left over from automation (“created”) is increasingly drained of meaning and worth, and fails to offer the fulfilment that many claim is one of the primary benefits of having a job.

The neoliberal world is incapable of recognising this loss of a common good, fixated as it is on competition and individual profit. Only a return to common ownership of the means of production, via things such as workers cooperatives and other forms of communal control, will allow us to engage with these new technologies in a way that sees them deployed (or not) to the benefit of the many, not just the few.

Of course, in terms of what to do next, Goodall barely scratches the surface, and I think underplays the potential benefits of technology. The approach she highlights — using William Morris and his reinvention of traditional methods of creation and production — is, to me at least, unconvincing. Not because the world of artisan producers that she describes is undesirable — far from it — but because I doubt it scales at the level necessary to achieve the results she desires in the world we actually live in. I might be wrong about that, but she didn’t convince me her vision was possible.

Still, Goodall is wise enough to recognise that what she is offering is not a cure-all. She says clearly and early on, “Those of us who advocate for the return of the commons as a response to the ravages caused by neoliberal policies do not propose this as some kind of ‘answer’ to all our problems.” Conflict is inevitable, she writes, but a commons approach may prove to be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.

And I think this approach underpins the thinking of many working in this space: they wish to offer alternatives that allow us to avoid war, full-scale societal collapse, or even revolution. Books such as this are valuable as much as anything, as fair warnings about the risks we are facing, part of a growing plea to take our challenges seriously. If we let the worst happen, we will not be able to say we weren’t warned. •

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Janice Evans works the night shift in a casino on a reservation in Mississippi. She is guaranteed US$8.35 an hour, but in a good week she might receive twice that much including tips. When the weather is hot, people come to the casino for the air conditioning, but on many weekends in autumn they stay at home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights to watch football. Janice’s fortnightly take-home pay in 2012–13 varied between $1200 in July and $900 in February, and from September to November she had to cut back on food purchases.

Elsewhere in Ohio, Sarah and Sam Johnson have apparently stable middle-class incomes of roughly US$65,000 combined before taxes, but spend about US$6000 a year more than they earn. Their expenses — mortgage, insurance and food — are mostly predictable. But even though they have health insurance coverage from their employers, it is low-premium, high-deductibles coverage, meaning that they have paid significant out-of-pocket expenses for minor surgery, MRIs and an emergency room visit, and owe money on a specialised credit card for medical expenses. These expenses have been exacerbated by other unexpected costs: a major leak in a water pipe in their home, and one of their cars breaking down and having to be replaced by a cheap car that then required substantial repairs later in the year. While the Johnsons’ average monthly spending is around $4800, it was nearly $10,000 in one month and close to $8,000 in another.

During 2012 and 2013 a team of ten researchers lived in Ohio, Kentucky, California, Mississippi and New York, where they repeatedly interviewed these three families and members of another 232 households. Their aim was to track every dollar the householders earned, spent, saved and borrowed, every gift they gave or received, every donation they made to charity or friends, and any government benefits they were paid. The results were then analysed by Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider for their book The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.

Morduch and Schneider’s focus is on income volatility — the extent to which a household’s income in any month can vary from its average monthly income over the year. They found that the average household in their sample experienced upward spikes in income during 2.2 months of the year and dips during 2.4 months, adding up to some degree of volatility during a total of 4.6 months. But a high-volatility group of households experienced spikes and dips during an average of 6.6 months a year.

Poorer households — those on around 42 per cent of median income in 2012 — tended to experience more and larger spikes and dips, ranging from 49 per cent below the monthly average to 58 per cent above. But even those classified as having “moderate incomes” (at least 84 per cent of median income) experienced fluctuations between minus 44 per cent and plus 49 per cent. Only 2 per cent of households recorded no significant monthly variation.

It wasn’t only incomes that ebbed and flowed. Spending was also volatile, partly because many families were effectively living from payday to payday, putting off paying bills in some months and trying to catch up in others. Many expenses — rent or a mortgage, for example — were predictable, but others — car or housing repairs and medical expenses — were unexpected.

As Sarah and Sam Johnson’s experience showed, healthcare costs are a big factor. According to Morduch and Schneider, the Johnsons were “unlucky but not so unusual”: about a quarter of the households had sent a family member to an emergency room during the year and about one in ten had a family member hospitalised.

The Financial Diaries makes up for its relatively small sample of households with its richly detailed accounts of how individual households cope with volatility. A broader picture comes from a large set of US data used in a JPMorgan Chase study of the income and consumption habits of 2.5 million bank account holders, transaction by transaction, between October 2012 and December 2014.

The study found that income and consumption were more volatile on a monthly basis than they were from year to year. Seventy per cent of the sample experienced annual income changes of more than 5 per cent between 2013 and 2014, but 89 per cent experienced monthly income changes of more than 5 per cent. Similarly, 41 per cent experienced income fluctuations of more than 30 per cent month-to-month but only 26 per cent experienced more than a 30 per cent change in annual income. Wages and salaries were the major contributor to volatility.

A study of further data from this source found that most of the month-to-month volatility in take-home pay occurred among individuals who stayed in the same jobs. While four-in-ten individuals experienced a job transition in a given year, this accounted for only 14 per cent of the month-to-month volatility in labour income.

The risk factors uncovered in the Financial Diaries — working on commission, relying on tips, coping with healthcare expenses in the absence of universal health insurance — may seem specific to the United States. But evidence from Great Britain reveals similar experiences there, albeit for different reasons.

In Tracking Income: How Working Families’ Incomes Vary through the Year, researchers at the London School of Economics enlisted 180 householders to report on their income and expenditure during the 2003–04 financial year. Nearly half dropped out of the study during the year, but complete week-by-week information was available for the remaining ninety-three.

Of those families, only seven had a stable weekly income over the course of the year, with another twenty-one having “broadly stable” income (within 15 per cent of the annual average for ten or more four-week periods out of the full thirteen periods). Thirty-two families stayed within 15 per cent of the average for ten or more periods but had large “blips” in other periods. Twenty-six families had erratic income patterns — eight of them highly erratic, with four-week earnings varying by up to £1000 per month, or in one case from a high of £2500 to a low of zero.

These variations reflect changes both within the household (in partnership status or number of children) and at work (starting, changing or stopping jobs). While benefits and tax credits generally helped stabilise incomes — rising when earnings fell and vice versa — in some cases they amplified income changes.

A more recent report on irregular pay from the Resolution Foundation, a British think tank, used anonymised transaction data from over seven million Lloyds Banking Group accounts. It found that monthly pay fluctuations are the norm for the majority of employees, with only the 9 per cent of employees who remained with the same employer throughout 2016–17 experiencing monthly fluctuations in take-home pay of more than 5 per cent. More than four in every five steadily employed low-income earners on around £10,000 per year had volatile pay, compared with two-thirds of those on around £35,000 a year. The absolute average monthly pay change for those with a steady job was highest (in excess of 15 per cent) for those on the very lowest earnings.

Do the same patterns exist in Australia? The short answer is that we don’t know — partly because of a lack of data.

The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, or HILDA, provides very detailed and useful information on income changes over time — but only between years. Using HILDA data for 2002–07, the Income Inequality, Mobility and Economic Insecurity in Australia study found that the lowest 10 per cent of earners carried over 30 per cent of total volatility risk and the lowest 20 per cent accounted for 46 per cent of lost wellbeing due to income uncertainty. It seems highly likely that changes within years would add to overall income volatility, as the JPMorgan Chase study found.

Drawing on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s 2016 Characteristics of Employment Survey, researchers Iain Campbell and John Burgess found that more than half of all casual workers in Australia and 15 per cent of permanent employees reported earnings (excluding overtime) that varied from one pay packet to the next in their main job. The ABS’s 2018 survey found that 24 per cent of all employees reported earnings varying from one period to the next (excluding overtime payments), 21 per cent often working a different number of hours each week, and 19 per cent with no guaranteed minimum number of hours each week. The survey doesn’t tell us, however, how much their earnings varied from week to week.

A recent large-scale study surveyed 1101 Australian adults who had been unable to pay a debt when it fell due within the previous two years. Of the participants, around 44 per cent were employed, 36 per cent derived their income primarily from social security payments, and around 7 per cent received both wages and a Centrelink payment. The most common tipping points into financial hardship included unforeseen expenses (37 per cent), a reliance on income support (33 per cent), unexpectedly large utility bills (27 per cent), physical health problems (27 per cent), mental health problems (22 per cent), not enough work (20 per cent) or unemployment (more than six months, 17 per cent; less than six months, 10 per cent). Significantly less prevalent were factors such as gambling (4 per cent) and alcohol and drug addiction (3 per cent).

While this study suggests that income volatility could be a factor for those without enough work, it doesn’t measure income changes directly. One study that did try to do that was a survey of seventy low- and moderate-income households in suburban Melbourne by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and RMIT University. It found that over half of the participants experienced highly erratic variations (greater than 25 per cent) in their fortnightly incomes. One group of nine households had variations greater than 60 per cent.

An analysis of those findings noted that many of these households reported having provided incorrect wage estimates to Centrelink. Casual work and fluctuating hours of work make it hard for households to estimate incomes accurately, and Australia’s highly income-tested benefit system can magnify the impact of reporting errors by cutting benefits in the immediate fortnight (if the estimate of earnings was too high) or in the subsequent fortnight (if the estimate was too low). Most of the study’s respondents sought to cope by reducing spending on food, recreation, utilities, medical care and transport. Just over a third borrowed money from family or friends.

But a comparison of two other studies suggests that Australian households are less likely to experience financial stress than American households. Since 2002, the US Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED, has been providing a wide-ranging overview of the economic wellbeing of American households, including how they deal with unexpected expenses. SHED found that 27 per cent of American adults were forced to skip some form of medical treatment in 2017 (compared with 32 per cent in 2013). Skipping dental care was most common, with 19 per cent going without treatment because of cost in 2017.

Australia’s HILDA survey has collected information on indicators of financial stress in Australia every second year since 2001. The results for 2014 show that about 1.1 per cent of its sample did not have medical treatment when needed, 0.5 per cent went without medicines prescribed by a doctor, 5.2 per cent went without dental treatment and 3.3 per cent went without a yearly dental check-up for their child. These deprivations could potentially overlap, but even cumulatively they show many fewer difficulties with medical expenses than in the United States — not a surprising result given the difference in healthcare systems.

While the measures may not be fully comparable, Australian data also show that emergency expenses generally created fewer difficulties for households. In 2015–16 around 13 per cent of Australian households said they would be unable to raise $2000 in a week for something important. In the United States, the 2017 SHED found that 41 per cent of American adults would either borrow or sell something or not be able to pay if faced with a $400 emergency expense (a reduction from around 50 per cent in 2013). Of this group, 29 per cent — 11.9 per cent of all households — said that they would not be able to pay the expense right now. The percentage of households is slightly lower in the United States, but the amount of money is much lower.

Inequality of wealth is a significant factor. While wealth is much more unequally distributed than income in all countries, the disparities are much greater in the United States than in Australia. According to the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, mean wealth per adult is about 20 per cent higher in Australia than in the United States, but median wealth in Australia, at $191,000, is nearly four times higher. About 6 per cent of adult Australians have less than $10,000 in wealth; in the United States, the corresponding figure is 28 per cent. Put another way, the least wealthy 60 per cent of Australians have 17.2 per cent of total wealth whereas the least wealthy 60 per cent of Americans have 3.2 per cent of total wealth.

Yet a high share of Australians’ wealth is held in the form of housing and superannuation, neither of which is readily available to meet unexpected expenses. In 2015–16, the least wealthy 20 per cent of Australian households had only $10,000 in financial assets apart from superannuation, and owed $13,000 on student loans, credit cards and/or motor vehicle loans (not including mortgages), suggesting considerable vulnerability for this group.

American wealth data rank households by their incomes rather than by their net worth. On this measure, the poorest 20 per cent of US households had an average of US$6700 in net financial assets. In Australia, the figure was A$63,200. (The difference between the rankings by income and wealth reflects the fact that low-wealth householders tend to be young people who have not had time to accumulate financial assets or housing, while the lowest income group is made up of older people who have had many years to accumulate savings and pay off their debts.)

The very modest wealth held by the bottom half of American households is likely to both reflect and reinforce the greater likelihood of financial stress, which in turn will be influenced by the different levels of public coverage of health costs, the level of the minimum wage, and the conditions of employment faced by workers.

The Financial Diaries provides important insights into the challenges of income volatility for American households. It also clearly has implications for a wide range of other public policy challenges — for financial inclusion, for minimising recourse to payday lenders, for relieving household indebtedness, for providing financial counselling, and for increasing the effectiveness of insurance. Volatile incomes pose challenges for income-tested benefit programs and for the collection of taxes to finance social programs. Volatility may also create a climate in which wage demands fall, wage growth stalls — and budget projections are less accurate.

The labour markets of Australia and the United States are different in important ways, as are our social and economic institutions, and the Australian welfare system seems to be more effective in offsetting the risks associated with volatile incomes. Australia’s more comprehensive healthcare coverage seems particularly important. Australia’s tighter employment protections and higher minimum wages could be expected to lessen the impact of income volatility and may be associated with the very different distributions of wealth in Australia and the United States, and thus the different availability of assets to cushion against income shocks.

But Australian households do face significant income risks. HILDA’s longitudinal data show that illness and disability are particularly common, with around 40 per cent of the Australian population experiencing a serious personal injury or illness each year over a ten-year period, and nearly 70 per cent of men and 64 per cent of women needing to cope with a close relative or family member’s serious injury or illness in any ten-year period. Over a nine-year period in another HILDA report, 22 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women were dismissed from their job. Thirty per cent of people who were twenty-five or younger at the survey’s start were dismissed from their jobs over the period. As a result, only 2.2 per cent of the Australian population stayed within the same percentile of the income distribution between 2001 and 2010. According to the latest HILDA survey, around a quarter of working-age men and nearly a third of working-age women experienced a period of income poverty in the ten-year period after 2001.

We also know that Australia has one of the highest levels of part-time employment of any high-income country and the highest level of underemployment in the OECD. A 2015 OECD report, In It Together, found that the share of part-time temporary employees in Australia is the highest of all the countries included, being four times the OECD average and nearly twice the next-ranked countries, the Netherlands and Japan.

The absence of detailed figures on month-to-month income volatility — which we know is likely to be more common than year-to-year volatility — is a glaring lack in Australian social data. It’s one that will need to be remedied if we are to avoid the worst consequences of precarious labour markets. •

The post Expecting the unexpected appeared first on Inside Story.

I have never liked drawing attention to the fact that I’m a woman in technology. I don’t want the most prominent fact about me to be my gender rather than my expertise or my experience, or the impact of my work. In male-dominated settings, the last thing I want to feel is that I’m only there because of my gender, or that it’s the first thing people notice about me. I don’t like that being described as a “woman in tech” flattens my identity, makes gender the defining wrapper around my experience, irrespective of race, class, education, family history, political beliefs and all the other hows and whys that make life more complicated. These are some of the intellectual reasons.

A more immediate reason why I haven’t wanted to be known for talking about gender is because I’m still young and I want to have a career in this industry. I like what I do. I work on a range of issues related to data sharing and use. At the moment I lead a technical team designing data standards and software to support consumers sharing data on their own terms with organisations they trust. Data underpins so much of the current interest in AI, so it’s a good time to be working on projects trying to make it useful and learning to understand its limitations.

It’s also true that most of the time my clients, employers, team members, fellow panellists and advocates are male. Most of the time they’re excellent people. I don’t like making them feel uncomfortable. People generally don’t like feeling as if they’re not being fair or that in some structural ways, the world isn’t fair. Avoiding making people uncomfortable — particularly those who decide whether you’ll be invited to speak at a conference, or hired, or promoted, or put forward for a new exciting opportunity — is still a sensible career move.

So I have long assumed that the best way to talk about gender and be a strong advocate for women is from a distance, at the pinnacle of my career, when I’m the one in the position of power. What a strange pact to make with myself: to effect change in the technology industry, to become a female leader, I just need to stay silent on issues affecting women in the industry. In thirty years’ time ask me what it was like and, boy, will I have some stories to tell — and some really good suggestions!

But I don’t think I can wait any longer. My sense of how to navigate the world as a woman and still get ahead was shaken in 2018. In the media, I watched as women who tried to keep their heads down and avoid making a scene still found themselves branded attention-seekers, deviants, villains — even though it was men behaving badly who were on trial. I published a book in a technology field and tried diligently to avoid discussing gender, only to be dismayed by the influence gender had on how it was received, who read it, who saw value in it.

At events, it was almost always women who approached me to say they enjoyed the panel and to ask follow-up questions. The younger the men, the more likely they were to want to argue with and dismiss me. At the book signings that followed, while my queues mainly comprised women, their requests for dedications were almost always to sons and nephews, brothers and husbands. I smiled politely through comments about being on panels specifically to add “a woman’s perspective.” I looked past the male panellists who interrupted me, repeated me, who reached out to touch me while they made their point.

I was also pregnant. By the time you read this I will have given birth to a baby girl. It is hard to describe how much this has recast what I thought was the right and wrong way to make it as a woman. She is the daughter of two intelligent parents who are passionate about technology. She is currently a ferocious and unapologetic wriggler who takes up every inch of available space and demands our attention, oblivious to the outside world. I don’t know her yet but I already admire her for that.

I do not want her to grow to believe that in order to successfully navigate the world she must make herself small, put up with poor treatment, apologise for taking up space that is rightfully hers. I don’t know how I would look her in the eye when she realises that this way of being does not help her.

While it can seem like we’re only now talking about gender issues in the tech sector, the discussion has been going on for decades. What makes it wearying is how many of the problems raised years ago remain the same.

In 1983 — before I was born — female graduate students and research staff from the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratories at MIT published a vivid account of how a hostile environment to women in their labs impeded academic equality. They described bullying, sexual harassment and negative comments explicitly and implicitly based on gender. They described being overlooked for their technical expertise, and ignored and interrupted when they tried to offer that expertise. The authors made five pages of recommendations aimed at addressing conscious and unconscious differences in attitudes towards women in the industry. “Responsibility for change rests with the entire community,” they wrote, “not just the women.”

It’s clear that for there to be serious improvements in the numbers of girls and women in technology, cultural attitudes towards what girls are interested in and capable of will have to change. We have to want them to change. But I’m not sure that we want that as a society. In Australia, declining participation rates among girls studying advanced maths and science subjects in high school continue to be a cause for concern. The reasons for the decline remain broadly the same as they were twenty years ago, when Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher interviewed more than a hundred female and male computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, home to one of the top computer science departments in the United States, as part of their seminal study of gender barriers facing women entering the profession.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Margolis and Fisher charted how computing was claimed as male territory and made hostile for girls and young women. Throughout primary and high school, the curriculum, teachers’ expectations and parental attitudes were shaped around pathways that assumed computers were for boys. Even where women did persist with an interest in computers into college, Margolis and Fisher observed that by the time they graduated “most… faced a technical culture whose values don’t match their own, and ha[d] encountered a variety of discouraging experiences with teachers, peers and curriculum.”

Back then, as now, barriers persisted in the workforce. In the mid 2000s, The Athena Factor report on female scientists and technologists working in forty-three global companies in seven countries concluded that while 41 per cent of employees in technical roles in those companies were women, over time 52 per cent of them would quit their jobs. The key reasons for quitting: exclusionary, predatory workplace cultures; isolation, often as the sole woman on a technical team; and stalled career pathways that saw women moved sideways into support or executor roles. “Discrimination,” Meg Urry, astrophysicist and former chair of the Yale physics department, wrote in the Washington Post in 2005, “isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success.”

These themes emerge in thousands of books, white papers, op-eds and articles: women leave the tech industry because they’re isolated, because they’re ignored, because they’re treated unfairly, underpaid and unable to advance. These problems persist, and every year there are new headlines concerning gender discrimination at every level of the industry. In 2018, female employees working for Google in California filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the multinational tech company systematically paid women less for doing similar work to men, while “segregating” technically qualified women into lower-paying, non-technical career tracks. The same year, 20,000 employees and contractors walked out at offices around the world to protest sexual harassment at the company after news broke that Andy Rubin, the “father of Android,” had been paid US$90 million to leave Google quietly amid credible accusations of sexual harassment.

In every tech organisation I have worked in, these kinds of dynamics remain uncomfortably familiar. There are more women than men in administrative roles, in project coordination, and in front-end development and design roles, although some of these women began in the industry with technical degrees and entry-level technical roles. Gender-related salary gaps persist, even within the same technical roles and leadership positions. HR processes, designed to create a level playing field, still inadvertently reward those who complain the loudest, who demand more money, who tend more often than not to be men. It remains difficult for women to pursue bullying and harassment complaints, particularly against powerful harassers, without career consequences.

Writing about gender in technology, it’s easy to fall into what computer engineer Erica Joy Baker describes as “colourless diversity.” A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center noted that while 74 per cent of women in computer jobs in the United States reported experiencing workplace discrimination, 62 per cent of African-American employees also reported racially motivated discrimination. Women of colour in tech find themselves doubly affected.

I am reflected in the statistics around gender: I am affected by them, perpetuate them, benefit from them. I have never successfully negotiated a meaningful salary increase or bonus. I have watched as male successors in my own former roles are paid more than I was to do the same job. I have managed teams where my male employees earned more than I did. These kinds of things happen both because I don’t speak up and because organisations let it happen.

I know this because as a manager, I let it happen too. I get requests for higher pay and promotions more frequently from men. Even if they’re rude or unreasonable or completely delusional, I take their sense of being undervalued seriously. I want to make them happy. The women I have managed rarely express their outrage or frustration so openly. They’re slower to escalate concerns and less likely to threaten to leave. I also know that as a white woman in tech, despite these experiences, I’m still statistically likely to be paid more and receive more opportunities than any of my non-white colleagues, male or female or non-binary.

Years of focus on bringing more women into technology roles have created a sense of being eagerly sought out and highly valued. But workplace dynamics and cultural attitudes still persist in making women of all ages, ethnicities, sexualities, once they’re in the sector, feel undervalued and ignored. It’s a strange paradox to live within. On the basis of our gender we’re highly visible (more visible if we’re white and heterosexual). As experts, as contributors to those technologies, it can still feel like we’re hidden in plain sight.

In August 2018, WIRED magazine asked: “AI is the future: but where are the women?” Working with start-up Element AI, it estimated that only around 12 per cent of leading machine-learning researchers in AI were women. Concerns about a lack of diversity in computer science have taken on new urgency, partly driven by growing awareness of how human designers influence the systems making decisions about our lives. In its article, WIRED outlined a growing number of programs and scholarships aimed at increasing gender representation in grad schools and industry, at conferences and workshops, while concluding that “few people in AI expect the proportion of women or ethnic minorities to grow swiftly.”

For women, the line between “inside” and “outside” the tech sector — and therefore what contributions are perceived as valuable — keeps moving. While WIRED focused on a narrow set of skills being brought to applied AI — machine-learning researchers — it nonetheless recast these skills as the only contributions worth counting towards AI’s impact. The “people whose work underpins the vision of AI,” the “group charting society’s future” in areas like facial recognition, driverless cars and crime prediction, didn’t include the product owners, user-experience designers, ethnographers, front-end developers, the sociologists and anthropologists, subject-matter experts or the customer-relationship managers who work alongside machine-learning researchers on the same applied projects.

Many of these roles evolved explicitly to create the connection between a system and society, between its intended use and unintended consequences. They are roles that typically encourage critical thinking, empathy, seeking out of diverse perspectives — all skills that leaders in the tech industry have identified as critical to the success of technology projects. The proportions of women in these kinds of roles tends to be higher, both by choice and perhaps, as the female employees at Google alleged in their 2018 lawsuit, by design. Yet, even as we wrestle in public debates with the impact the design of a technical system has on humans and society, our gaze keeps sliding over these people — already in the industry — who are explicitly tasked with addressing these problems, including many women. If in public commentary we don’t see or count their contributions as part of the development of AI, then their contributions don’t get valued as part of teams developing AI.

I want more diverse women to become machine-learning researchers. I also want the contributions women already make in a range of roles to be properly recognised. What matters isn’t so much getting more women into a narrowly defined set of technical roles, the boundaries of which are defined by the existing occupants (who are overwhelmingly male). This is still a miserably myopic approach to contributions that “count” in tech. What matters is that the industry evolves to define itself according to the wide set of perspectives, the rich range of skills and expertise, that go into making technology work for humans.

What I really don’t want to see, as the relationship between technical systems and humans takes on greater status in the industry, is women being pushed out of these important roles. It would be the continuation of a historical pattern in the tech industry. As technology historians including Marie Hicks have shown, despite this persistent sense that women “just don’t like computing,” women were once the largest trained workforce in the computing industry. They calculated ballistics and space-travel trajectories; they programmed the large, expensive electromechanical computers crunching data for government departments and commercial companies while being paid about the same as secretaries and typists. But as the value of computing grew, women were squeezed out, sidelined, overtaken by male colleagues. Once considered a “soft” profession, women’s work, not “technical” as defined by the men who occupied other technical roles, computer programming eventually became highly paid, prized… and male-dominated.

I worry that we’re about to do it again, this time in ethical AI. Ethical AI is in the process of transitioning from being a “soft” topic for people more concerned with humans than computers, and treated by the technology industry primarily as a side project, to being a mainstream focus. Experts in ethical AI are a hot commodity. KPMG recently declared “AI ethicists” one of the most in-demand hires for technology companies of 2019. There’s a reason a book about ethical AI like Made by Humans got picked up by a mainstream publisher.

A significant proportion of critical research fuelling interest in the impacts of AI on humans and society has been driven by women: as computer scientists, mathematicians, journalists, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, non-profit leaders and policymakers. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s work on bias in facial recognition systems broke open the public debate about whether facial recognition technology is yet fit for purpose. Julia Angwin’s team at ProPublica investigated bias in computer programs being used as aids in criminal sentencing decisions, and exposed competing, incompatible definitions of algorithmic fairness. Data scientist Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the first big mainstream books to question whether probabilistic systems were as flawless as they appeared.

There are many prominent women in AI ethics: Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, co-directors of the AI Now Institute in New York and long-term scholars of issues of bias and human practice with data; Margaret Mitchell, a senior machine-learning researcher at Google, well known in the industry for her work in natural-language processing, who has drawn attention to issues of bias in large corpuses of text used to train systems in speech and human interaction; Shira Mitchell, quantifying fairness models in machine learning; danah boyd; Timnit Gebru; Virginia Eubanks; Laura Montoya; Safiya Umoja Noble; Rachel Coldicutt; Emily Bender; Natalie Schluter. In early 2019, when TOPBOTS, the US-based strategy and research firm influential among companies investing in applied AI, summarised its top ten “breakthrough” research papers in AI ethics, more than half of the authors were women.

Which is why it’s been disconcerting to see, as interest in and funding for AI ethics grows, the gender distribution on panels discussing ethics, in organisations set up explicitly to consider ethical AI, start to skew towards male-dominated again. It’s not just that more men are taking an interest in ethical AI; this is a reflection of its importance, which is something to be celebrated. What troubles me is that what “ethical AI” encompasses often seems to end up in these conversations being redefined as a narrow set of technical approaches that can be applied to existing, male-dominated professions.

Even as the women in these professions — and many of the influential women I just cited are computer scientists and machine-learning researchers — are doing pathbreaking work on the limitations (as well as the strengths) of technical methods quantifying bias and articulating notions of “fairness,” these technical interpretations of ethics become the sole lens through which “ethical AI” is commoditised.

Ethical AI is thus recast as a “new,” previously unconsidered technical problem to be solved, and solved by men. I have been consistently unnerved to find myself talking to academics and institutes planning research investments in ethical AI who don’t know who Joy Buolamwini is, or Kate Crawford, or Shira Mitchell. And I worry that user researchers, designers, anthropologists, theorists — many of them women — whose work in the industry has for years involved marrying the choices made by engineers in designing systems with the humans affected by them, will end up being pushed out as contributors towards “ethical AI.” I’m afraid we’ll just keep finding new ways to render women in the industry invisible. I worry that my own contributions will be invisible.

Every woman in technology can tell you a story about invisibility. At a workshop in 2018, I watched a senior, well-respected female colleague, who was supposed to be leading the discussion, get repeatedly interrupted and ignored. She finally broke into the conversation to say, mystified, as though she couldn’t quite trust what was in front of her own eyes and ears, “Didn’t I just say that? Did anyone hear me say that?” What stayed with me was the way she asked the group the question: she wasn’t angry, just… puzzled. As though perhaps the problem wasn’t that people weren’t listening to her, but that there was some issue with the sound in the room itself, or with her. As if perhaps the problem was that she was a ghost who couldn’t be heard.

I’ve listened to men repurpose my proposals as their own — not intentionally or maliciously, just not realising that they had heard me say the same thing seconds earlier. I’ve watched as men on projects I’ve led attribute our success to their own contributions. It is unsettling and strange to be both visible as a woman in tech, and yet invisible as a contributor to tech. For women of colour, invisibility is doubly felt. Even at conferences and on panels dedicated explicitly to the experiences of women in tech, most panellists will be white women in the industry.

Perhaps nobody has captured the stark influence of gender on visibility more vividly than the late US mathematician Ben Barres. In his essay “Does Gender Matter?” Barres recounts his own experiences as a graduate student at MIT, entering the school as a woman before transitioning to a man. At the time, Barres was responding to comments made by male academics, including Harvard president Lawrence Summers and psychologist Steven Pinker, asserting biological differences to explain the low numbers of women in maths and science. In the essay, Barres is careful not to attribute undue significance to his own experiences. But sometimes anecdotes reveal as much as statistics do.

Barres described how, as a woman and as the only person to solve a difficult maths problem in a large class mainly made up of men, she was told by the professor that “my boyfriend must have solved it for me.”After she changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say that “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.” Confronting innate sex differences head on, Barres described the intensive cognitive testing he underwent before and after transitioning and the differences he observed: increased spatial abilities as a man; the ability to cry more easily as a woman. But by far, he wrote, the main difference he noticed on transitioning to being a man was “that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect. I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

This is the first time I’ve written publicly about my own experiences as a woman in technology. Up till now I’ve played by the rules. I have spent years being polite in the face of interruptions, snubs, harassment. I know instinctively how to communicate my opinion in a way that won’t upset anyone and have tended to approach talking about sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis that what matters most is not upsetting anyone. I have focused on finding the “right words,” the “right time” to talk about gender issues.

But I have observed the ways in which gender (and race, and sexuality) continues to shape who is in power and whose contributions get counted in the tech industry, in ethical AI. Even when it comes to the “right” way to talk about gender issues, I can’t help but notice how different “right” looks for men as compared with women, and for white women as compared with women of colour. Increasingly, men are publicly identifying as champions of change for women: they sign panel pledges, join initiatives pursuing gender equality, demand equal representation, and it’s seen as a career booster. Women demand change too forcefully and are labelled bullies, drama queens, reprimanded for their over-inflated sense of self-importance. Women of colour are vilified and hunted. And women who stay silent in the face of all this, as I have, implicitly endorse the status quo, often finding themselves swallowed up by it anyway. If my daughter grows up to be interested in tech, these are not the experiences I want her to have. I want her to be unafraid to speak up, to demand our attention. I want her to be seen, and I want her to speak up for others.

If there is no “right” way as a woman to speak about gender issues — if there is no “right” way for a woman to take up space, to take credit — then silence won’t serve me or save me either. The only way forward from here is to start speaking. •

This essay is republished from GriffithReview 64: The New Disruptors, edited by Ashley Hay.

The post Computer says no appeared first on Inside Story.

Do you recognise this world? You do? Maybe you’re a North Korean dissident, or a refugee who fled Stalin’s Russia. Or maybe you’ve just got home from work.

“Most workers,” argues the American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson in her provocative new book, “are governed by communist dictatorships in their working lives.” When we enter our workplaces we enter a system of private government. And it’s not a pretty sight: the private governments of the past were run by leaders who took power by force or by birth; the private governments of today are run by CEOs.

Taking her examples from American sources, Anderson tells of poultry processors forced to wear adult nappies because they are denied toilet breaks; sweatshop conditions in Californian garment factories; astounding levels of sexual harassment in restaurants across the nation; out-and-out wage theft in many industries; and Amazon warehouse workers suffering under heatwave conditions because management wouldn’t install air conditioning. (To be fair, they did organise for ambulances to ferry the workers who collapsed from heat stroke to hospital.)

Of course, these are the extreme examples. But the system of control, Anderson says, is near universal. Big Brother is boss, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.

Western governments might be democratic in nature, but when we pass through those ubiquitous security gates into the place where we spend a third of our lives, our corporate lanyards round our necks, we surrender to a system of government that Henry Tudor would recognise and approve of.

Philosophers love their thought experiments, and Anderson’s is a doozy. She describes something familiar in a new way and the scales fall from your hitherto unseeing eyes. After reading her book your workplace will never look quite the same again. Men and women might be born free, but everywhere they are chained to their cubicles.

Journalist and screenwriter Dan Lyons would agree. He’s spent the last couple of years journeying through the work gulags of modern capitalism, talking to dissidents on the shop floor and hubristic managers in the corner offices, and he’s come back a modern-day Solzhenitsyn.

Lyons is no philosopher, or sociologist for that matter, but he is funny — and he’s pissed off. Once a successful journalist, he was disrupted out of a job he loved at Newsweek, ended up working at a tech start-up staffed by enthusiastic millennials, wrote a jaundiced book about his experiences (naturally enough called Disrupted), and ended up contributing to the hit HBO comedy Silicon Valley.

You’d think he’d be content now, but Lyons is having none of that. He’s convinced that modern work practices are making people seriously unhappy, and he thinks it’s all the fault of his traditional enemies: those smug oligarchs who run Big Tech. Lab Rats is the result of this personal crusade.

Because Big Tech companies are powerful and successful, how they do things is copied shamelessly by many other companies hoping to emulate their share prices. As a long-time critic of Silicon Valley’s culture, Lyons is convinced that the industry’s influence on the happiness of modern workers will reach far beyond a pocket of California.

Big Tech loves cheap workers. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google — the so-called FANGs — are all big companies with relatively small workforces, mostly made up of contractors. For Lyons, the growing use of contract workers, pioneered by tech companies like Lyft and Uber, is making job security a thing of the past.

And Big Tech also loves change, at least on its own terms. Unfortunately, that’s not so good for workers. As Lyons points out, “being exposed to persistent, low-grade change leads to depression and anxiety. The suffering is akin to what we experience after the death of a loved one or spending time in combat.”

Move fast and break things, as the Facebook motto had it. Even lives.

Uncovering the dark side of Silicon Valley is becoming a journalistic industry. In Brotopia, the American TV reporter Emily Chang, presenter and executive producer of Bloomberg Technology, examines how the tech industry treats women. Her tales show job discrimination, investor prejudice, and a culture of sexual politics that would look more at home in parts of the National Rugby League.

The chapter of Chang’s book that got a lot of publicity (including an extract in Vanity Fair) when it was first published in the United States dealt with the anonymous sources who told her about the sex parties held by the upper echelons of the tech business. The sense of entitlement among powerful men is, of course, an old and dismaying story. But the CEOs, founders, venture capitalists and paper billionaires of the Valley have given it a new twist. Perhaps because they were virginal nerds in high school and university, they somehow feel they have earnt the right to run a tech version of the Playboy mansion circa 1972, but with more money, better drugs and even less duty of care.

It’s the same kind of self-justifying ideology used to disrupt legacy businesses or claim that the gig economy is an improvement on that old-fashioned notion, workers’ rights.

Chang’s book also reports on the structural issues that bedevil the tech sector. Despite playing an important role in the creation of the industry, women are woefully underrepresented in its workforce. According to Chang, not only are there too few female coders, developers, CEOs and venture capitalists in tech, but there is also no real commitment to overcoming the deficiency.

In an otherwise interesting and well-researched book, Chang does seem to miss one of the most important issues arising from the Valley’s woman problem. As Safiya Umoja Noble shows in another recent book, Algorithms of Oppression, the programming choices that lie at the heart of the whole enterprise are often hopelessly biased against women and minorities, mainly because they are written by a very narrow cohort of white, Ivy League–educated men.

So, what kind of shop floor of the future are these men creating?

One day a software programmer in Los Angeles called Ibrahim Diallo turned up to work to find that his security pass didn’t work. Luckily the security guard recognised him and let him in. Then his computer wouldn’t let him log on. His supervisor sent an email to HR to sort things out. She got back a computer-generated reply saying that he was no longer a “valid employee.” Diallo had been fired by a computer.

Because of a software malfunction, Diallo spent three frustrating weeks without a job and without pay. A minor Kafkaesque moment in the history of industrial relations, you might say. But Dan Lyons says it’s a parable of what’s already happening. “We are meat puppets, tethered to an algorithm,” he writes.

We already have software programs that screen resumés, and irritating workplace surveys run by AI, as well as the widespread use of “continual performance improvement algorithms” that literally monitor a worker’s every move. By creating a new hybrid, part worker, part machine, we run the risk of dehumanising the workplace, says Lyons — with far-reaching psychological effects on workers.

“In my quest to understand the epidemic of worker unhappiness,” writes Lyons, “I’ve come across stressors like dwindling pay cheques, job insecurity and constant, unrelenting change. But [the] fourth and final factor of unhappiness in the workplace — dehumanisation — might be the most dangerous of all.”

An optimist at heart, Lyons says he’s also found signs of a counterrevolution, at least in some companies. There’s the Chicago-based software company Basecamp, which mandates that its staff work only forty hours a week — except in summer, when they take Fridays off. Basecamp’s owners aren’t pursuing world domination, just interesting and fulfilling lives. And, anyway, they’re not short of cash: one of them can still afford to collect racing cars and compete at Le Mans.

Then there’s Managed by Q, a contract-cleaning business, where “everybody cleans,” even the firm’s founder and CEO, who still does shifts scrubbing toilets. Unlike many newly minted companies, Managed by Q doesn’t rely on the gig economy to shave wages and conditions; everyone who cleans also gets health insurance, a pension scheme and stock options.

Lyons argues that companies like these have seen what’s happening in Silicon Valley and then done the opposite. They don’t make Google-sized returns, but their staff turnover is lower, their productivity is higher, and people have fun at work.

The reform that Lyons seems to miss, however, is the most obvious one: collective action. Last November, for example, around 20,000 Google workers staged a walkout protesting at the company’s use of forced arbitration to settle sexual harassment or assault cases instead of allowing its workers to go to court. By February Google had bowed to the pressure and agreed that it would no longer force employees to settle disputes in this way.

As the group that led the campaign, Google Walkout for Real Change, tweeted at the time, “This victory would never have happened if workers hadn’t banded together, supported one another and walked out. Collective action works. Worker power works. This is still just the beginning.” •

The post A spectre is haunting the workplace appeared first on Inside Story.

I don’t remember the name of the documentary we watched, or even the teacher who showed it to us, beyond his spectacular moustache and fondness for lessons on “bush survival skills.” But I will never forget the graph I saw on the screen that day: a lime-green line, superimposed across an image of the earth, charting the rise of global surface temperatures since 1960. The line went up and steadily up, fading into ominous red as it approached the 1980s. There was no violent up-tick at the end, like the “hockey-stick graph” that would feature in An Inconvenient Truth seventeen years later. Nor did the line end in the splayed fingers of alternative “shared socioeconomic pathways” like the graph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report twenty-eight years later. It nevertheless made a deep impression on me.

It was clear, from that line, that we were all going to have to do something, very urgently, to get it to go back down again.

With an imagination fertilised by stories of Vietnam war protests, the Australian kids TV show Secret Valley (in which plucky BMX-riding teenagers in a koala-filled valley stood battle with greedy real estate developers week on week), and the slogan “think global and act local,” I did the thing that was obvious for a child to do in 1989. I started a group within the school with a grandiose name. We were known as “PEACE,” an acronym for People for the Environment and Conservation Everywhere, and we had an immediate, concrete objective: the elimination of the non-recyclable polystyrene cups used in the school canteen to serve out chicken soup at lunchtime.

Tales such as these tend to follow a familiar narrative arc, one that traces a political awakening through the experience of coming together to make demands, and builds to the realisation of the immense power we realised we had to speak truth to power more generally. First the polystyrene cups, and then the world.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the school principal asked gently how else we proposed to keep the drinks hot and safe, we said we didn’t know, and “PEACE” dissolved soon after, our short- and long-term aims unmet. My nascent environmental consciousness was channelled elsewhere, into checking hairspray cans for CFCs and applying sunscreen and wearing broad-brimmed hats with renewed authority and vigour.

But this is not a simple tale of dissipated personal resolve. I did not lose interest in the global temperature line. Rather, I did what I was socialised to do. I “grew up.”

In 1990s Australia, this meant devoting attention to a different sort of line, one that was not written down or public, but rather in my own head: my private line of personal progress. I had been raised in the slipstream of the postwar “golden age” as an indirect beneficiary of a set of educational, industrial relations and social security policies that had enabled my father, who had grown up in a poor family and left school without matriculating in the 1940s, to move into the middle class in the 1960s after many years spent working as a cleaner.

Significant changes were under way in the Australian economy in the 1990s, but what was in my teenage head was a melange of beliefs from an earlier time: an awkward and undigested blend of Fordism, the Protestant work ethic, Keynesianism and second-wave feminism. These collectively distilled into the commonsense idea that hard work, delayed gratification and education were reliable fuel for an upward trajectory in life. It was a belief that, upon obtaining the requisite good marks at school, and then uni or TAFE, you had a ticket to do work that was interesting and useful, entailed more complexity and responsibility as you got older, and earned enough to enable you to buy a house, have a family, and retire comfortably. It was a deal I assumed applied to everyone; not a special offering for those with superabundant talent, energy or privilege.

Unlike the global temperature line, the determinants of this personal-progress line felt wholly within my control. They nestled comfortably in the fabric of everyday life, an unspoken and unacknowledged dimension of day-to-day chats with friends about things like which subjects to choose, which jobs to apply for, and where to live. Yet, as the 1990s flipped into the millennium, it became gradually clear that the pursuit of work that was socially useful, interesting and reasonably paid was not so much a singular endeavour as a competitive and strategic puzzle. You couldn’t have all three, or rather, for women, four, since the question of how to fit in children was an additional matter that we alone had to consider.

Those fortunate enough to be buoyed with parental wealth seemed to have an easier run, not only at achieving two, three or more of the prized quartet, but in taking risks to get them, backed by a sense of entitlement and the knowledge that their family would bail them out if needed. For those with less cultural and material capital, the horizons were shorter. And the rules that seemed so self-evident at high school had the habit of melting and morphing without explanation every time we tried to play within them.

As I was navigating these questions, that other line, the global temperature one, did not disappear from my consciousness. But, if I am honest, it occupied a different universe from that personal-progress line. I had the climate in mind when trying to decide whether to ride my bike rather than drive, when remembering to take my reusable bag rather than use a plastic one, when buying a KeepCup. The climate line related to stuff and its management. Superego, rather than ego. Things I was supposed to say no to rather than the grand, existential puzzle of what to say yes to.

Conversations about the climbing red line and what it meant were awkward to have with friends. They didn’t seem to last for very long.

The different ways we talk about work and its future don’t mesh well with the reality that we have just twelve short years to avert calamitous climate change.

The “just transitions” narrative, for instance, takes a narrow view. It quite rightly observes that there is no zero-sum choice between jobs and the environment. Twenty-four million jobs worldwide will be created by 2030 by virtue of renewable industries, comfortably eclipsing the six million jobs predicted to be lost from the cessation of fossil fuels. It is crucial that workers in the latter group are offered fair support to transition into these new industries or into other work, of course, but so far this story has little to say about workers who are not closely proximate to the work involved in energy extraction and production.

The “digital disruption” story of the future of work, by contrast, is expansive in its scope. It foretells unimaginably vast changes in present configurations of work, heralding the inevitable breaking down of jobs into tasks, many of them vulnerable to replacement by machines. A tone of gleeful inevitability commonly accompanies this narrative, paired with an insistence that technological change has invariably led to a “net jobs gain” in the past, and will do so again. As long as workers adopt a suitably “flexible” mindset, and no one holds back on investment in technology, all will be well.

A more pessimistic narrative of work may be found among the heralds of the “precariat.” For the first time in history, they argue, we have a generation who, despite high levels of educational attainment, are forced to work in “careerless jobs,” with no “shadow of the future” in their working lives, to use Guy Standing’s chilling phrase. Detached from any sense that what they say or do today will make any difference to their fate tomorrow, they are the new dangerous class: frustrated, insecure, indebted and stressed, ripe for seduction by the politics of xenophobia, populism and nostalgia.

And finally, there is an even grimmer story, in which panic gives way to elegy and lamentation. Commonly associated with the writer Paul Kingsnorth and the “Dark Mountain” project, this narrative suggests that human industrial systems are effectively unstoppable, fuelled by a set of toxic myths about the separation of humanity from “nature” and the necessity of human “progress.” All that can be done from here is to challenge these myths with counter-stories and privately pursue lives outside industrial systems.

These four narratives share a few common logics. All (apart from just transitions) tend towards determinism, and the sense that we humans have little agency in the question of how work is organised and valued, and that it is instead some other force, be it technology, neoliberalism or industrial capitalism, that sets the terms of our future. What each shares, too, is the implicit dismissal of work as a viable stage upon which we might collectively struggle for a better system. Indeed, these narratives carry little optimism that any alternative social order will ever be possible at all.

It is a diagnosis that is premature. Signs of an appetite for alternative orders to the “take/make/consume/dispose” model of human progress abound. From the streets full of schoolchildren on strike for the climate to the Green New Deal movement to the language of “circular economies” starting to be heard in business and government, new modes of thinking about what human progress means are emerging and beginning to erupt into mainstream politics all over the world.

And just as it is premature to give up on the possibility of a new social order, so too is it hasty to abandon the idea that work can be a political site from which to fight for the reform. For there is a crucial link between “sustainability” and work that is perhaps very obvious but rarely made explicit: the process of “sustaining” requires human labour. It means more than simply saying “no” to damaging acts of consumption; it also means saying “yes” to the human activities that are positively necessary for the repair, renewal and regeneration of our soils, our oceans, our cities, our critical human systems and our human bodies.

A society that exists within planetary limits is one that looks on such work as more than just an afterthought or “non-core” aspect to the “real” business of production. It rather treats it as utterly elemental.

So how do we currently value and organise this work?

In Perth there is a carer working in a residential care home who thinks that no one should ever die alone. There is no funding for palliative care supplies at her work, so she runs a raffle to enable her to buy what she needs, like moisturiser to use on the lips of people in the last days of life, when they can’t make their mouths wet any more. Most days she works more than an hour without pay. She has never been paid more than the award rate for forty-three years, despite the additional qualifications she has acquired with her own time and money. The time she gets to shower and toilet each person she cares for is approximately six minutes.

In Arnhem Land there is a Kuninjku man on an outstation who used to burn his country according to customary practice. His burning eased the destructive pressure on native species exerted by feral cats, cane toads, pigs, cattle and other animals, and formed part of a sustainable hybrid economy that comprised hunting and fishing, arts and crafts, and access to state transfer payments. Since 2015, government policy changes mean that he must now engage in “work-like activity” (which does not include caring for country) for twenty-five hours a week, on an hourly rate of $11.60, without standard industrial protections. He has no time for burning now, and the Kuninjku hybrid economy has all but disappeared.

In Brisbane there is a woman who loves to care for and teach young children. Her wage is so low that she cannot afford to have children of her own.

In Hobart there was a security guard who worked in the state’s court complex whose name was known by every employee and regular user of the building. She had a low, quiet voice capable of soothing the most intimidating of offenders. She offered support to domestic violence victims and solace to the parents of young offenders. One day, after twenty-one years of work, her position was converted into a casual one by the service multinational who had taken over the contract. She could not pay her mortgage on such uncertain wages, and was forced to leave.

In Perth there was an engineering graduate who wanted to work in renewable energy manufacturing. Despite top marks, he was unable to get a secure job in that field. Others in his cohort found jobs in oil, coal and gas industries, earning, on average, $180,000 a year.

In rural New South Wales there is a regenerative farmer who knows how to “read” the landscape, measuring success in terms of the levels of animal health, species diversity and the quality of nutrient and water cycling on his property. Seeing his farm in this way meant that he had to painstakingly “unlearn” everything he was taught about best-practice farming over decades.

In Adelaide there is a junior humanities academic who gave birth to a human being. Devoted to her discipline and the maintenance of an intergenerational conversation about the world through teaching and writing, she worked for years as a casual, always taking more than her allocated forty-five minutes per student per term to be the best teacher she could. Research was done in her own time in the hope of securing a permanent job, but with a child to care for, she could no longer afford to work for free, and has left the sector.

Each of these people does work that is the opposite of what anthropologist David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs.” They bestow, daily, the thing that Simone Weil described as “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” namely, attention.

Their work is environmental. Not in the narrow sense of being low-carbon-emitting (although it is that). Nor in the sense that it boosts biodiversity (although some do that too). Their work is environmental because it is centrally concerned with human and non-human regeneration, and in particular with fostering social cohesion, trust, civility and a sense of order. It is environmental because it fosters education and the passing on of learning about how to live wisely and within limits. No society can simultaneously exist within environmental limits and be a democracy that does not possess an abundance of these things.

There are some common themes in their conditions of work. Their jobs generally lack pathways in and pathways up. Most of these workers are not “held” within a secure career structure that enables them to reliably progress over time in seniority, nor are they paid adequately to comfortably afford those social markers of “life progress”: a house and a family and a secure retirement. They are, rather, expected to “trade off” the meaningfulness of their work for material security, status and self-development.

For many, daily work is often frustrated and interrupted by management processes that are ill-suited to their labour. They must contend with rigid Taylorist grids, competitive frameworks, productivity metrics: repertoires of control and efficiency derived from industrial contexts thrust into vocations that have, for millennia, followed the tempos and cyclical rhythms of human and environmental need rather than the dictates of the clock.

Many, if not most, of these workers live under the shadow of a glaring mismatch between the status of their work (in terms of pay and security) and the social value it creates. For we reward and support the stewards of renewal far less generously than we do the stewards of extraction and consumption, who benefit from myriad material and social supports that mean that their personal-progress lines don’t just start high, but are set up to rise.

No element of this work order is necessary, or inevitable. The point is not that these workers are victims. Far from it, most of those mentioned are actively organising and agitating in their workplaces and unions to make their conditions of work better. The point is rather that there is a deep perversity in our current order of work, which does not furnish the people who are doing the things most crucial to a flourishing planet and society with the means to flourish themselves.

As Australians, our obligations in responding to environmental crisis are particularly acute. We are one of the wealthiest and most technologically capable nations on the planet, and among the most blessed in renewable energy sources. Yet we are also one of the highest per capita emitters in the world. To put our current priorities in clear focus, the International Monetary Fund has calculated that Australia spends 1.96 per cent of its GDP on fossil fuel subsidies. That is almost four times the approximately 0.5 per cent of GDP we spend on early childhood education and care. In other words, for every public dollar we spend building a future for our youngest citizens, we spend nearly four dismantling that future.

There are powerful historical and geographical dynamics that have led to those damning numbers. Our “settler capitalist” trajectory was premised on extractive pastoral and mining practices. At the same time as that trajectory brutally destroyed and displaced Indigenous lifeways, it imported a highly gendered conception of public and private life that consigned work of social reproduction to women and systematically excluded it from the formal economic sphere.

But just as Australia’s history can be blamed for our present inertia, so too does it contain remarkable sources of inspiration for how we might meet the challenges we face now. We can learn from the religious, cultural and kinship structures that enabled Indigenous peoples to live on and tend to the land, sustainably, for millennia, and to pass on knowledge of how to care for country through the generations.

We can recall the philosophy that underpinned the creation of some of our key national institutions at Federation. The conciliation and arbitration system, for instance, was predicated on a set of principled arguments for determining where competitive markets belong and where they do not. It rested on a notion that our economic systems should be in service to a higher purpose — the development of people as full moral and social beings — and established systems for regulating industrial relationships to that end.

We can learn, too, from the fact that we have remade the fundamental determinants of our work order once already. One hundred years ago, the basic determinants of working life — the things that had the greatest bearing on your occupation, salary, permission to work at all — were gender and race. Imperfect and incomplete as the process was, we largely dismantled that system of formal discrimination in the final third of the twentieth century.

Finally, a sense of history can aid us in understanding why so many ostensibly powerful people seem to feel so powerless to do anything about our current crisis. Our embrace of a passive conception of government, one that confines itself, as Mariana Mazzucato has recently observed, to doing little more than merely “levelling the playing field” of the market and getting out of the way, has led us to consign great swathes of the work of renewal to the for-profit market. As a consequence, much of the care of our eldest and youngest citizens is the responsibility of firms necessarily operating within a financialised system that demands short-termism, risk-shifting, debt loading and lean labour costs. Such arrangements are not only unjust. They are the product of an anachronist and misplaced application of ideas that were gestated in the context of the cold war, in response to a centralising, statist, planning-obsessed Soviet enemy that no longer exists. They are institutional arrangements that come from another age and are not the ones we need to deal with these warming, fragmented and increasingly unequal times.

Such times demand a new work order, an updated social contract for our warming world that recognises anew that the purpose of our economy, and thus of work, is to facilitate the flourishing of our living systems. It is not to furnish markets, capital, GDP — or any of the human inventions we have devised as synecdoches for advancement — with raw material.

The essence of such a renewed social contract should lie in the notion that if you are doing useful work — and especially if you are doing the essential work of stewardship and renewal of our life-giving systems — you should be rewarded with the status, salary and self-development opportunities to enable you to fully develop your capabilities over your life course. You will not be left to knit together the elements of a full and flourishing career on your own.

The new work order can’t be technocratic. It needs to be built upon the strengthened efforts of those already engaged in renewal and stewardship work, and the community organisations, unions and environmental groups that support them.

There will be struggle. There are, after all, more than a few powerful stewards of the old take/make/consume/dispose order who will see no reason to simply surrender their status. We must start to see certain habits, practices and fields of expertise associated with short-termist, non-reciprocal corporate “extractivism” as being akin to occupational “stranded assets.” Just as certain bodies of fossil fuel ores must simply be kept in the ground, so too, these ideas for how to run a society must simply stay in people’s heads.

Technology must be seen as a servant rather than a master. It is crucial to contest the idea that technology, rather than people, determines the value and organisation of work. And, in particular, that it is “gigs” and “tasks” that comprise the natural units of work, rather than relationships, careers and domains of knowledge and practice. At the same time, it is crucial to avoid nostalgia. Digital capabilities and networked orders must be at the heart of our repertoire in thinking about how to reorganise and value work that is oriented to environmental repair and stewardship.

We must re-examine, too, our assumptions about what counts as low- and high-skilled work in light of what we now know about the complex needs of human and environmental systems. Our assumptions are currently stuck in a circular logic that ties status to levels of pay and credentialism, and “bakes in” the undervaluation of caring and relational work. There is no reason why domains of work that are currently fragmented and insecure cannot be rebundled into occupations that are more autonomous, skilled, relational and rewarding.

A new work order will not displace existing environmental imperatives. We must rightly continue to insist on a rapid and deep transition to renewable energy, reduced pollution and consumption, and the eradication of fossil fuel interests from politics. But a new work order will augment them in crucial ways, enabling people to weave the great work of social transformation into their everyday lives.

My generation will be the last to have a climate epiphany. My daughters are growing up always knowing that their world is careering towards a destructive path. They know it in the same sort of way I grew up knowing about the first world war — and thinking (with indecent arrogance) that if, somehow, I had been there, I would never have been involved in something so silly and pointless.

My hope is that by the time they are adults they will see as grotesque the fact that we — knowing about climate change — once paid our brightest young people handsomely for coming up with ingenious ways of flinging people and objects around the planet as frictionlessly and profitably as possible. That we did that at the same time as practically impeding the work of those engaged in the renewal and repair of the world. I hope they will look on such arrangements with a sense of incredulity, of the kind I felt when reading about the militarist logic that saw 57,000 British casualties on the first day of the Somme but insisted that young men wake up and go over the top to be slaughtered again the next day.

Of course, like any parent, I hope their little lines of personal progress rise, and that they find occupations that are useful and interesting and that nourish and nurture the people and places around them. But as every parent knows, I can’t do that for them. What I can do, and what all of us can do, is fight for a system that doesn’t press impossible dilemmas on their slim shoulders.

It is within our power to reshape our present order of work in a way that does not insist that the next generation must choose between work that renews the world and work that is materially secure. We can, instead, fashion a system that offers them a stake in a deep and expansive environmental politics. One that isn’t just about what they do or don’t buy, but that yokes together their private lines of progress with that other great line that determines and marks our collective fate. Such a system would not only be easier and fairer to live in. It would also enable their ambitions, their loves and their impulses to care for the places and people around them to be woven into a common social project they will fight for when we are all gone: the nurturance of life, and the flourishing of our common home. •

This is an edited version of the inaugural Iain McCalman Lecture, delivered at the University of Sydney on 6 February. The lecture was established to celebrate the career of the distinguished historian Iain McCalman.

The post Climate change and the new work order appeared first on Inside Story.

And that was it — no mention of my outburst. Or the wombat. But by then I had decided to leave anyway. For two and a half months I had put up with the MP’s petty, bullying antics and it was time to make myself scarce.

Leaving meant turning my back not just on her, though; it would also probably end any hope I had of a career in politics. And that’s what has been missing from the Emma Husar controversy: a recognition of the vulnerability of people who work for politicians, especially if they plan a career in politics, and just how complicit the parties are in their predicament. That’s why the findings of a party-commissioned report won’t shed much light on incidents like this.

Political organisations of all colours have everything to gain by downplaying complaints made by electorate officers. And how could it be otherwise? What party would want to reveal that it had vetted and approved a candidate for preselection only to find that, once elected to office, he or she was incapable of managing a small staff without resorting to bullying and intimidation? Who is going to take responsibility for that mistake?

In retrospect, the writing had been on my particular wall all along. I discovered that the press officer I had replaced hadn’t actually resigned — he simply hadn’t turned up for work one day. He had locked himself in his flat in a nearby town and refused to come out. According to office folklore, the MP went to the flat and spent half an hour buzzing the doorbell, shouting, “I know you’re in there!” Shouting at people was the only constant in her erratic management style.

All the horror stories about my former employer were linked by one theme: if we wanted a career in politics, we needed to shut up and do what she said. The not-so-subtle threat was that all it would take was one bad word about us in the party room and no other MP would touch us. And, of course, because we were in the unusual situation of being on the public payroll without being public servants, there was no HR hotline we could call, no way to bring in a mediator.

The only organisation that could rein in an MP between elections was his or her party — and we knew whose side the senior figures were on. The party knew about the high turnover of staffers in my boss’s office, but she — a good local member in a marginal seat — was too valuable an asset for them to touch. Staffers were expendable. The party didn’t even think it was worthwhile to offer the MP some basic training or send in a mediator when things got very bad.

I was new in town and was looking for somewhere to stay, so my fellow staffer suggested I move in with him — he was renting a big house and was in urgent need of a housemate. “No way!” she bellowed when she heard about it. “I’m not having you lot spending your time talking about me behind my back!” This was my second day at work.

Then I found out that she didn’t want me to waste money on accommodation when parliament was sitting because she needed to be able to tell the electorate that she was spending less money than her predecessor. I would work in Canberra late into Thursday night then make my own way home to her electorate and be at my desk the next day. That’s how I came to swerve off the road in the early hours of Friday morning, miles away from anything, to avoid a wombat. I was lucky to survive.

Back then I was in my early twenties, with no mortgage to pay and no kids to feed. When I left the office, that was it; my fellow electorate officer did the same and started up a successful professional training company (we’re still in touch, although our conversations mainly involve us reliving the trauma of those months). But what about those who couldn’t afford to resign? Or those who actually wanted to make a career out of it?

The veracity of the claims against Husar is for others to decide, but one thing I know for sure: political staffers are unusually vulnerable and completely on their own. The assumption that politicians have the right to hire and fire until they get the staff they want will never be challenged. And if parliament doesn’t want to take responsibility for the fate of workers it pays for, well, the parties aren’t about to get involved either. When my MP was churning through employees, everyone in the party knew about it but no one acted.

When a fellow staffer left the office just weeks ahead of me, he called me on my mobile as he drove away. “Free at last; free at last… Thank God.” It was exactly what the previous staff member had done while driving away for the last time, and it had already become an office meme.

“Who was that? Who were you talking to?” My boss had appeared out of nowhere.

“Nobody,” I answered. “I was talking to nobody.” ●

The post The political precariat appeared first on Inside Story.

He eventually figured it out and got me to where I was meant to be, but I couldn’t resist.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said to Uber’s Brisbane manager at the time, Sam Bool, when he met me in reception. “My Uber driver got lost.”

I had been on a panel a few months earlier with Bool, and he had suggested I call in at Uber the next time I was in town and have a look around. Though I was happy to accept the invitation, I wasn’t what you’d call a fan of Uber. But nor was I one of those who dreams of its destruction. Uber and other platforms of its kind have enormous potential, even if the company’s labour practices are far from ideal. As part of a more general transformation of work and industry, and with the right regulation and a much more ethical approach, their upside could be significant.

Indeed, Brisbane (and the rest of Queensland) already regulates Uber, and the state government’s legislation has been beneficial for everyone (though the taxi industry would argue that the new rules don’t go far enough). Among other things, drivers are obliged to pay an annual fee in order to operate; they must meet a zero drug and alcohol requirement when driving; their vehicles must have a government-granted certificate of inspection and display Uber-identification when the app is operating; and, as of 15 January 2018, they are required to have a Booked Hire Service Licence, which comes with its own set of rules.

When the regulations were introduced, Uber’s Queensland manager, Alex Golden, told the ABC that the company was “disappointed for Queenslanders who will miss out on the opportunity to make flexible money from ride-sharing… because they can’t afford the upfront costs imposed by government.” Interestingly, though, during the panel discussion where Bool and I met, Bool told us that the regulation had actually made his life as a manager easier. The fact that the government now imposed certain standards on Uber drivers meant that he no longer had to spend time enforcing similar rules and was freed up to do other things.

At this point, Uber’s year of hell hadn’t officially begun. This was before accusations of sexual harassment surfaced in the United States; before founder Travis Kalanick was forced from his post as CEO; and before the City of London refused to renew the company’s operating licence. It was also before Uber was sued by Google’s autonomous vehicle company, Waymo, for allegedly stealing trade secrets, and before Kalanick himself was sued for fraud by Benchmark, one of the earliest venture capital firms to invest in the company. I’d be surprised if these developments would have changed the essentials of what I saw in Brisbane, though perhaps they’d have changed the conversation we had.

Even before things got rocky for the company, you would hardly say it was a stranger to controversy. It was noted for — and even revelled in — its bad-boy image as a disruptor of the traditional taxi market. It openly flouted regulations and seemed almost to welcome slugging it out in court with the various governments it offended. It aggressively and shamelessly used its customer base to lobby politicians, as famously happened in New York when mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would seek to limit the number of hire cars operating in his city. It also openly opposed attempts by drivers to unionise, and indeed has spent billions on getting rid of drivers altogether through automation.

My visit began with a tour of the premises, which is linked to the separate offices of Uber Eats and the division that organises promotions with local businesses. In one section, staff liaised with drivers via telephone — hiring was done elsewhere — and it was here that I got my first glimpse of the kind of thing that many people hate about Uber. I was told that the staff on the phones worked from scripts, partly in order to make sure they never used a form of words that implied the driver was an employee. They never tell drivers to do anything; they suggest certain courses of action.

I was told the average amount of time a driver stays with Uber is four months, which struck me as an incredibly high turnover rate. It means a significant part of the business involves recruiting drivers. Indeed, a 2015 report released in the United States by Uber itself shows that, of 162,000 active drivers, 11 per cent quit within a month. Most were also part-time — 62 per cent had other jobs — and just 14 per cent of drivers were women (though the figure is even lower for taxi drivers: in the United States, 8 per cent are women; in Australia, the figure is 6 per cent).

The implication of all this is that businesses like Uber rely on the existence of a vast pool of unemployed or underemployed low-wage workers who are looking either for any sort of work at all or for some sort of income supplement. Some of them are certainly attracted by the flexibility the job provides — I have spoken to students who drive for Uber in preference to, say, working in a restaurant, because it’s much easier to fit Uber around their study schedule — but the reality is that a labour market that provided everyone with a decently paid, full-time job would be the death of companies like Uber in their current form.

The high turnover also makes it incredibly difficult for drivers to organise collectively, let alone unionise, and demand better pay and conditions. (Given its hostility to unionisation, Uber may well regard the turnover rate as a feature rather than a bug.)

Another controversial aspect of the “platform capitalism” that Uber represents is its use of rating systems that allow customers to score workers, workers to score customers, and the platforms themselves to use data to impose standards on drivers. Like many such businesses, Uber uses a star-rating system (one to five) and, as an article in the Verge points out, such rating systems have all sorts of implications for how we understand the worker–employer–customer relationship:

The on-demand economy has scrambled the roles of employer and employee in ways that courts and regulators are just beginning to parse. So far, the debate has focused on whether workers should be contractors or employees, a question sometimes distilled into an argument about who’s the boss: are workers their own bosses, as the companies often claim, or is the platform their boss, policing their work through algorithms and rules?

But there’s a third party that’s often glossed over: the customer. The rating systems used by these companies have turned customers into unwitting and sometimes unwittingly ruthless middle managers, more efficient than any boss a company could hope to hire. They’re always there, working for free, hypersensitive to the smallest error. All the algorithm has to do is tally up their judgements and deactivate accordingly.

I asked Bool if it was true that drivers are fired if their customer rating falls below a certain level (generally reported as 4.8 stars) and he told me that the star rating is just one tool Uber uses to keep a check on driver performance. Another is the “telematics” function associated with the app and the GPS tools within the drivers’ smartphones. By using those readings, Uber can tell whether a driver is holding the phone in his or her hand or has it mounted on a stand on the dashboard (as Uber recommends). It can also tell whether the driver has accelerated too quickly, swerved, or braked suddenly. Uber justifies this close monitoring of drivers as a way of improving overall safety, and it explains on their engineering website:

On Uber Engineering’s Driving Safety team, we write code to measure indicators of unsafe driving and help driver partners stay safe on the road. We measure our success by how much we can decrease car crashes, driving-related complaints, and trips during which we detect unsafe driving.

Uber uses “harsh braking and acceleration as indicators of unsafe driving behavior.” Harsh braking, says the company, “is highly correlated to unsafe behaviors like tailgating, aggressive driving, and losing focus on the road.”

Uber is not alone in using technology to monitor driver behaviour. “Black boxes” that use similar technology are common in the trucking industry. An executive at one of Australia’s biggest haulage companies told me recently that they “help our drivers understand how to be better drivers.” According to one manufacturer of such devices, “It provides instant in-cab feedback to drivers so they can adjust their behaviour accordingly, increasing safety and efficiency. It also uses on-board data to generate weekly driver skills reports, creating another opportunity to educate drivers and reinforce optimum driving habits in your company.”

For all the talk of improved safety and efficiency, though, such practices also highlight one of the least-talked-about factors shaping the future of work, namely the way the new technologies enable ongoing, real-time surveillance of employees and contractors — and, indeed, customers. We know, for instance, that Uber’s app used to track passengers for five minutes after their ride had finished, a practice that was only recently discontinued.

After the tour, I sat down with about fifteen staff members while they had their lunch. Uber provides a fresh meal for staff each day, and the common area — where we sat around a big square table — has a fridge full of drinks employees can help themselves to, along with microwaves and coffee-making facilities. After I was introduced, we went around the table and each person gave some background about his or her education and trajectory to Uber. I was invited to talk about my book, Why the Future Is Workless, and then we spent about an hour discussing matters arising.

I imagine everyone was on best behaviour, but all the same I was struck by what an impressive lot they were. Roughly equal numbers of men and women, nearly all in their twenties, all of them with at least one degree — in everything from psychology to programming — and a number with postgraduate degrees. We talked about the effect technology was having on work and they were well-versed in the pros and cons of what was happening: they joked about how most of them were likely to be made redundant by machines.

When I asked how they saw their careers unfolding, most thought that they would have many jobs across their working life and accepted this as the nature of work these days. In fact, they didn’t see it as a negative at all. They liked the idea of that flexibility and the chances it opened up for travel and different experiences. It struck me that it would have been interesting to have a similar discussion with drivers present as well. The experience of the gig economy — moving from job to job or contract to contract — is obviously very different for those with in-demand skills and qualifications than it is for those simply trying to string together enough to live on.

I asked what they thought about the prospect of driverless vehicles. Most thought it was inevitable.

“How would you explain the introduction of a driverless fleet if you were Uber?” Bool asked me.

“Well, first,” I said. “I’d stop lying about what is likely to happen.”

I told them I had recently seen an interview with Travis Kalanick in which he had played down likely job losses, even suggesting that autonomous vehicles were about “job creation.” While it is certainly true that new jobs will emerge with such a technology, there is also no doubt that what attracts companies like Uber to autonomous vehicles is the chance to lift their own profitability by reducing the number of drivers they need to pay. Pretending otherwise is nonsense, I suggested.

At the time, this might have seemed like the most pressing matter facing Uber, and I could understand why it had been raised. But the dramas that subsequently swamped the company have given it plenty of other things to worry about, to the extent that some are openly questioning its long-term viability. Still, while the corporate problems are likely to cause ongoing concerns, there is evidence that the core business of ride-sharing continues to perform strongly. The big issues are likely to be the role that founder Travis Kalanick will play in the company, and how quickly the autonomous vehicle market becomes viable.

After the lunchtime discussion, Bool walked me outside and used his manager’s app to order a car to take me to the airport (yes, at no charge). I told him how impressed I was with his team and he shook his head slightly and said, “Yeah, they’re amazing. When I was their age I was just looking to make money, to make a living. These guys really want to save the world.”

It’s easy to be cynical about a comment like that — if you want to save the world, why on earth would you work at Uber? — but I could see what he meant. Uber is hardly a poster child for a vision of a workers’ utopia, but I think we need to be careful to separate the good from the bad. It isn’t the technology per se that is the problem, but the social, managerial and economic structures within which it operates.

In trying to shape the future of work, it is important to understand how the technology can be used (and abused) and to understand the nature of the transformation that is occurring. We should be finding ways of creating the political environment in which these new tools will benefit the many and not just the few. The bare question that frames most of this discussion — “Will a robot take my job?” — is far too reductive.

I think the big mistake people make in trying to understand Uber is to compare it to the taxi industry. While it is true that Uber and other ride-sharing services have caused no end of problems for taxis, it is wrong to see them as merely a more efficient form of an old industry. At some point, especially if autonomous vehicles become the norm, the transformative power of a cheap, reliable ride-sharing service goes well beyond anything the taxi industry could imagine or achieve.

Driverless, on-demand vehicles are likely to change everything from the design of cities to the way we shop. Cars themselves will go from being a product we own to a service we order, and the overall number of vehicles on the road is likely to drop. (PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests the fall in numbers could be as high as 98 per cent.) Driving will be much safer and the knock-on effects will touch business and government alike. As analyst Ben Thompson has written, the race is on to see which company “becomes the default choice for all transportation.”

Uber is an easy company to hate. But given the extent of the transformation it represents, we are going to need a better response than that. •

The post In the belly of the beast appeared first on Inside Story.

The pages before that date were dense with appointments typical for a late-stage PhD student, nicely positioned in their designated times: “super­visor”; “submit book review”; “conference”; “seminar”; “teach.” All in ink, obviously. The pages crackled a bit from where the biro had pressed in hard. The pages after the “Baby!” entry were smooth and blank. I was living with my husband in a London council flat, seduced from my Australian home by the promise of a life in the knowledge-worker class. All my experience to date had taught me that ink in my diary meant work. Blank space meant not-work. The ink meant constraint. The blank space meant freedom.

As it turned out, the date of the “Baby!” entry was the least of my delusions. The eight-hour labour I learnt about in National Childbirth Trust antenatal classes went for thirty-five. The birth plan I’d thought­fully printed out in triplicate to distribute to the midwives at the birth centre (“warm water, no pain relief, Bach cellos, dim light please”) was instead labour in a fluorescent-lit four-bed ward, oxytocin in my arm, metal in my spine. The thesis plan (“revise introduction, rewrite conclusion, fix footnotes, submit in three weeks”) became nine months of tremulous writing in naptime stretches that varied between twenty seconds and two hours. I developed a dread of small domestic sounds: a door click, a plastic shampoo bottle falling over in the bathroom or a glass clinking on the sink all had the devastating power to wake the baby and unceremoniously terminate my working day.

With an awake baby came life lived in the diary’s blank space. It certainly didn’t feel like freedom. It was more like living in a coral reef: beautiful, yes, but slow-moving and lonely, with little opportunity to venture into the wider ocean.

Years later, I would make sense of this time in terms of Hannah Arendt’s division of human activity into categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in her 1958 book The Human Condition. Life in the blank space was what Arendt termed “labour” – biologically necessary activity that was, in her words, “futile but necessary.” Always consumed at the point of production, labour is unproductive in a literal sense, leaving nothing tangible behind. It differs profoundly from “work,” Arendt’s concept for activity performed in relation to human-made things. The construction of a table, the building of a road, the painting of a house are all work. Work’s logic is instrumental and utilitarian; it can be contained and planned within the time lines of a diary. Arendt proposed “action” as a category for activities by which people disclose themselves to others. It was the sphere of the ancient polis, the domain in which people apprehend and distinguish each other as incommutable and unique creatures. The writing of a play, the composition of a blog and the delivery of a lecture are all action. As a middle-class, able-bodied nascent academic,

I had the good fortune to spend a considerable portion of time before having a baby engaging in action, and a fair bit in work too. My experience of labour had not been much more than a toe dip. It was no wonder that I did not grasp its logic, its splendour, or its strange rhythms in comparison to the worlds of work and action. It is unsurprising, if not excusable, that I had taken it utterly for granted.

Pregnancy and birth might be one of the most inexorably linear experiences on offer in the twenty-first century. Ask any woman who has given birth about the experience and you are likely to hear a story with events that are powerfully placed in narrative sequence, and an ending that doesn’t just punctuate the story but becomes a sort of temporal frame for her entire life.

The major processes shaping the future of work aren’t much like that. The transgression of planetary boundaries and the displacement of human activity by machines are stealthy and incremental processes, hard to fathom on a day-to-day basis and utterly unamenable to diarisation. They have uneven beginnings, moments of great acceleration (the Industrial Revolution; the period from 1950 to the present) and inconceivable end-points, on a scale far larger than a human life. We are perpetually “in them,” yet their full collective impacts defy the senses. Increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere cannot be heard or smelled; a bleached Great Barrier Reef or a fifty-mile crack in West Antarctica can be cheerfully disregarded with a quick scroll through a newsfeed.

Algorithms that set the price of labour for digital-platform work are designed to invisibly calculate value from moment to moment, unencumbered by human judgement and without scope for negotiation or appeal. Casualisation and digital scheduling are, in combination, reducing the visibility of structural unemployment and the wounds of shame and despair it can inflict. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, unemployed and precariously employed people took up space on the road, forming lines and gatherings that had names like “The Hungry Mile” and “The Bull Pit.” We don’t have a name yet for the experience of sitting alone in a bedroom, in a car or on the toilet in a state of distraction and latent expectation, awaiting a text message that will signal the prospect of work or its absence. Hundreds of thousands of people do this daily. Yet they now do it privately, without ritual or witnesses.

That these non-linear, largely undetectable processes are collectively whittling away at the foundations of “work” as we presently understand it is inarguable. If the Committee for Economic Development of Australia is even partly correct in its prediction that 40 per cent of Australian jobs will be automated by 2025, the changes that the millennial generation will witness to existing patterns of work and education will be epic, and magnified by the imperative to decarbonise the entire system.

Understandably, the first tranche of thinkers who have attempted to grapple with climate change, automation and late capitalism as a joined-up set of challenges have tended to focus on what will be lost, rather than what will stay the same. Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (2016), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future (2015) and Tim Dunlop’s Why the Future Is Workless (2016), for instance, all overwhelmingly focus on the appropriate psychological and policy responses to the jobs that are set to disappear, leaving the cyclical work of social reproduction – “labour,” in Arendt’s sense of it – as an afterthought. Just as I had done with my pre-baby diary, they contemplate the moment when the dense ink gives way to white space, but can only imagine the latter as lack.

How might our perception of the future of work change if we looked on the “white space” differently? Whether we recognise it or not, the job of maintaining the biological processes of the earth will be a major dimension of human activity in a low-carbon, highly automated world. This applies to the work of looking after human bodies as much as it does to the stewardship of ocean, sky and land. As we rethink and refashion our forms of agriculture, transport, mining, forestry, energy and chemical industries into low-carbon equivalents adequate to sustain life within planetary boundaries, labour will remain a constant. Aged and disability carers, early childhood educators and nurses – low-carbon occupations all – will endure through the thousands of micro-revolutions wrought by automation. No doubt many self-styled innovators will attempt to replace them with robots, tone deaf to how inextricable human relationships are in such jobs. All of us want to be seen and heard by another human being in the moments of vulnerability that constitute the basis for these forms of work. No one wants to die in the company of a robot.

An Arendtian framework can assist us to think through our predicament. Arendt was not a sentimental admirer of labour, although she understood that a life that was structured around a simple dichotomy of “work” and “leisure” risked triviality without it. Unlike many modern theorists, she was not moved by psychoanalytic conceptions of personhood that accorded a pre-eminent role to parents and intimate others in shaping the self of a small child. The low value Arendt attached to labour was, as she readily acknowledged, nothing new. Societies from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christians to patriarchal Victorians all placed it as the degraded partner in a binary with a more exalted form of existence, whether it be the polis, the spirit or the “public sphere.”

While our current age is not alone in taking the maintenance of our physical and social spaces for granted, we have certainly given it a twenty-first-century, neoliberal spin. Many early childhood educators earn so little that they cannot afford to buy a house or have children of their own, despite significant post-secondary qualifications. Aged carers are paid so poorly they risk poverty. People with jobs in the world of work and action who take time away to care for elderly parents or young children are punished for their “choice,” not just once through foregone income but twice as a result of a grotesque superannuation system that magnifies wage gaps in retire­ment. Through neoliberal goggles, labour is not recognised as the essential foundation for civilisation but rather is seen as a cost burden on the public purse that should rightly be turned into a profit-making opportunity. Treasurer Scott Morrison, speaking at the ACOSS National Conference in 2016, said, “What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for investors – for private investors. We have to make it a good deal, for the returns to be there.”

Arendt would not, I suspect, exactly have leapt to advance the status of our modern practitioners of labour, but she probably would have considered Morrison’s comments pretty strange. The extraction of “returns” is work logic rather than labour logic. It is what we do to coal when we take it out of the earth, and wool when we shear it off the sheep. The framing of relationships of care and attention as profit-making opportunities is, in Arendt’s schema, a category error.

Bringing labour to the foreground highlights the extent to which devel­opments in technology amplify, rather than diminish, the urgency of asking old and familiar questions about power, collective action and institutional design in the way our society organises care work. Who should own and design the technology? How should the work be shared out across classes and genders? What role should profit-making play? Who should set the mechanisms for measuring, monitoring and communicating “quality”? Do we fundamentally see the recipients of care as customers or citizens? If these questions are not asked democratically, and with the explicit involvement of the present and future workers who will do this labour, then they will continue to be implicitly answered for us by the owners of capital.

The last instance of a societal shift on anything like the scale that is currently required occurred at the end of the second world war. The intellects that shaped that change, from William Beveridge to H.C. Coombs, faced the immense challenge of working in wartime conditions, with an infrastructure almost wholly devoted to militarisation and a population wracked by privation and grief. The war also presented them with some key advantages, though, not least an acceptance of centralised government planning and authority, a society-wide willingness to make individual sacri­fices for collective aims, and an acknowledged legitimacy in protecting and promoting forms of work on the basis of their usefulness rather than their profit-making capacity. Such thinkers and policy-makers arguably had an imaginative advantage over our age too: a vivid sense of the society they were moving away from – a planned wartime economy – and of the one they were moving towards – a peacetime society not afflicted with the hardships of the Depression.

The current generation of the left, by contrast, shares no such consensus. The backdrop of nationalism that provided a common teleological frame­work to its citizens has been dismantled – a matter for celebration, without question, given its bloody legacy. But we must also recognise that erosion of nationalist (and, before them, religious) structures of meaning has also resulted in diminished conceptual tools for conducting a public democratic conversation about where we are, and where we must go in a climate-altered and highly automated planet. Young people must work in a landscape of political communication that fosters presentism, virtue signalling, impatience with and suspicion of institutional authority, and an overdeveloped sense that individual “feelings” are an adequate proxy for political action.

Like the baby boomers, millennials are also shaped by a deep, post-imperial anxiety about the morality of imposing visions of a collective good onto others. This did not afflict the planners of the 1940s, for better and for worse. Beveridge, for instance, inherited a worldview that stretched back to Comte and the positivist tradition. He passed through Oxford, Toynbee Hall, the British civil service and the LSE – all institutions that emphasised, albeit in very different ways, the subordination of private interests to the common good. Today, by contrast, the political left must repeatedly make the case for collec­tive action and argue for the principles that underpin a flourishing society, in a public realm that is chronically afflicted by amnesia and distraction.

In the absence of societal consensus, it can be easy to resort to despair in the face of an ailing system. But we’re far from empty-handed. We can start with the givens, the timeless things that will inevitably be present in the future, rather than an overwhelming focus on what we are going to lack. We know that there will be children, and they will crave belonging, love and learning. Citizens of all ages will all seek togetherness, connection to each other and to the generations before and after. We will express ourselves through culture, endeavouring to make sense of our uniqueness as human beings and our shared cultural inheritance. Some of our bodies will work imperfectly from birth, some will become diseased. All of them will get old. We will need sources of energy that are generated in ways that don’t violate any of the planetary boundaries for existence.

We will need a grasp on all three of Arendt’s categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in this impending world. But more than this, we need to acknowl­edge that their relative proportions will change, and work won’t simply disappear. If a larger share of human activity is to be taken up by labour – by the maintenance of our physical, social and intimate worlds – then perhaps it should be shared around a bit more fairly. And perhaps it should be handled with a set of conceptual tools that are more apt. Words such as “efficiency” and “competition” and “choice” have been deployed far too widely – well beyond the bounds of the domain of work, where they rightly belong (and even then, in far more limited circumstances than is standard). They are alien to labour and corrode the foundations of trust, continuity and judgement that enable its proper performance. We need to develop a public vocabulary that gives value and space to labour and action on their own terms, as foundations for our common human flourishing.

I followed the birth plan for the early stages of labour. The contractions of the first morning did involve white pillows, a red balloon visualisation I’d read about in a hypnobirthing book and a sort of figure-eight swaying of the hips I’d learnt in prenatal yoga. They also included the use of a contraction-timing app that seemed ingenious the week before but that, in practice, required the irritating re-entry of my pin number every few minutes. I ditched it a few hours in, submitting to the more reliable “are you in so much pain you cannot talk to the midwife on the phone” test as a measure for when the moment was right to go to the hospital.

I let my hair fall entirely in front of my face as I shuffled with my husband from our ground-floor council flat through the common area to the black cab on the street. It was mid-morning, and the space was like a theatre in the round, observable from five levels of balconies. Given the deep guttural sounds I was making, I suppose more than a few people would have come out to watch me, but from behind the veil of hair, I could not see them. Remarkably, the only witnesses I could perceive were three ginger cats, all residents in our block, lined up near the door in a sort of guard of honour to mark the passage of a fellow animal.

I brayed on the floor of the black cab, through slow traffic and sharp turns, desperate to reach experienced hands at St Mary’s Paddington. A thick paper file was exchanged on arrival (credit card details were not) and a miraculous system of science, planning and institutional design invisibly pulsed into life. Dozens of professionals seamlessly co-ordinated their time and attention, wordlessly sharing scientific knowledge derived from 200 years of research and experience, enmeshed with the particular and specific observations that had been made about me and my baby over the past nine months. I met some of the midwives twice over twenty-eight hours, once at the end of their shift and again at the start of the next. They spoke a common language in accents from Ireland, Australia, Wales, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Jamaica. After more than an hour of pushing, I was politely asked if I would consent to being in an Imperial College univer­sity study about a novel episiotomy technique, and play my tiny part in nudging the scientific frontier forward for others. Yes, God, please, please do it. I signed the paper with a biro and turned my eyes away from the scissors. Then hands on thighs, feet braced, and a deep Jamaican voice of the latest midwife roaring, “Puuuuuuuuush.”

If my daughter is to give birth to a child at the same age, it will be 2040. Her ride to the place she delivers her baby will be, I suppose, a driverless and smoother affair than mine was; the monitoring of heartbeats, effacement and contractions “smarter,” more accurate and less invasive. I’m confident she won’t be required to enter a pin number at any stage. Perhaps the whole thing will happen at her home, with medication and medical-examination cameras alighting to the scene by solar-powered drone. If such technology is useful for keeping her safe, I hope she gets it all, and that her entitlement to do so has nothing to do with her status or income (or mine).

Please let there be people with her, though, no matter what. Let them be experienced, and kind. Let them have chosen this work because they want to do it, and because it is recognised as crucial in a low-carbon world, and not because they cannot find anything else to do. Let them give her their attention, free from concern for ratings or efficiency measures, from worry about where their next job is going to be or how they are going to care for their own children. If something goes wrong, please let there be someone to hold her and help her and calm her, and not just a beeping machine. And when my daughter first hears her baby’s cry, please let there be someone there to meet her gaze, to lift her new child up, and to pass her on with eyes shining. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 52: Millennials Strike Back, edited by Julianne Schultz and Jareth Head.

The post A consensus for care appeared first on Inside Story.

Like many elderly Australians, he died in hospital, ushered into oblivion on a gently rising tide of opiates just one day after his seventy-seventh birthday. My mother had an equally common demise. She died in a nursing home at the age of eighty-six after drifting for years through the ice floes of dementia.

Old age is tough: your body betrays you; no one gives a crap about your hard-won wisdom; and the whole project rushes towards its inevitable conclusion like an out-of-control billycart.

But there’s brighter news, according to Don and Patricia Edgar in Peak: Reinventing Middle Age. Old age is starting later, and middle age is growing correspondingly longer.

The signs have been there for a while, of course. My father’s father died at the age of thirty from tuberculosis; my mother’s father retired at sixty after forty-four years with the same firm, then dropped dead of a heart attack aged sixty-three. (A lifelong teetotaller, he asked for a brandy, took a sip, and expired.) Their wives outlived them, but neither lasted as long as my mother – both died in their early seventies.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that Australian males born today will live to 80.4 years, and women will last even longer, until 84.5. With advances in medicine, more and more of us will easily make it to one hundred. Many of the children born in the first decade of this century will see in the new year at the beginning of 2100.

According to the Edgars, this historic shift in life expectancy is also rearranging the structure of our lives. Roughly speaking, they believe there are now four stages to an Australian life.

People are “younger” for longer. By the time you’ve been schooled, enjoyed a gap year, gone to university, and frittered away a few years travelling, you’ll be twenty-five. By that age, my father had been in the workforce for a decade.

From twenty-five to forty-nine, the Edgars say, Australians will enter a period of “maturity.” This quarter-century slice of life might be called “Zorba Time.” Remember that Zorba the Greek famously said, “Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.”

According to the Edgars – both aged eighty and still engaged enough to write this engaging book – the next stage carries the biggest change. The years from fifty to seventy-five, they argue, have become the new middle age.

For Australians born before the cold war, arriving at that stage of life meant you were way over the hill and well into the valley of the shadow of death. With old age arriving much later than it did just a few decades ago, the final stage of existence stretches from about seventy-five to a century.

The new middle age is a demographic reality that can’t be avoided. For today’s Australians – both the much-criticised baby boomers, and the generations they generated – “This is our peak; these years are the gift medical science has given us.” In order for us to use this gift wisely, the Edgars argue, Australia needs “a radical and creative rethink of the way we should restructure a hundred-year life.” And we have to start by reimagining this time of life as a bonus, not a burden.

Peak is split into two halves. The first part paints the big picture. It tells the story of Australia’s haphazard struggle to meet the challenges of living with longevity, particularly in the labour market and family relationships.

With higher rates of long-term unemployment among the over-fifties coupled with a higher incidence of “grey divorce,” the new middle age might look more like a trough than a peak, but the Edgars remain optimistic. The newly middle-aged are a potent political force – and membership is pretty much unavoidable – so why can’t change occur?

But can the modern digital economy absorb these changes? The world is ruled by the workaholics who have created it in their own image. And now robots, algorithms, automation and AI are conspiring to create a workless economy. How does this mesh with the demographic revolution identified by the Edgars?

The second half of the book is a series of profiles based on interviews with ordinary Australians drawn from the authors’ circle of friends and acquaintances. They remind you that everyone’s life, written down, looks a bit like a small raft bouncing through the rapids of a big river. They make you wonder what your own mini-biography would look like – and how satisfied you would feel with it.

But there’s a sameness about the experiences portrayed. There are divorces, deaths, illnesses, and economic challenges, to be sure, but the Edgars have profiled people who are all accomplished “reinventors.” It might have been useful to hear from some of those Australians whose lives have run aground on societal change.

Part pep talk, part revolutionary pamphlet, the Edgars’ book is a quick and informative read on a subject that will engross more and more of the population. Clearly written – and published in a pleasingly large, easy-to-read font – Peak grapples with one of the great themes of the twenty-first century: what the hell are we going to do with all this extra time? •

The post Hundred-year lives appeared first on Inside Story.

The independent umpire was one of the original demands of the union movement in the 1890s. Labor supported Alfred Deakin when he introduced it at federal level, and it soon led to the groundbreaking Harvester judgement, which set minimum pay rates at levels that would allow a worker to support a family.

In recent decades, Labor has been the greatest supporter of arbitration, with the Liberals much more ambivalent. True, one of the Keating government’s great reforms was to open up an alternative path through enterprise bargaining, but even those outcomes had to be run past the umpire.

When John Howard’s WorkChoices allowed employers to ignore the commission and effectively impose rates and conditions on workers, Labor was loud and fervent in its support for keeping the umpire. Bill Shorten has referred to it as one of the key reasons why workers are much better off in Australia than in the United States.

But having an independent umpire means you have to accept its decisions when they go against you. If one side succeeds in overturning the decisions it doesn’t like, then there is no longer an independent umpire. The tradition that has underpinned our social fairness will be gone, thrown out the window.

And stunningly, it seems to be Labor that wants to do that. It looks like the narcotic self-indulgence of Coalition politics has crossed the floor, and normally sensible people on the Labor side can’t think straight anymore.

The Fair Work Commission’s decision to reduce penalty rates for Sundays and public holidays in four awards was a defeat for Labor and the union movement. But it is neither as severe nor as sweeping in its impact as they are trying to con Australians to believe.

A reforming Labor Party could have responded quite differently. Recent research by various groups, and reporting by Adele Ferguson and her Fairfax colleagues, has revealed an epidemic of underpayment of workers by employers. That is where Labor ought to be promising serious action to defend workers’ rights. It should not set out to overturn a decision made by an umpire it itself appointed.

Labor and the unions have misrepresented the decision by leaving out key elements. They have tried to blame it on the Turnbull government, when it was the decision of a five-member tribunal made up entirely of Labor appointees, under a process Labor initiated. One of the five helped draft the Fair Work Act. Two more are former union officials, including its chair, Iain Ross, Bill Kelty’s former deputy at the ACTU. This is not a Coalition hit squad.

The claims by Labor and the unions – losses of up to $6000 per worker, pay cuts of up to 30 per cent, a million workers affected – are unsubstantiated, implausible and misleading. For the most part, permanent workers will be paid time and a half (150 per cent) for Sunday work, and casual workers 175 per cent. The commission has made it clear that the new rates will be phased in over several years, and will coincide with rises in the minimum wage.

The changes are mostly moderate. The new penalty rate for working on public holidays is 225 per cent for full-time and part-time staff, and 250 per cent for casual workers. To me, that is ridiculously high. (New Zealand specifies only that employers must pay workers “at least time and a half,” or 150 per cent.) To employers, it is not much lower than the 250 and 275 per cent rates applying now.

The penalty rates decision applies to just four out of 122 workplace awards. It applies only to workers without an enterprise bargaining agreement, or EBA. The commission insists there will be no automatic flow-on to any other award; each case will be decided on its merits.

Moreover, the very success of the centre and the left in creating a highly targeted welfare system will mean that many of the workers left worse off by the decision will see their welfare benefits rise as their income falls. It will cushion their losses, as will their reduced tax rates, through bracket creep in reverse.

Labor and its union allies always knew that the review of penalty rates would be a problem for them. Why? Because the case they are trying to defend – insisting that workers must be paid twice as much to work on Sundays as they are on Mondays – is a very weak one.

Yes, working on Sundays and public holidays can be a drag, and socially inconvenient, but to insist that it requires double pay is absurd. Even a pro-worker tribunal like the Fair Work Commission panel found it impossible to defend as fair compensation for the actual inconvenience of Sunday work.

(A disclosure: in my previous life I worked frequently on Sundays as a journalist. Our penalty loading for Sunday work was 15 per cent. To me, that was a fair measure of the real level of inconvenience I suffered for working when my friends and family had the day off.)

But unions have a cultural problem: they are not used to the commission taking away pay rates and conditions they have previously won. The unions have been willing to trade off penalty rates as part of enterprise agreements – the retail industry argues that in fact most retail workers have already traded down their penalty rates for other gains in EBAs – but they are so used to winning in the commission that they find it hard to accept a decision under which they have to give up something unilaterally.

Labor must have expected this decision, or something like it. It’s had plenty of time to prepare its response. Why has it made such a mess of it?

During last year’s election campaign, it was hopping on hot coals on the issue. Bill Shorten kept insisting to workers that penalty rates would be at risk under a Turnbull government, and that a Shorten government would protect them. Yet when Neil Mitchell asked him on air if Labor would accept the commission’s findings on Sunday penalty rates, he replied unequivocally: “Yes. I said I would accept [the findings of] the independent tribunal.”

Right on, Bill. If a Labor government can interfere with the findings of an independent tribunal, what’s to stop a Liberal government doing so? If Turnbull can find a way to regain momentum by the next election, the Coalition would be much better placed in the next Senate. A Coalition–One Nation majority on the Senate floor in 2019 is not impossible. A Labor pledge to intervene to overrule the commission would invite the Coalition to do the same, wherever and whenever it suits it.

An umpire can’t be half-independent.

Second, what can Labor realistically do from opposition? Nothing, except to foment expectations, and promise to reverse the decision, if and when it wins office in two years’ time.

Whether that promise would be kept if Labor actually wins government is a fair question. By then, the decision would be largely implemented, and accepted. The idea of going back to double pay for Sunday work would be very difficult to sell. It is quite likely that once in power, a Labor government would decide it was too late to change the decision.

You can see why shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus was floundering almost comically on AM on Friday morning. He declared, “We will do everything within our power to make sure you can’t get these outcomes from our industrial relations system,” but then refused to say how they might do so – while also declaiming, “Sabra, I could not be clearer!”  He is paid well to create such fogs.

But let’s be clear: it would be an act of extreme cynicism if Labor were to pretend that it will overturn this decision in office, and then not do so. Yet the political reality is that if it got into office, this might be what happens. It would be better if Labor did not go down that track, and accepted that sometimes umpires make decisions we don’t like but must accept.

Labor’s lack of leadership on penalty rates has opened the way for Malcolm Turnbull to seize the initiative with real policies to protect the interests of the low-paid workers Labor claims to be defending. He can do what Labor should be calling for.

First, Turnbull and his ministers should actively support the decision, pointing out that it is the Australian way to have such decisions made by independent experts, and that while the Coalition supports the principle of penalty rates, paying people twice as much to work on Sundays is over the top in today’s world. He could echo the commission’s words – yes, the decision will make a substantial number of low-paid workers worse off – but emphasise that the effect will be cushioned by its gradual implementation and by the built-in supports provided by a highly progressive tax and transfer system.

Second, he could take the initiative by providing new funding to beef up government policing of the labour market, to detect and prosecute employers who are cheating their workers. Coalition values surely have no place for a culture of cheating by employers. The exposures by researchers and reporters suggest that, in the real world, many weekend workers don’t receive their full penalty rates anyway. By putting more cops on the beat, the government would be working to increase the wages they are actually paid.

Third, Turnbull could emphasise a key point ignored in the hysterical overreaction to the commission’s decision: excessive penalty rates have made some employers shut their doors on Sundays, while others employ only a skeleton staff. Sure, no one knows how many jobs will be created by this decision; only time will tell. But unless someone has repealed the laws of supply and demand, more people will be working as a result of this change, and more hours of work will be available, at premium rates.

Look at New Zealand: it did away with regulated penalty rates altogether, but the sun kept rising, people have kept working and spending, and its economy is clearly outperforming Australia’s. Unemployment is down to 5.2 per cent. GDP is growing at 3.6 per cent and the budget is back in surplus.

Some of you will have read all this with pursed lips. That’s all very well, you say, but the ultimate effect is that several hundred thousand low-paid workers will have their pay cut, and they will become worse off as a result. I don’t want to see that happen, you say, so I’m against the decision.

I take your point. But these are not the only low-paid people in Australia: they’re just some of the few who now double their wages by working on particular days. In future they will still get time and a half for working Sundays, which many other low-paid workers would envy. If there is a problem with workers at the bottom being paid too little, then our focus should be on all of them, not just those now in the spotlight.

The reality is that if the law requires employers to pay workers more than the revenue and sales they bring in, they will not be employed – or employers will cheat and pay them less than their due. In a world of competitive global markets, we can’t just make employers responsible for ensuring that our workers have adequate incomes. That’s the job of government.

If we think low-paid workers in Australia have too little income, then it’s government, not employers, whom we should be asking to right the balance – and for all low-paid workers, not just those being paid penalty rates at indefensible levels.

This decision is much smaller in its impact than the Labor–union scare campaign implies. It was a fair decision, by an independent umpire, made on the merits of the case. We should thank them for carrying out a very difficult job with such objectivity, fairness and conscientiousness. Labor should pull back from the brink, and drop its threats.

The post A penalty lifted off the economy appeared first on Inside Story.

These hopes raise the obvious question: will jobs of any kind survive in the future? This is the issue addressed by Tim Dunlop in Why the Future Is Workless.

The future (or lack of a future) of work is well-trodden ground. Dunlop surveys the wide variety of views to emerge in recent years and also, more importantly, challenges assumptions about work, labour and jobs that are taken for granted most of the time. As he points out, “jobs” as we understand them didn’t exist in significant numbers before the middle of the nineteenth century. When American politicians were drawing up the US constitution in the late eighteenth century, he writes, they “envisioned a nation of independent yeoman farmers and other forms of self-employed workers, not one of wage slaves who worked for someone else.”

Good jobs – secure and well-paid enough to support a family in reasonable comfort ­– only became a standard expectation in the middle of the twentieth century, and it is these jobs, rather than the facts of work and labour, that are now disappearing.

Dunlop draws heavily on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s distinction between “work” and “labour,” which she saw as crucial to understanding the thinking of the ancient Greeks. For them, according to Arendt, labour consisted of the repetitive drudgery necessary to maintain life, and was therefore fit only for women or slaves, while “work” was undertaken only by free (male) citizens, in the public sphere, and involved the creation of a shared world in which achievements are durable and socially meaningful.

This distinction between “work” and “labour” has been erased in modern society. All work is judged by whether it produces outputs of marketable value (whatever their usefulness or lack of it), making it “labour” according to Arendt’s distinction. Under such conditions, jobs are essential to our wellbeing and self-respect. The unceasing claims of politicians of all stripes to be the bringers of “jobs, jobs, jobs” responds to, and reinforces, this understanding of ourselves.

Yet it is increasingly unclear whether our economy can continue to generate jobs, or at least enough jobs paying wages sufficient to maintain our current pattern of social organisation. The past few decades have been bad for workers, particularly in the leading industrial economy, the United States. Wages have stagnated and the ratio of employment to population has fallen, particularly for men but more recently for women, too.

More generally, the whole social structure built around the idea of a “job” or “career” has been eroding for decades and is now approaching collapse. While perceptions of short-term job security fluctuate with the business cycle, the idea that anyone can reliably plan a course through his or her working life has essentially disappeared. Any job, anywhere, can disappear because of changes in trade patterns, or budget cuts, or simply because cutting it will boost next quarter’s profits. 

In these circumstances, the claim implicit in Dunlop’s title has a lot of intuitive appeal. The interesting question is: what can and should be done about this? But before we get there, we need an explanation of why things seem to be turning out this way.

Much of the time, the discussion about the future of work is posed as a debate between two competing stories. In the first, the blame is placed on globalisation, usually interpreted narrowly to mean reductions in barriers to trade in goods. This free-market globalisation is blamed for the loss of “good” jobs, commonly understood as those in the manufacturing sector.

The alternative story can be summed up in a single word, “robots.” The associated claim, put in the strongest form by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their recent book, The Second Machine Age, is that advances in information technology have rendered more and more jobs susceptible to automation. The obvious cases include manufacturing and routine clerical jobs, but the claim is that jobs of all kinds will soon be vulnerable. The failure of much-touted “expert systems” in the 1990s casts some doubt on strong versions of this claim, but there is no denying the amazing progress of artificial intelligence, manifested in such wonders as self-driving cars.

Dunlop rejects the dichotomy between globalisation and robots. He begins with a broader view, in which free-market globalisation – known to Australians as “economic rationalism” but more commonly called “neoliberalism” – is merely part of the dominant ideological framework of the past thirty years. The most obvious features of neoliberalism have been policy shifts such as privatisation and the explosive growth of the financial sector produced by “deregulation” (a misnomer, since the financial sector, more than any other, relies on government for its very existence). 

Equally important, but more subtle, has been the relentless focus on work and the production of marketable goods and services as the measure of all things. Dunlop quotes some particularly egregious statements from Julia Gillard, whose exhortation to workers to “set the alarm clock early” contrasted sharply with more than a century of union struggle against excessive working hours. But Gillard was merely echoing the assumptions that saturate the entire political class and have seeped into the thinking of just about everyone to a greater or lesser extent. The idea that one could live a good life without a central role for paid work has become just about unthinkable.

Yet, at least since the global financial crisis, the neoliberal economy has been in a state of crisis. It is still delivering huge benefits to the very rich, but it is failing everyone else. And this is why technological progress, which has mostly benefited society, is having such disruptive and negative effects today.

What, if anything, can be done about this? Or will the market economy take care of it? The latter is certainly the view of proponents of the “sharing economy,” such as the young American philosopher Cory Massimino, who welcomes a new, liberated economy that is slowly but surely transcending government shackles.

Dunlop is appropriately scathing about this idea. Drawing on the work of Harvard scholar Yochai Benkler, he explains how the free ride-sharing and house-minding practices that emerged in the early days of the internet have been thoroughly commercialised – under the label of the “sharing economy” – by the likes of Uber and Airbnb.

We don’t need a new term here. The practice of sharing our vehicles and houses for money has been around since the dawn of civilisation. It’s called renting, hiring or leasing. The only difference today is that the internet enables Uber and Airbnb to get around licensing requirements and other restrictions faced by traditional taxi companies and hoteliers. That has both good and bad effects. Mostly, though, it’s part of the general reshaping of the regulatory state to serve corporate interests at the core of neoliberalism.

This is most obvious in apps like TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk, which enable people to bid competitively for small jobs. Again, apart from the use of the internet, the markets here are no different from practices in the past – the way workers were hired on the waterfront in the 1930s or, for that matter, are still hired on the street corners of American cities where casual (often undocumented) workers wait to see if they will be picked out for labouring and construction jobs. And once the legal obstacles can be negotiated, that kind of hiring will presumably go online as well.

As Dunlop says, a better description of these developments is the “on-demand economy,” a term that encapsulates the “flexibility” Australia’s economic reformers have been pushing for decades. “Flexibility” sounds very nice, but workers figured out long ago that flexibility is, most of the time, a zero-sum good. The more flexibility employers have in calling workers in and sending them home, the less flexibility those workers have in managing their own lives.

If the on-demand version of the workless future is dystopian, what is the alternative? Dunlop puts forward two linked ideas: reductions in working hours and a universal basic income. Both imply that the benefits of technological progress would be taken increasingly in the form of greater leisure and less through increased (and more unequal) consumption of goods and services.

Although a reduction in working hours seems radical, in Australia, as in most developed economies, it would represent nothing more than a return to the historical norm. For more than a century, beginning with the achievement of the eight-hour day (or forty-eight hours a week over six days) by Victorian stonemasons in 1856, workers have struggled to claim more leisure, and that claim has consistently been resisted by employers.

For much of the time since then, the workers had the best of it. The standard working week of forty-eight hours, universal in Australia by the early twentieth century, was reduced to forty-four, to forty, and finally, in 1983, to thirty-eight hours. Along with sick leave and long-service leave, annual leave became a standard condition, and by 1973 had been expanded to four weeks a year. Maternity leave for public servants was introduced at the same time, and had been extended on an unpaid basis to the entire workforce by 1979.

Since the rise of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the movement has gone entirely in the other direction. Standard working hours have remained unchanged in most respects, but the majority of full-time workers have ended up working additional (often unpaid) hours. The trend towards earlier retirement, which persisted into the 1990s, has been reversed, to the extent that workers in their forties today can expect that they will be seventy or older before they become eligible for the pension. 

Critics of the case for increased leisure claim that long working hours reflect the insatiability of human demands for goods and services. But the history described above tells a different story. Even more than paying higher wages, employers resent and resist paying the same wage for fewer hours of work. As long as unions were powerful, employers had no choice but to do so. But ever since they regained the upper hand in the 1980s, employers have pushed relentlessly for longer hours and harder work.

The second and more radical part of Dunlop’s proposal is a universal basic income, or UBI. The general idea is to provide an unconditional income, sufficient to live on, to everyone, regardless of employment status. By removing the necessity to work, a UBI would pull society in the direction of both greater leisure and more enjoyable and satisfying work.

Proposals for a UBI raise quite a few technical problems, particularly in the purist form proposed by Dunlop, according to which the minimum income is paid even to those whose income is already high. Although there are ways to resolve these problems, Dunlop tends to understate their significance by implying that a UBI could be achieved in the short term and with relatively modest adjustments to taxing and spending.

The fiscal obstacles to the implementation of a UBI are, in fact, substantial. The scheme would require substantial increases in the effective marginal tax rate faced by middle- and high-income earners, whether this was achieved through the income tax schedule or through means testing. The political obstacles are even more substantial. The whole thrust of policy for decades has been to increase the intensity of work testing for benefits of all kinds. And, unlike much of the neoliberal agenda, measures like “work for the dole” have plenty of public support, despite the largely spurious nature of the work that these can involve.

But the difficulty of the proposal is precisely the point. A UBI represents both a long-term challenge to the entire organisation of work and labour and, in the short term, a rallying point for a rejection of one of the central themes of neoliberalism, the critical importance of (paid) work. As the collapse of the neoliberal order accelerates under pressure from the political right, this mixture of utopian vision and immediate resistance is exactly what the left needs to offer.

Technological change has been rendering old skills obsolete ever since the invention of the spinning jenny in the eighteenth century, and will doubtless continue to do so. The real problems we face today are not technological but social and economic. Like it or not, a radical reorganisation of work is under way. The question is whether we can shape it to benefit the world as a whole, or whether it will continue to enrich the few at the expense of the many. As Dunlop concludes, “We have been told that when it comes to work, there is no alternative. What these new technologies suggest is that maybe there is.” •

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Secrecy could be difficult to maintain: an informer, a pregnancy or an accidental revelation might bring the deception to an ignominious end. Women’s rights campaigner Merle Thornton tells of a friend who worked at the desk next to hers in the Department of Social Services. Having secretly married, she was exposed when a caller to the section asked for her by her married name. No help was forthcoming from the union, the Administrative and Clerical Officers’ Association; in fact, the ACOA was among the strongest supporters of the bar.

Typists, whose work was regarded as unsuitable for men, were allowed to return as temporary staff members after marriage. But only permanent officers could occupy supervisory positions, so the possibilities for married women were extremely limited. They had few entitlements and forfeited their superannuation rights. Even single women suffered, missing out on training because it was assumed they would marry and thus waste and extra knowledge or skills they picked up.

The 1942 book Public Service Recruitment in Australia expressed a view of women employees that was typical of the time:

There is some evidence that they are more adaptable to monotonous work than men. Women are still prepared to undertake such work at comparatively low salaries, and their retirement upon marriage is still an important factor ensuring rapid turnover, thus mitigating the problem of blind-alley employment.

The author was Robert Parker, an expert in public administration who would play a significant part in the removal of the marriage bar that seemed so natural to him when he wrote those words. One of his stepdaughters, Meredith Edwards, would later become deputy secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

In the late 1950s, Parker was a key member of a committee of inquiry into public service recruitment chaired by former ABC chairman Richard Boyer. One of the many submissions to the inquiry came from the Canberra Association of Women Graduates, which had surveyed women graduates in the public service and found that the marriage bar and the lack of equal pay were major issues of concern. Women also struggled with prevailing prejudices, such as the view that it was inappropriate for women to supervise men. Senior officers in the Department of Supply also reported to the Boyer committee that they were embarrassed by their inability to promote good female clerks because of their restriction to positions without supervisory responsibilities.

Educator and feminist Helen Crisp was one of the two representatives from the Association of Women Graduates who appeared before the all-male committee. She later said that she left the hearing “full of hope” but, on reflection, thought that their good reception was due to the fact that the committee had already intended to recommend the removal of the marriage bar and was glad of the association’s evidence and support. In fact, the committee’s minutes make clear thatthe association’s evidence was instrumental in convincing it to take up the issue of women’s employment and ask Robert Parker to prepare a paper on the subject. The committee decided, however, that equal pay was outside its terms of reference: “While unequal pay for the sexes obtains in the private sector it cannot be regarded as a deterrent to employment in the Public Service.”

Among its wide-ranging recommendations for the modernisation of public service recruitment, the Boyer committee did, indeed, formally recommend the removal of the marriage bar. Notably, it put the argument in terms of women’s citizenship rights, as well as advantage to the service.

Parker foreshadowed the recommendations in a paper to a national conference on public service recruitment, shortly before the report’s release in 1958. The only woman present to hear Parker’s views on female recruitment, among over one hundred delegates, was, again, Helen Crisp. Her husband, political scientist L.F. Crisp, was the president of the Canberra group of the Royal Institute of Public Administration, which was hosting the conference. The conference was formally opened with the salutation “Mrs Crisp and gentlemen.”

“In so far as the peculiarities of females render them unsuitable or uneconomical to employ in certain occupations or certain positions,” said Parker, “the public service may have perfectly rational grounds for limiting their employment in those positions, on the valid principle of suiting persons to jobs.” He went on:

But it is perfectly clear that some public service authorities – or at least some governing legislation – go further than this, and presume to decide whether women in accepting employment are evading their domestic responsibilities. In my view, this is a matter for individuals, not the State to decide.

He later referred more forthrightly to the “arbitrary wastage of female talent in the community.” While Parker was still referring to peculiarities that might limit the kinds of jobs for which women were suited, he was firmly contesting the use of the Public Service Act to enforce a certain kind of public morality that laid down home duties as the only appropriate occupation for married women. He had come a long way since 1942.

But while the government introduced legislation for most of the Boyer committee’s recommendations in late 1960, it deferred action on married women, pending a report from the Public Service Board.

When it reported to cabinet in 1961, the Public Service Board supported the Boyer recommendation. Cabinet still, however, decided to take no action on the matter. The reason for cabinet’s 1961 decision, and a subsequent 1962 reaffirmation of it, was the belief that “the Australian social structure would be best served if there were no change, and that the Commonwealth Government should not lead in encouraging married women away from their homes and into employment.”

But cabinet’s decision was not for public consumption. Prime minister Robert Menzies told parliament that the board’s report was “still under consideration.” Cabinet decided that the government’s line for the purposes of parliament and the forthcoming federal election was that “the question is one to which the Government has been giving some consideration but concerning which it has not yet come to a conclusion.” As John Bunting, secretary to cabinet and head of the prime minister’s department, put it at the time, cabinet decided to lie low for the time being, rather than provoke the feminists.

By 1965, the government still had not acted, but the issue got a new lease on life from the apparently unrelated issue of women’s right to drink in the public bars of hotels. In March 1965, Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the public bar in the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane, from which women were banned. There was enormous media coverage, with reports appearing as far away as Moscow and London, and an interview on the new and influential Four Corners program on ABC television. Thornton had been forced to resign from her job with the ABC halfway through her first pregnancy, after two years of concealing her marriage. She took advantage of the publicity, and the large number of people who had contacted her, to found the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, or EOW, the primary goal of which was the removal of the Commonwealth marriage bar.

EOW set about lobbying and producing material relevant to its case. In particular, it sought to contest arguments about the negative effects on children of maternal deprivation, and the relationship between maternal absence and juvenile delinquency. It also collected the personal testimonies of women whose lives had been damaged by the marriage bar. As Thornton has pointed out, this emphasis on the authenticity of women’s own experience foreshadowed, as did the direct action on behalf of women’s rights, the arrival of women’s liberation later in the decade.

Bill Hayden, federal member for Oxley, was recruited and, armed with EOW’s research and arguments, began doggedly raising the issue in the federal parliament, including in a major speech in October 1965 and a private member’s motion in December.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the bureaucracy was also stirring. The chairman of the Public Service Board was the formidable strategist Fred Wheeler (later Sir Frederick). Wheeler had spent the 1950s in Geneva as treasurer of the International Labour Organization and so was very familiar with international standards on issues such as the employment of married women. In 1961, he had recommended to cabinet that the marriage bar be lifted. He now suggested to the head of the Department of Labour and National Service that it might again raise the matter with cabinet. Significantly, although the public service came within Prime Minister Menzies’s portfolio, Wheeler did not try this route.

The minister for labour and national service, William McMahon, put forward a cabinet submission on 30 November recommending removal of the marriage bar on the grounds of labour shortages and the international embarrassment it caused, particularly with the ILO. The submission cited support from sections of the Liberal Party, female Liberal senators, the National Council of Women, and other women’s organisations. The federal Labor Party had adopted the removal of the marriage bar as part of its policy; and major public service organisations such as the Professional Officers’ Association and ACOA were also in favour. ACOA had withdrawn its opposition to the retention of married women as permanent officers, though it still objected to the recruitment of married women.

But there was resistance from the prime minister’s department, which raised a number of concerns about McMahon’s submission, among them the potential that married women, with their divided loyalties, might not be fully efficient: “Given that married women may at times have a conflict of loyalties between work and family responsibilities, what regulating action can be taken to ensure that the Service does not come off second best?” The department also drew attention to the distinction between retention of married women and their active recruitment “in competition with normal recruitment.”

Eventually, cabinet deferred the decision yet again, referring the issue of permanent employment of married women to an interdepartmental committee, which it asked to examine the consequences of such a decision both within and outside the service.

Hayden persisted with his parliamentary questions, but it was the retirement of Menzies in January 1966 that removed the last major obstacle to progress. Leslie Bury, the new minister for labour and national service, presented a cabinet submission in August 1966 reporting on the findings of the interdepartmental committee and recommending action in the current session of parliament to remove the marriage bar. Cabinet at last agreed on such action on 24 August 1966.

The minister recommended that the Act make it clear that “married women officers are subject to the same conditions as other officers and therefore subject to dismissal if, on account of domestic responsibilities, they fail to observe those conditions.” Cabinet concurred. The removal of the marriage bar in the United Kingdom in 1946 had come with a similar provision:

H.M. Government has taken this decision on the understanding that steps will be taken to dismiss from the Civil Service any married woman who on account of domestic responsibilities or for any other reason fails to observe the conditions of service of her grade according to normal departmental agreements and practices.

Married women were to be treated like everybody else; there was not yet any consideration of the need to review employment arrangements to ensure they did not discriminate against officers with family responsibilities. That had to wait for two decades. Moreover, retention of married women was regarded in a different light from their recruitment; the latter was to be kept under review.

The bill removing the marriage bar completed its passage through parliament on 28 October, just before the 1966 federal election. It came into effect on 18 November 1966. It was a far cry from the state of affairs earlier in the decade, when even the public servants’ own union believed that “the majority of Commonwealth public service positions above the base grades will remain inherently more suitable for male officers.” •

This article is based on the introduction to Removal of the Commonwealth Marriage Bar: A Documentary History, edited by Marian Sawer (Centre for Research in Public Sector Management, University of Canberra, 1997).

• More articles in our series on the landmark events of 1966

The post The long, slow demise of the “marriage bar” appeared first on Inside Story.

The Frenchman observed a trend that extended back at least a century. This was the “demographic transition” from a population with high birth rates, high death rates and a low average age to one with low birth rates, low death rates and a high average age. “Ageing happens, as it were, from both ends,” he wrote, “that is to say by a decrease in natality (fewer young people) and by the lengthening of human life (more old people).”

As it turned out, Sauvy was prematurely correct about the decrease in natality. That long-term trend was interrupted by the “baby boom,” which was just beginning when he wrote his essay and was initially believed to be a temporary blip once couples were reunited after the war.

But even in error, Sauvy was closer to the mark than today’s ageing alarmists. In the standard version of the story, baby boomers are seen as the major cause of population ageing, responsible for all manner of social ills. In reality, the baby boom deferred the demographic transition by several decades. If the boom hadn’t occurred, the average age of the population would have risen much earlier.

A more fundamental conceptual error in Sauvy’s framing of the problem, repeated in nearly every subsequent treatment of the topic, is that populations are ageing. This isn’t the case: populations don’t age, people do. In fact, each of us ages at the rate of precisely one year per year, until we die. The longer we avoid death, the older we get and the greater is our contribution to the average age of the population. From this viewpoint, the ageing “problem” is best summed up by a witticism popularised by the actor Maurice Chevalier: “Growing old doesn’t seem quite so bad when you stop to consider the alternative.”

The logical error here is the “fallacy of composition.” The fact that the average age of a population is rising, or falling, says nothing about the individual experience of members of that population. Most obviously, “population ageing” implies a future that is exactly like the one we have at present except that old people are more numerous and young people are fewer. People at any given age, it’s assumed, will have much the same characteristics and live in much the same way as they do at present. This way of thinking is wrong for at least three reasons: because of changes in healthcare, in work and in technology.

First, the assumption that, say, sixty-five-year-olds in the future will be much like sixty-five-year-olds have always been, except more numerous, is inconsistent with the main process leading to population ageing – namely, that people at older ages can now expect more years of continued life. If the average sixty-five-year-old can expect to live twenty years today, he or she must be healthier than the average sixty-five-year-old of the 1950s, who could expect only thirteen years.

The mistaken assumption goes right back to the beginning of the ageing literature. Sauvy, at least, made it explicit: 

A progressive unlevelling occurred because of the considerable progress of techniques and the almost total powerlessness of biology upon senility. Though the infant in its cradle finds its expectation of life increased… sclerosis of the crystalline always begins at twenty-five.

He noted that “this statement is made without prejudice to the possible progress of science in the future,” and his example illustrates the point very clearly. “Sclerosis of the crystalline” is an obsolete term for macular degeneration leading to nuclear cataracts of the eye, which are now both preventable and easily treatable. 

The same is true of loss of mobility and many of the other disabilities traditionally associated with ageing. Improvements in diet and exercise based on a better understanding of conditions like osteoporosis make it possible to maintain good health for longer. Anti-arthritic drugs mitigate the effects of chronic conditions.

Treatments like hip replacements, now routine, provide years of extra mobility. Alarmists often see such treatments as a huge cost burden. But a hip or knee replacement costing $25,000 is a bargain however you look at it. It’s much less than the cost to society and the patient of six months in a nursing home. More pointedly, it’s less than the cost of a new car, seen as a necessity for working-age people to achieve the mobility needed to go to and from work.

Even dementia, where there has been little if any advance in treatment, is declining in its age-specific prevalence. This is a by-product of improved cardiovascular health and (more speculatively) increased education levels among the middle-aged and old. 

These factors, and declines in other sources of premature death – including infant mortality, infectious disease, car crashes and smoking – have helped extend the “standard” lifetime at every stage, with middle age running into the sixties and healthy old age into the seventies and eighties. At the end, there is a period of frailty and decline, leading inevitably to death. The really big costs in the medical system are those incurred in the last year of life. And, by definition, the last year comes only once in a lifetime.

The second and closely related problem is the assumption that patterns of work won’t change. This is illustrated most clearly in the way the Australian Bureau of Statistics divides up the population. For the ABS, the working-age population is made up of people aged fifteen to sixty-four, which reflects the fact that when the definition was formulated it covered the years between the school-leaving age of fifteen and the statutory retirement age of sixty-five. On this basis, the ABS calculates a “dependency ratio,” namely the ratio of those outside the fifteen to sixty-four age range (“dependants”) to those within it.

This definition has remained unchanged even though the school-leaving age has increased to seventeen, compulsory retirement has been abolished, and the pension age is set to increase to sixty-seven (with a further increase to seventy on the cards). In practice, most young people are dependent on their parents into their early twenties and sometimes beyond. Retirement ages are so variable as to defy any precise definition, but it seems clear that after falling for most of the twentieth century, the average age of retirement has started to increase. A truer and more useful comparison would incorporate these changing circumstances.

Finally, and more subtly, discussions of population ageing ignore the technological progress that has been one of the main contributors to reductions in mortality. Technological progress has led to increased productivity and has largely eliminated unskilled jobs in many parts of the economy.

Two implications flow from this. First, young people must spend more time in education to acquire the skills needed for a technologically advanced economy. While dependency ratios are calculated on the assumption that working life begins at fifteen, the reality is that high school completion is the norm, and that a majority of young people acquire post-school qualifications of some kind. The need for education means that the increase in the birth rate sought by former treasurer Peter Costello would take many decades to yield net economic benefits.

The decline in unskilled jobs and the increase in years of education mean that more people are capable of working longer if they choose. In the economy of the twentieth century, access to the age pension at sixty-five was an obvious boon to the typical unskilled worker who might have spent fifty years working in a physically demanding job. This group of workers hasn’t disappeared, but it now represents less than a fifth of the workforce. For the majority, retirement at sixty-five is no longer a physical necessity; rather, it is the outcome of choices, personal in the case of voluntary retirement, or social, in the sadly common case where older workers find themselves unemployed and unable to find new jobs because of age-related bias.

As a society, we have the choice of taking the benefits of improved technology in the form of reduced lifetime hours of work. We could continue, as we did for much of the twentieth century, to lengthen the period of retirement. Alternatively, and more sensibly for many people, we could reduce the intense workload experienced during the peak years of work and family responsibility (roughly age twenty-five to fifty-four) while delaying full retirement until seventy or later.

The increase in longevity produced by improved medical treatments, reductions in the risk of death, and healthier living is a huge boon for Australians, individually and collectively. Yet the framing of the issue around “population ageing” has presented it as a near-catastrophe, not only creating unnecessary negativity but also closing off discussion of the opportunities created by our longer lifespans. We need to stop talking about “population ageing” and start talking about people living longer and healthier lives. •

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The first and second series of Utopia are on the bestseller shelves at ABC shops, alongside the scripts published late last year by Harper Collins. Wary as I am of making promotional statements, I’d recommend that you get in there and buy the lot. It’s one of those series that gets better on second – and even third – viewing. The scripts, by Working Dog team Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, are state-of-the-art exemplars of contemporary television comedy. Each episode is as deftly structured as Fawlty Towers: there’s not a detail that isn’t woven into the plotline, ready to return with a twist at some critical moment.

And besides that, it’s the best back-to-work orientation kit anyone could ask for. Set in the offices of the NBA (Nation Building Authority), this is essentially a situation comedy about the impossibility of doing work at work. If you are going quietly nuts at the prospect of spending another year sitting at a table with a bowl of mints and a fan of coloured markers, earnestly preparing to whiteboard the next vision statement or brainstorm the new key performance indicators, this is the medicine for you.

Rob Sitch, playing CEO Tony Woodford, dreams of getting something done: building a road, at least, or a fence to define the perimeter of a development site. He is aided by his stalwart deputy, Nat (Celia Pacquola), but their concerted attempts to deliver outcomes are confounded at every turn. On one level, they are up against a suite of petty obstructions of the kind that might turn anyone’s working day into a farce. The email is down, the swipe cards don’t work, the passwords are disabled, a fanatical barista has taken charge of the coffee machine, and the new app keeping track of appointments is feeding the alerts into the wrong devices.

Then there are some rather more substantive distractions. Like a week-long staff training program run by a visiting guru who wants everyone outside on the lawn doing group bonding exercises. Occupational health and safety compliance is an all-engulfing commitment for another week and, of course, there is the staff party, with a Mexican theme – an enterprise so ambitious that it overrides all other concerns.

These shenanigans, presided over with air-headed vivacity by office manager Amy (Michelle Lim Davidson), are a mere sideshow compared to the roadblocks presented by PR manager Rhonda (Kitty Flanagan), who whirls about syphoning up the energy of the place in an overriding quest for the perfect marketing pitch. “When no is just the first syllable in knowledge. When dreams break free of their foundations…” Rhonda tweets press releases under the desk in meetings, translating everything that is said into newspeak. She hauls in mood boards, and demands immediate attendance for a brain shower to focus on the rebranding initiative.

Enthusiasms seem to change with the wind. Projects are announcement-driven, visions are goals in themselves. It’s a radical case of inverted priorities, reinforced by the ever-smiling Jim (Anthony Lehmann), a liaison officer who pops in and out to deliver the government’s verdict on where the NBA should be heading on any particular issue at any given moment. At the end of series one, as Tony and Nat confer on the likelihood they will be closed down because of a comprehensive failure to actually get anything done, Jim turns up and delivers the news: they are to be upgraded and expanded. “A big country calls for big ideas, big dreams, big vision… together we are Nation Building Australia.”

The theme of major infrastructure in Utopia may have hit a national nerve. As a big country, we have a conspicuous record of failing to do big things, or of doing the wrong ones, especially when it comes to transport. Light rail and the cross-city tunnel have proved to be disasters in more than one capital city. But what about an interstate bullet train? An efficient freight system? A new container terminal? Such possibilities remain an elusive dream for Tony. He’d just like to get started on a road somewhere, but it’s not going to happen.

Series one of Utopia premiered on ABC in August 2014, in the middle of Tony Abbott’s brief term as the self-declared infrastructure prime minister. As the first couple of episodes went to air, Abbott was being goaded for his failure to deliver on the boast. “One Year On, Infrastructure Prime Minister Still Poised With a Shovel,” ran the headline of an influential article by Peter van Duyn, who cited an Australian Logistics Council estimate that a 1 per cent increase in the efficiency of transport infrastructure would boost GDP by $2 billion. Well, that wasn’t going to happen, was it? And evidently it still isn’t.

Analogies between the paralysis of the workplace and the paralysis of government are intricately suggested in Utopia, but the series is not an exercise in political invective. Although Tony Abbott’s voice forms part of the vocal collage over the opening titles of the program, there is no attempt to satirise the policies and practices of any particular government.

Scriptwriters Cilauro, Gleisner and Sitch have steered close to political satire before, notably in The Hollow Men (2008), but their prime target here is the culture of workplaces. Utopia belongs to a genre of the office comedy defined by John Clarke and Bryan Dawe in The Games (1998 and 2000). The script for Utopia bears some of the hallmarks of the Clarke/Dawe style – a deft way with the rhythms of dialogue, a capacity to make subtle comedy out of misfired communication, and a brilliant sense of level. Nothing is overpitched, and the tension builds through the sheer technical skill with which each episode is structured.

This is in contrast to a long tradition of sitcoms that depends on the overblown or hysterical personality as a catalyst. Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) is the prototype in the American tradition, Basil Fawlty (Fawlty Towers) in the British. With his creation of the excruciating David Brent in The Office, Ricky Gervais belongs in this mode too. While it is not personality-driven in that way, Utopia is populated by an array of vital personalities. Rob Sitch’s Tony, at the centre of the forcefield, is a relatively subdued figure, whose reactions to an unrelenting stream of frustrations hardly produce a blip on the Richter scale. This leaves plenty of scope for those around him to cause the turbulence, but it’s a clever strategy to ensure that the most disruptive people are also the most charming. The cast as an ensemble are pitch-perfect.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard of the series is that it’s too real to be funny, but that’s also a compliment. As Tom Gleisner said in an interview, “We don’t write satire, we make observations.” As a team, Gleisner, Cilauro and Sitch have an eye for situations that are beyond satire. We don’t need them to tell us that we inhabit a cultural environment in which everything is in the service of promotion and promotion is an end in itself, but they offer a brilliant portrayal of how this works on a day-to-day basis.

The real world (if we can call it that) has obligingly responded with an ironic counterpoint to coincide with each stage of the series, from its inaugural week, with the infrastructure prime minister failing to lift his shovel, to its closing episodes, as Malcolm “there-has-never-been-a-more-exciting-time” Turnbull took over. Perhaps the new PM wasn’t aware that he was repeating one of Rhonda’s favourite catchphrases, or that she and her kind would be whispering “Love it!” as he announced his Innovation Crusade. And as for the anointed crusader, what casting director could have done better than Christopher Pyne, who pronounced himself “instinctively and reflexively excited about innovation”? Pyne should be joining the scriptwriting team at Working Dog. Or is it, perhaps, that Rhonda has taken up a position in his office? And who better to be in charge of Nation Building than our current prime minister, as he prepares to get back to work ready for the first 2016 sitting of parliament? •

The post Beyond satire appeared first on Inside Story.

Some of our dismay comes from a fear that many people will end up poor and unemployable, and only a few of us will benefit from new opportunities. But our trepidation also reflects the role that work plays in our lives. For most people, having a job is a source of self-respect.

The social changes we face require a rethinking of our values. It is this task that the philosopher Bertrand Russell undertook eighty-four years ago, at the height of the Great Depression. His essay, In Praise of Idleness, has been republished with extensive notes, an afterword and a foreword by Bradley Trevor Greive, an author of popular humorous books. As Russell’s witty companion, Greive informs and entertains us with interesting facts about Russell’s life, works and influence. Russell’s writings are a great discovery that he wants to share with his readers. “Russell’s every neural impulse,” he writes, “was an earthquake that rattled my tiny brain around inside my head like an oyster in a tumble dryer.”

Russell was born in the age of Queen Victoria and was active into the 1960s. Among philosophers, he is most noted for his work on the foundation of mathematics and his explanation of why the sentence “the present king of France is bald” makes sense even though there is no such person. As a public intellectual he was notorious for his criticism of religion, his pacifism, and his advocacy of sex education and gender equality. He was once turned down for a position at the City University of New York out of a fear that he might corrupt the morals of the young.

Russell wrote seventy books and thousands of articles, and gave countless lectures and interviews. He went to prison for his opposition to the first world war and, with Jean-Paul Sartre, organised an unofficial war crimes tribunal to draw attention to the misdeeds of the Americans and their allies in the Vietnam war.

Russell not only wrote a lot, he also wrote well. When my students ask me to recommend a book on the history of philosophy I always suggest they read his History of Western Philosophy. Though full of his philosophical prejudices, it is far more interesting and readable than texts that try to be more scholarly and even-handed.

Greive is impressed not only by Russell’s output but also with his refusal to endorse common opinions without subjecting them to criticism and his willingness to accept criticisms of his own views. “Ultimately what made Russell a more gifted thinker than most – and by most I mean virtually everybody who has ever lived – is that he was happy to be unsure or indeed proved wrong.”

But it is not just Russell’s ability to doubt that Greive wants to feature; it is also his wisdom. The text of In Praise of Idleness is broken up with quotes from other of Russell’s writings, each accompanied by Greive’s remarkable illustrations: big-eyed, expressive adaptations of exotic animals originally drawn by seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrators. “When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man,” says Russell, and this quotation is accompanied by a puzzle-eyed monkey and a frog searching for something that has eluded its grasp – perhaps the exact truth.

Should we accept Greive’s assessment of Russell’s greatness? Philosophers are divided in their opinion about the worth of Russell’s philosophical works – as they are divided about everything else. Many of the views expressed in his more popular books are now widely accepted as having been superseded. Despite the clever aphorisms that Greive extracts, some of his writing has not aged well. But Greive does us a service by bringing In Praise of Idleness to our attention. Its republication is a timely resurrection of a work on a subject that we need to think about.

Russell’s basic argument is easy to state. The belief that all the work we do is virtuous or necessary is an illusion. Modern technology could allow everyone to enjoy an adequate standard of living while doing a lot less work – about half, in fact. All the work needed from each individual, Russell thinks, is four hours a day. Freed from spending so much of our lives at work, we would have the leisure to engage in enjoyable and creative activities to the benefit of ourselves and society.

“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day,” Russell writes,

every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving… Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality… Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out.

Russell’s argument seems easy to criticise. An economist is likely to tell us that arranging the economy so that everyone has an adequate standard of living and just four hours of work would require too much interference by government. A sociologist will add that most people won’t want to work less if this means that they can afford fewer consumer goods. A psychologist is likely to doubt whether people would really benefit from having more leisure, and an international relations expert will certainly be scornful about Russell’s idea of how war can be stopped.

But these criticisms are based on existing ways of living and valuing. Russell is asking, and trying to answer, basic questions about the value of work and leisure, the way we ought to live our lives, and how we can be happy and productive. He is trying to persuade us to change our way of thinking. The issues he is tackling are important for us, and his conclusions require serious examination, even if we end up disagreeing with them.

Work is what keeps an economy going and gives people a means of life, so to question its value might seem like a ridiculous and fruitless exercise. For most people, though, work means being forced to spend a large part of their life doing what they don’t really want to do. In his provocative way, Russell compares work to slavery, and sees the fight for the eight-hour day as one of the most significant struggles of the labour movement. He is simply proposing a more radical version of what these struggles aimed to achieve.

In saying that work in a modern economy is a form of slavery, Russell is operating with a narrow conception of what counts as work. Work is of two kinds, he says: “first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.” Manual labour is what he has in mind, not work in the service industries that play such a dominant role in developed economies. He is not thinking of childcare, nursing, social work or any other kind of work where the prominent activity is relating to other people. And he does not seem to be speaking for those who like their work and think it is worthwhile, or those who get a kick out of workplace competition and a sense of accomplishment from a job well done.

Russell believes that there are also other reasons why we should be critical of work as we know it. He thinks that we have imbibed a morality that has made willingness to work into a virtue. We admire those who work hard, put in the hours and take on extra responsibilities, and we denigrate those who are seen as slackers. Russell calls this a slave morality. He also thinks that work breeds conformity and prevents people from thinking critically about what they are doing. The investment banker who gets a thrill from buying and selling bonds is as much in thrall to the requirements of the job as the labourer on an assembly line, and is as little inclined to reflect on the ethics of what he or she is doing.

The worst thing about work, according to Russell, is that it blocks creativity. It leaves us at the end of the day without the time or inclination to reflect on what we are doing or to engage in any activity that requires a creative use of our mental faculties.

Idleness is praiseworthy, Russell thinks, because it frees us up for creative and enjoyable activities. The plausibility of this statement depends on understanding what he means by idleness. He makes it clear that what he praises is not the forced idleness of the unemployed or the idleness of the free rider who expects to live off the labour of others. Idleness is not spending your time in passive activities or filling your days with Facebook. It is the space you can make for yourself, free from the demands of your working life, to observe, reflect, play, engage in hobbies, lose yourself in your imagination or learn new things.

Greive thinks that Russell’s ideas about the value of idleness were influenced by his childhood experiences. Brought up by a domineering and demanding grandmother, Russell would escape from his lessons and lose himself on the family estate, observing nature and reflecting on what he was learning. He later regarded this time out from the demands of his formal education as the most important part of his childhood.

It is certainly true that Russell has a typical philosopher’s idea of what is good for a person: namely solitary meditation. Most people would probably prefer to spend their leisure time socialising or participating in family life. But these activities can also be both enjoyable and productive. We don’t have to share Russell’s preferences in order to appreciate what he says about the value of idleness.

How about those who wouldn’t know what to do with more free time? Russell thinks that more education would solve that problem – presumably an education that emphasises creativity and critical thought rather than one that concentrates on preparing people for a life of work.

Idleness, Russell argues, is good for individuals, and it is also good for society. It stimulates creativity and it makes people more kindly and less inclined to fight each other. Greive enthusiastically agrees, at least about the former. “Russell’s argument is a call to action for every citizen of our age of ideas and, if applied, heralds the next wave of enlightened entrepreneurs.” Whether idleness is the mother of invention, whether people with more free time become kinder – these are propositions for which we need more evidence. But even if idleness is not the key to peace and human progress, its value for individuals is a sufficient reason to recommend it.

You can be impressed by Russell’s praise of idleness and remain doubtful about the practicality of his ideas. Greive, the author of books about personal life, takes Russell’s essay as a call for individuals to change their priorities. He tells us that he was inspired by Russell to make better use of his spare time. “Over the next ten years I travelled the world, founded a national poetry prize, participated in wildlife conservation programs on every continent, qualified to be a Russian cosmonaut in Moscow, competed in Polynesian strongman contests in Moorea and took up cooking, gardening and adventure sports.”

Russell is not just advocating a change of values, though. He also wants a revolution in social and economic life. We should stop producing so much – a heretical idea for economists – and be satisfied with less. We should aim for a society where everyone contributes more or less equally to the labour necessary to ensure a decent life for all. Presumably this requires not only a fair amount of material equality but also quite a lot of social engineering. It is not obvious that there is scope in this social world for capitalists to set the terms of employment and maximise output in order to produce a profit, or for entrepreneurs to get rich.

What Russell is advocating (contrary to Greive’s view) is a form of socialism. Although he disliked the dictatorial power of Soviet rulers and their devotion to making people work, he didn’t object to the idea of a centrally planned economy. Russell’s ideas, in fact, can be located in a tradition of socialist thought about how work can become less onerous and more self-fulfilling in a society not constrained by the requirements of capitalism. For those suffering from the Great Depression, the view that capitalism had to be replaced by a managed economy was almost common sense – which is how Russell treats it.

The fall of the Soviet Union is supposed to have taught us that a planned economy doesn’t work. Does this mean that Russell’s proposals for changing our economic and social life belong in the dustbin of history? Perhaps we should instead take to heart Russell’s insistence that received truths ought to be doubted. A planned economy in an age of artificial intelligence may be a feasible proposition, and it doesn’t have to be undemocratic. But even if we reject Russell’s socialism we need to take up the discourse that Russell hoped to initiate about work and leisure and how they should be distributed. A good life for everyone in the twenty-first century depends on it. •

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It was Slaughter’s 2012 article for the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” that inspired a book she loathed the idea of writing. She is, after all, a foreign policy expert, and in 2009 she landed her dream job as the first female director of policy planning under secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In fact, Slaughter boasts an eye-watering CV: foreign policy analyst, legal and international relations scholar, former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She’s now president and CEO of New America, a think tank “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age.”

But about that dream job. She left it. The once-in-a-lifetime-chance-to-do-something-for-your-country job; the are-you-sure-you-want-to-pass-this-up kind of gig. Partly, she left because she had completed her agreed two years and if she stayed any longer she’d lose her tenure at Princeton. But more importantly, she left because she just couldn’t commit to continued commuting from Washington to Princeton to see her sons, then twelve and fourteen, merely on weekends. Her eldest had begun to act up, skipping school and getting acquainted with the local police station. And although her partner Andy (also a dean at Princeton) was committed to their care full-time, he needed help.

The resulting Atlantic article about her decision is one of the most-read stories in the 150-year history of the publication. And there’s one line (and, it turns out, the one that Slaughter found most difficult to write) that stands out: “I wanted to go home.” It’s an almost-dirty admission that prompted a flood of mail, feedback and support, but also an air of disappointment from her peers.

It was that disappointed reaction – the passive-aggressive “It’s such a pity you had to leave Washington” – that prompted this book and allowed Slaughter to “break free from an entire set of deeply internalised assumptions about what is valuable, what is important, what is right, and what is natural.” As one of Slaughter’s “Twitter correspondents” wrote to her in the wake of the article, “There has to be something better than Lean In or Get Out.”

Lean In is, of course, a reference to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s arresting 2010 TED talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” and her subsequent book. Corporate women embraced it, but it was speaking to a small slice of them: after all, it boasted the tag line “3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite.”

Sure, that might be how to muscle in on what is still predominantly a man’s world, but many women (and men, for that matter) asked: but what if we don’t want that world? When she writes that Sandberg’s advice, while not without merit, “incorporates a traditional male world of corporate hierarchies,” Slaughter echoes the misgivings of many feminists concerned about the neoliberal narrative that has woven its way into modern feminism.

That system, Slaughter says, is antiquated and broken: “[M]uch broader social, political, and cultural change is also necessary… This kind of change goes far beyond feminism. If we can adopt policies and practices that support and advance women at every level of our society, we will make things better for everybody.”

Slaughter writes about a country in which, apart from a privileged few, it is very easy to fall through the cracks. The United States is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. It is the only advanced economy that doesn’t require employers to provide paid vacation time. “More than 70 per cent of low-wage workers in the United States do not get paid sick days, which means they risk losing their jobs when a childcare or health issue arises… [N]early one quarter of adults in the United States have been fired or threatened with job loss for taking time off to recover from illness or care for a loved one.” Tips for cracking the C-suite aren’t going to cut it.

Slaughter clearly believes in the dignity and value of work. But a simple question underpins this book and sets it fundamentally apart from other attempts to deal with this subject: why don’t we believe in the equal dignity and value of caring for others?

The “care” factor that Slaughter focuses on is an attempt to shift to a much more inclusive conversation – one that involves women, men, the fair whack of American workers who live in poverty, and those wealthy enough to have the luxury of contemplating how to achieve a work–life balance.

“It means rethinking everything from workplace design to life stages to leadership styles,” writes Slaughter. “Not valuing caregiving is the taproot, the deeper problem that gives rise to distortion and discrimination in multiple areas of American society.” Our emphasis on “competition” over “care” vastly underserves our true needs:

If we succeed in freeing ourselves from the competitive mystique, understanding that competition is a valuable human drive but no more valuable than care, we will no longer see the liberation of women as freedom only to compete. On the flip side, if we truly believe that care is just as valuable as competition, then we will realise that men who are only breadwinners are missing out on something deeply satisfying and self-improving.

A background in public policy and academia helps to lend perspective to Slaughter’s viewpoint, but it’s her contention about the value of care that really refutes one accusation levelled at her original article – that she was “perpetuating ‘plutocrat’ feminism – that I’m only concerned with the high-class problems of powerful women like myself.”

Much of the conversation about feminism these days is framed around the construct of intersectionality, but this has the potential to paralyse debate (just ask Germaine Greer…). Slaughter’s care contention goes some way towards diffusing the criticism that many women – including the likes of Annabel Crabb, author of The Wife Drought – cop for lending their white, privileged voice to the debate around equality.

Yes, there is a yawning gap between a 1 per center struggling to keep her career trajectory on track while having babies and a woman living on the poverty line and attempting to keep her family afloat. But, as Slaughter points out, “without minimising the differences in these women’s lives, they all pay a price for having loved ones who need care.”

Slaughter argues that valuing caregiving – not just in our own roles as carers for children, aged parents or sick friends, but also in the work of teachers, childcare workers, health workers and aged carers – should transform the economy and the way we work. We will have to value caregiving, in fact, if we are to cope with an ageing population and increasingly dual-income households. “As a society,” she writes, “the ways in which we value breadwinning over caregiving have made us blind to these costs: we miss the ways in which more money cannot actually substitute for care.”

There’s a practical edge to this, explains Slaughter. In communities around the United States, manufacturing jobs for men have disappeared and “the decent jobs that have remained are overwhelmingly in ‘eds and meds’: education and healthcare.” These are care jobs. Women’s jobs. Low-paid jobs.

Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex document the economic shift from manufacturing towards service and information. Valuing care – and paying for it – could make care jobs more attractive to men and help bolster the middle class, argues Slaughter, and so the next phase of the women’s movement must be a men’s movement. (Cue groans.) But Slaughter again bypasses predictable arguments against this line by examining the concept through the prism of care:

The biggest unconquered world open to men is the world of caring for others. If we tell boys that they can break down centuries-old barriers and be pioneers of social change, suddenly they have a mission, an inspiration, and a new kind of role model to emulate – a new definition of a good man.

Slaughter is adept at straddling the micro and the macro. She’s a policy wonk at heart, as is clear from her vision of what she dubs an “infrastructure of care” – sinking funds into childcare and eldercare, paid family and medical leave for women and men, a right to request part-time or flexible work, investment in early education, higher wages and better training for paid caregivers, and community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer.

She also offers handy Sandberg-like hints. (Think of your career as an interval training exercise, not a sprint; build a “portfolio career”; plan to “lean back.”) But the book could do with a little more of the personal – after all, sharing her own vulnerability is what drew people to that article. She writes of the satisfaction of watching her kids wolf down the breakfast she made each weekday after her return home, but her own experience of care, and what she’s learnt from it, remains enigmatic.

Despite that gap, Slaughter’s work resonates because she’s refreshingly good at acknowledging that even the best of plans get waylaid by messy, nonlinear, frustrating, unpredictable life. By that unplanned-for yearning to just go home.

“Suppose the twists and turns of your life include late marriage, no marriage, divorce, or infertility,” she writes. “A miserable economy, a boss who just doesn’t recognise your merits no matter how confidently you assert them, a job and a spouse that are not in the same place, a child who needs you more than you expected or whom you want to be with more than you expected, parents who need care. Illness, unemployment, debt, disasters both natural and man-made.” What then? Perhaps that question is something Sheryl Sandberg can relate to after the tragic and sudden death of her beloved husband last year.

Slaughter’s contention: “A resilient system is one that can handle the unexpected and bounce back, that anticipates the possibility of many paths to the same destination.” The system may not change overnight but changing our expectations of ourselves would be a start. •

The post Leaning back appeared first on Inside Story.

Business organisation was fragmented in the mid 1980s – a disunity skilfully fostered by prime minister Bob Hawke almost from the moment he came to office – and there was nothing even approaching a consensus about the best way of organising industrial relations. The New Right focused attention on the damage wrought by excessive government regulation and tariff protection but most of all by union power and the arbitration system. For eighty years, its proponents said, Australia had been penalising its highly efficient export industries – pastoralism, agriculture and mining – to prop up the manufacturing industry and urban wages.

Two articles in the right-wing magazine Quadrant early in the Hawke years crystallised attitudes. The first was by a middle-ranking public servant in the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, Gerard Henderson, who had earlier been on the staff of Bob Santamaria’s right-wing Catholic National Civic Council. In his September 1983 article, “The Industrial Relations Club,” Henderson presented Australian industrial relations as fundamentally an exercise in mutual back-scratching. A coterie of Melbourne-based commissioners, union leaders, business representatives, industrial lawyers and public servants operated “in a club-like atmosphere” surrounded by “an ethos of complacency and self-congratulation” in which economic realities took second place to deal-making.

A second contribution to Quadrant, a year later, came from Treasury secretary John Stone. Stone had already announced his intention of resigning from the public service when he delivered “1929 and All That” as the Edward Shann Memorial Lecture at the University of Western Australia. Like Henderson, he had the wages system in his sights – “a crime against society” – but Stone developed a more ambitious argument that “the spirit of enterprise is shackled and weighed down by the dead hands of governments.” He appealed to the spirit of achievement represented by Gallipoli, Kokoda, Douglas Mawson, Charles Kingsford Smith, Howard Florey and Geoffrey Blainey.

Stone and Henderson had one thing in common, apart from their right-wing politics. As civil servants, neither had themselves been much subjected to the rigours of the market. Indeed, it was a feature of the New Right revolt that it tended to bring together aspiring politicians, political staffers, speechwriters, academics, public servants, consultants, lawyers, journalists and industrial relations practitioners. People risking their own money were not only inconspicuous, they were frequently berated as part of the problem on account of their cosy deals with government and unions. Yet it was critical to the New Right’s campaign to reshape Australian public policy that conventional ways of thinking about both the resolution of industrial conflict and the public service needed to be discredited. Industrial arbitration had to be stripped of its remaining judicial dignity, the public service of any residual status it enjoyed as a patriotic calling connected with a nation-building project.

Henderson took to this task with relish, opening a 1986 speech by ridiculing the department that had once employed him for the number of refrigerators it provided its staff. His former colleagues, he indicated, were stupid and self-serving, overwhelmingly concerned with their pleasures and perks. At the lunch held to mark his departure from the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, he “ruefully reflected” that during his four years in the public service he “had lost more brain cells than any of my senior officers were born with.” This comment, he added, “was not appreciated by some senior officers. Some others, fortunately, could not comprehend it.” By the time he made this speech to a group of like-minded right-wing activists, Henderson was exercising what was left of his brain cells as chief of staff to opposition leader John Howard.

These activists drew on a particular understanding of Australian history, a melodrama of “goodies” and “baddies” in which the “baddies” – Alfred Deakin’s early twentieth-century Liberals and the Labor Party – had triumphed over a few economically literate souls who recognised that the laws of supply and demand could not be lightly brushed aside. They reserved a particular venom for Henry Bournes Higgins, the pioneering Arbitration Court president and architect of the living wage. Higgins, in arguing that industries must either pay their workers a living wage or cease to trade, was responsible for the gross inefficiencies that had sent Australia into inexorable national decline. In short, according to leading New Right figure Ray Evans, Higgins was “a nut… who, to the great detriment of his country, found himself able to give legal form and substance to his fantasies.”

The response of those who wished to deal with “our Higgins problem,” as they called it, was to establish the H.R. Nicholls Society in early 1986. Henry Nicholls had been an English radical, a Chartist who came to Australia during the 1850s gold rush. Many decades later in 1911, in his dotage as the editor of a Tasmanian newspaper, Nicholls found himself charged with contempt of court after writing of Higgins as a “political judge.” Ray Evans, who had himself once been a Labor man but was now an assistant to Western Mining’s Hugh Morgan, was impressed by Nicholls’s defiance when he encountered the story. Along with John Stone, Barrie Purvis, the director of the wool-broking employers’ body, and Peter Costello, a young barrister and Liberal Party activist, Evans wrote to potentially interested parties in January 1986 proposing the formation of a society “to give new impetus for reform of the present labour market and to provide a forum for discussion of alternatives to the present regulation of industrial relations.” The letter suggested that the stakes were high. The outcome of the present debate over industrial relations would have “great significance… for Australia’s future economic growth, political development and ultimately, perhaps, territorial integrity.”

Costello had recently become a figure of some national repute on the back of a legal battle in Victoria. The Dollar Sweets case arose from an industrial campaign run by the Federated Confectioners’ Association. As in other famous industrial cases of the mid 1980s, the situation was peculiar. The union concerned, led by Carlo Frizziero, was militant, hostile to the Hawke government’s Prices and Incomes Accord with the unions, and on the far left of the Victorian Labor Party. In April 1985, just a few weeks before the Dollar Sweets strike, the small group of left-wing unions with whom Frizziero was associated had suffered a major defeat at the Victorian Labor Party’s annual conference, when they failed to prevent the readmission to the party of four conservative unions that had left during the split of 1955 and subsequently been associated with the Democratic Labor Party: the Clerks, Shop Assistants, Ironworkers, and Carpenters and Joiners.

The party conference damaged the far left’s image, and did little to enhance that of the Victorian Labor Party generally. The wild melee that occurred at the Coburg Town Hall recalled the physical combat and bitter passion of the episode to which this Sunday morning was a tragicomic postscript: the Labor split of 1955. It was one thing to issue black armbands to delegates entering the hall, and for the president of the Musicians’ Union to play on his clarinet “a mournful refrain of The Last Post.” It was quite another for left-wing activists to hurl abuse, punch and jostle delegates, and throw overripe tomatoes at their opponents as they tried to enter the hall.

The Dollar Sweets dispute added to the reputational damage incurred by the far left unions. A small family business with twenty-seven employees operating in suburban Glen Iris, Dollar Sweets was well-suited to an anti-union propaganda blitz. Here was another case of “the little man who stood up to trade union bullies and thugs.” The boss, of Austrian descent, was Fred Stauder, and among the firm’s products were Hundreds and Thousands, as seen and admired on fairy bread and birthday cakes at children’s parties. The confectioners’ union, having achieved a reduction of working hours to thirty-six per week in the larger firms, had now moved on to the likes of Dollar Sweets. But Stauder replied that the business could not afford any additional reduction in the working week. In July 1985 the union called a strike and established a picket; fifteen of the company’s employees stopped work. After Stauder told them that they would either have to sign a no-strike agreement or face dismissal, he terminated their employment and replaced them.

The strike was not good-humoured. Telephone wires were cut and locks filled with glue. There was a bomb threat, an arson attempt and a physical altercation between Frizziero and a truck driver delivering sugar to the factory. The union dropped its claim for reduced hours, but demanded that the striking workers be reinstated. Stauder turned to senior business leaders for help. They directed him to Peter Costello, a twenty-eight-year-old barrister, who offered as a long shot the possibility of a successful common-law tort action. With the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce providing the money, Dollar Sweets issued legal proceedings against the union. The following month, a decision of the Supreme Court called the union’s behaviour “stupid and nihilistic” and ordered that the picket be lifted. The parties later settled for a union payment of $175,000 in damages.

A much bigger strike during 1985 also helped place a spring in the step of New Right activists. The dispute occurred over the efforts of the South East Queensland Electricity Board, or SEQEB, to use contract labour. The National Party government had introduced a regime of equalising electricity costs across the state, the effect of which was to impose a large cross-subsidy of rural and provincial consumers at the expense of those living in the major centres. But the result – massively increased electricity prices for city-dwellers – was potentially damaging to the government at a time when Bjelke-Petersen’s decision to sever his coalition with the Liberal Party demanded National Party electoral gains in the more populated areas.

The dispute bubbled on for almost a year before exploding into a full-scale strike in February 1985. Efforts by the State Industrial Commission to settle the dispute were unavailing and on 7 February, with thousands of consumers already in the dark, the Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency. With the government’s support, SEQEB management subsequently sacked 1000 striking linesmen, replacing them with non-unionists bound by contracts containing no-strike clauses.

Solidarity strikes, pickets and protest marches were ineffective in countering Bjelke-Petersen’s war against the union’s members. Instead, the government introduced a series of laws intended to curb union power in the industry. And in a move that reprised his ban on street marches in the late 1970s, Bjelke-Petersen transformed protest into a threat to law and order by strengthening the powers of police in a manner that outlawed pickets. Anyone now deemed to be interfering with the power supply could be arrested. In August a handful of members of a group that called itself “Concerned Christians” protesting near SEQEB headquarters were arrested under the Electricity (Continuity of Supply) Act.

Most of the striking workers were left without jobs or hope but with a burning resentment of their treatment at the hands of SEQEB, the government, union officials and timid Labor politicians. Many thought they had been sold out by their leaders for the sake of career advancement and political advantage. There was particular bitterness over the abject surrender of the Trades and Labour Council. Meanwhile the strike’s undoubted victor, Bjelke-Petersen, reached his apogee as a hero of the political right.

The growing aggression of a handful of employers in the mid 1980s saw a distinct reaction set in, based on the suspicion that industrial warfare incurred intangible social and economic costs along with the more obvious benefit of being able to pose, like an ancient ruler, with one’s foot firmly planted on the neck of a vanquished foe. The tipping point was Robe River, the last of the fabled New Right industrial disputes of the mid 1980s, and the most ambiguous in its immediate politics and eventual impact. No dispute better illustrates the New Right’s apocalyptic vision of how a period of intense conflict would give way to an industrial utopia in which bosses and workers would deal with one another as autonomous and rational individuals, free from the insidious interference of union or state.

Robe River was in the Pilbara, a remote region in the northwest of Western Australia that was a leading producer of iron ore. It had operated from 1970 as a joint venture under the management of the American firm Cleveland Cliffs, but in 1986 Peko-Wallsend, one of the partners, became the majority shareholder and took over running the company. Its profitability climbed rapidly in the first half of the 1980s. But the Japanese steel industry, which was Peko’s leading customer, entered a more difficult period after 1985, which reduced the scope for exports. Peko’s new chief executive, Charles Copeman, blamed the company’s problems on slack management and “restrictive work practices” – a phrase that entered the political lexicon at this juncture. After sending in a team of executives to investigate, Copeman sacked four senior managers and demoted the managing director, then declared existing industrial agreements null and void. Hypocritically – considering Copeman’s contempt for the arbitration system – the company wanted to place all workers on the site under the federal award system, a move opposed by the state Labor government.

To the extent that restrictive work practices were a problem at Robe River, they were the result not of the compulsory arbitration so hated by New Right ideologues but of the local collective bargaining they wanted to replace it with. Robe River had differed from other Pilbara companies in seeking to exploit the spot – or short-term – market in iron ore rather than use long-term contracts. Spot prices were higher, but with this came an acute sensitivity to industrial disruption, which in turn encouraged a compliant response to union demands. For the new management, it seemed that if local arrangements could be overridden, many of the practices that Peko believed were wrecking the operation could be removed.

Having announced its intention to remove restrictive work practices, the company conducted what many workers saw as a reign of terror. It transferred workers around the operation irrespective of previous arrangements, including a sixty-year-old tea lady who was “reclassified as an ore handler and put out on yard duties.” While the company did its best to present its workers as the beneficiaries of a well-developed system of rorts, there was also sufficient adverse publicity about Peko’s behaviour to prevent Copeman from becoming a popular hero.

Peko’s aggression and vindictiveness disturbed even those convinced that conditions at Robe River were on the soft side. Union representatives complained that management had targeted them for demeaning work in what they called “punishment details,” while the company introduced new tenancy agreements in the company towns of the northwest, providing for a 400 per cent rent increase for workers who went out on strike. Wives feared being evicted from their homes while work contracts now provided that “any or all of the conditions of employment can be changed weekly at the sole discretion of the company.” Most seriously for Peko’s reputation, when the WA Industrial Relations Commission ordered a moratorium on industrial action and investigation of work practices, the company sacked sixty-four employees who had resisted changes in their working arrangements. When the commission ordered their reinstatement, Peko sacked its entire workforce of 1160; it looked like the kind of lawlessness of which H.R. Nicholls Society types had accused unions at Dollar Sweets.

In Pilbara towns such as Pannawonica and Wickham, workers and their families were seething at the company’s behaviour. Some were prepared to acknowledge the “rorts” and conceded that there were practices that could readily be abandoned. “I know there’s got to be changes,” commented one worker. “I think most of us do. But the way the company’s going about it. You know, just splitting the town, making people angry.” Pilbara families especially resented the idea, current in the state’s more closely settled south, that they were “filthy rich” and living a life of luxury and comfort. Food, electricity and petrol prices were high, and holidays expensive because of the region’s remoteness.

Central to Peko’s strategy for dealing with its workforce was to sow divisions between the white- and blue-collar employees, between “staffies” and “wages.” Staffies had to sign contracts agreeing to take the places of striking blue-collar workers or face dismissal. Previously, community clubs and organisations – indeed, the Pilbara towns’ social life – had revolved around easy sociability between the two groups. As blue-collar workers and their families saw it, there was little consciousness of status difference between them: it was “a close-knit community” in which people “got on well.” Hence, for blue-collar unionists, the failure of most clerical staff to support them aroused bitter resentment; they regarded them as “scabs” and shunned them. Those who turned up to take the places of striking workers were greeted at the security gate by a menacing banner that proclaimed: “Scabs. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.” Staff who entered a local hotel “soon left under a barrage of abuse from unionists.”

The lockout ended on 3 September after the Industrial Relations Commission rejected Robe River’s appeal against an order to reinstate sacked workers. But the company’s refusal to enter into conciliation meant that there would be no quick end to the dispute. The commission eventually upheld the company’s right to eliminate restrictive work practices. Union leaders had worked hard to restrain their members, preferring “passive resistance” to a strike. But the company continued to carry out reprisals. In December 1986 a strike finally occurred over harassment of unionists, white-collar workers performing blue-collar labour, and staffing levels. Pickets were established and unionists showered abuse on strike-breakers as they arrived for work each day. Meanwhile, the company took its cue from Dollar Sweets – Peter Costello was advising Copeman – and issued writs against individual union officials and conveners.

In the New Right industrial fable, Peko was a tower of strength. In reality, there were good reasons why it should now seek a compromise. Peko’s Japanese partners had expressed their concerns about the company’s manner of dealing with its employees as early as August, and the WA government was furious with Peko for the dispute’s impact on the state’s reputation as a reliable exporter of iron ore. Bob Hawke, equally unimpressed, had called employer militants of the Copeman type “political troglodytes and economic lunatics.” The ACTU had established a fighting fund and workers from other Pilbara mines had expressed a willingness to shut down the whole region’s iron-ore operations. Even as it issued one legal writ after another, Peko could not be sure of how far the unions would be prepared to go.

Early in 1987 negotiations between ACTU president Simon Crean and Copeman resulted in a peace deal, although not without some resistance from rank-and-file unionists. It was hard to miss the irony: Copeman, the scourge of arbitration and the unions, had relied on one to deal with restrictive work practices, and on the other to extract him from the industrial chaos of his own making.

Peko was soon reporting a happy and productive workforce, which the company and its New Right supporters treated as vindication. Sceptics, however, were unconvinced by claims of an outbreak of happiness, and pointed out that other companies seemed to have managed greater productivity, and probably greater happiness, without prosecuting industrial warfare on a grand scale.

Nor can the federal government’s move away from allowing price inflation to determine the level of the basic wage (a system called “indexation”) late in 1986 be seen as a direct outcome of the New Right revolt. Hawke had been playing with the idea of linking wage levels to considerations of efficiency and productivity, in addition to price increases, for many years, and the government remained committed to an entrenchment of the award system and the role of unions within it. And it is by no means self-evident that it became easier as a result of Robe River, at least in the short term, to imagine large workplaces across the nation full of employees on individual contracts, for the dispute was also an illustration of the costs of open industrial warfare.

Robe River also brought the H.R. Nicholls Society to national attention as a mysterious and possibly dangerous cabal, contributing to New Right stridency – and a backlash against it that would soon have disastrous political consequences for opponents of the Hawke government. The Prices and Incomes Accord was based on a fusion of politics and industrial relations that eventually helped keep the Labor Party in office for longer than any previous national Labor government. But the political right’s attempt at creating its own fusion would help keep the Coalition out of power for another decade. •

This is an edited extract from The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia, by Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc.

The post The anti–industrial relations club appeared first on Inside Story.

Given the financial pressures many of them face, this is hardly surprising. Living costs are higher here than in their home countries; student fees amount to thousands of dollars annually; and international students don’t have access to Austudy and other forms of government assistance.

What might come as a surprise is the fact that exploitation of international student workers is widespread. A 2005 study based on 200 interviews with international students found that 58 per cent of interviewees were paid below the minimum wage, earning between $7 and $15 per hour. A recent survey of more than 200 international students by a union, United Voice, found that 60 per cent earned less than the national minimum wage ($16.37 per hour), with a quarter of respondents receiving $10 or less per hour.

Official recognition of the problem is almost non-existent. In 2008, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission documented the racism and discrimination suffered by Victorian international student workers for a Victorian government inquiry. The number and significance of complaints from migrant workers in general prompted the workplace enforcement agency, the Fair Work Ombudsman, to establish an Overseas Workers’ Team in 2012. Meanwhile, the problem persists: when we interviewed twenty-one international students working in Melbourne cafes and restaurants last year, we found that all but one of them had been underpaid or not paid at all in at least one of their jobs.

What lies behind this exploitation? The primary factor is the vulnerability of international students in Australian workplaces. Like other newly arrived employees, they lack local knowledge, language skills and familiarity with labour laws, and they experience discrimination especially on the basis of race and ethnicity. But they also lack access to the rights and entitlements enjoyed in these workplaces by Australian citizens and permanent residents. The visa limit on their hours of work – presently forty hours per fortnight during term time – can also be a source of vulnerability: employers can use the fear of the consequences of a breach, including potential deportation, to impose abusive working conditions.

But that vulnerability is only part of the story. It is no coincidence that many of the sectors in which international students work – cleaning, retail and taxi-driving, for instance – are poorly paid, precarious and plagued with breaches of workplace laws. The hospitality sector is perhaps the best example of how the vulnerability of international students interacts with employer practices in hazardous industries. Currently the focus of a campaign by the Fair Work Ombudsman in response to the serious incidence of non-compliance, employers in the hospitality sector have repeatedly been found by courts to be in breach of working conditions.

Why, then, despite the publicly available evidence and frequent media coverage, have governments done so little? Two (unsatisfactory) reasons seem to discourage official action. First, international students are typically seen only as consumers (or, as some critics put it, “cash cows”) in Australia’s education market, not as members of the local workforce. Second, and related, government policies to regulate temporary migrant employment have overwhelmingly focused on workers employed under 457 visas and other dedicated temporary labour schemes.

A current Senate inquiry presents an opportunity to break this silence. The Senate Education and Employment References Committee is examining the impact of Australia’s temporary work visa programs not only on the labour market but also on temporary visa holders themselves. The inquiry is broad, extending well beyond the 457 visa program, and has an important focus on exploitation and mistreatment. We hope that this inquiry seizes the opportunity to acknowledge the acute problem of the exploitation of international student workers, that it affirms the entitlement of these workers to workplace justice, and that it begins the process of ending the exploitation that appears to underwrite key industries in this country and the higher education sector. •

The post Taking a taxi ride to an inhospitable workplace appeared first on Inside Story.

Visiting Sydney from New York before Christmas, I dropped by the office of a client and former colleague. Her employer, a large law firm, recently moved to swanky new premises and she was keen to take me on a tour. As we strolled the eerily quiet corridors, the towering windows, antiseptic surfaces and noiseless elevator doors put me in mind of the inside of a spaceship. At any moment I half-expected the two of us to defy gravity and lift off from the gleaming polished floor.

The cost of maintaining the illusion of worker freedom through extravagant fit-outs seems to grow with every decade. The office’s split-level mezzanine and cafeteria exaggerated the sense of a space–time continuum. Designed as a hub for meetings of all kinds, the mezzanine encourages flexibility of human movement within the larger workplace, which remains tethered to that relic of twentieth-century work practices, the billable hour. Looking around, I felt a retrospective pang for the lifestyle extras a corporate job used to afford me. But having “consciously uncoupled” myself as a full-time employee from the corporate workplace eight years earlier, it felt like viewing Earth from deep space.

These days I write grist for my client’s marketing mill from my desk in Brooklyn. But as a freelance writer and editor over here, I’m about as rare as the common cold. Numerous cafes in my Crown Heights neighbourhood have become the home office away from home for many independent workers in today’s “knowledge economy.” With workers hunched at communal benches, wearing oversized headphones and staring into their laptops, these cafe-offices could be mistaken for call centres. I work from my bedroom, like I did as a student.

Because the majority of my freelancing is for Australian companies and authors, my working life orbits around Skype. Started in 2003 and named for the awkward progeny of “sky” and “peer,” Skype facilitates free calls between computers over the internet and provides additional “freemium” services. By opening a Skype credit account, for example, I could dial landlines from my laptop for two Australian cents per minute. For a consumer accustomed to the Rosetta Stone of her monthly Telstra bill, my Skype usage was not only a bargain but also straightforward to track.

Super-sizing my Skype account, I acquired a “Skype-in” telephone number for $60 that begins with the Sydney area code and diverts to my laptop for a local call cost to the dialler. I refer to this as my “magic number.” Clients enjoy the trick, though neither end of the line – or is it the optic fibre? – has a clue as to how it’s done.

Product consumers are accustomed to the fact that the things they buy are often manufactured at a great geographical distance, but in the service economy this is a recent and transformative change. In a recent blog post for the New Yorker, George Packer described the invisibility of the worker in today’s digital economy. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are “ubiquitous in our lives but with no physical presence or human face,” he wrote. “With work increasingly invisible, it’s much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the internet economy.” As one of the lesser stars of that universe, Skype’s workings as a corporation remain a mystery to me as its happy customer, in the same way that the logistics of my virtual office must baffle some of my clients.

For seven years now I have commuted around the world from the comfort of my bedroom-slash-office. (I try not to dwell on the fact that in Sydney I worked out of a dedicated study in my home; living in a New York apartment is all about sacrificing space.) Using Skype I have coached Australian authors living in Kenya, Melbourne, Los Angeles, the Gold Coast, Sydney and on a remote Queensland farm through their respective manuscripts, all of which have been, or soon will be, published.

When I first moved to New York in 2006, I learned that my professional experience beyond the borders of the United States counted for little. Though I found it relatively easy to find a junior-level job, it was immediately obvious that I’d need to earn more to survive. I got in touch with a few friends working for book publishers and large corporations back home and work trickled in. By 2009, with the floor of the global economy having collapsed, I had become dependent on Skype to stay afloat. Happily my physical location in New York proved no impediment to clients based in other parts of the world. A few have stuck with me since the early versions of Skype, when my voice sounded like it was at the end of a tin-can telephone.

Today Skype shapes the “social contours” of my professional and personal life. My typical working day splits into three shifts across two time zones. Mornings are for my own writing projects, afternoons for deadline-driven client jobs or errands. The third shift is the trickiest but the most crucial. By now it’s evening in New York, but Australia is only just flipping open its smart phone, arriving at work, checking email. Between three and five times each week I have a Skype meeting, which makes local dinner time a moveable feast.

My parents like to say of people they find incompetent, “He wouldn’t know what day it is.” Competence aside, no one can accuse me of that. My Skype working life demands I stay aware not only of the day, but the time of day in two places at once. I straddle the International Date Line like a time-travelling desk-jockey.

Perhaps all this is evidence of Dutch theorist Erik Veldhoen’s claim that the digital era makes work more independent of time and place. But having cultivated the illusion of access and availability, in another sense I feel chained to my desk, wherever I may roam, a satellite in virtual space.

Veldhoen predicts the end of the physical office environment for the vast majority of “knowledge economy” workers around the world. On his website, where he sets out his vision of what he dubs the New Way of Working, he writes, “The one-on-one relationship between the organisational structure and the building will be abandoned on all fronts.” Like all good futurists, Veldhoen’s relationship to technology is relentlessly positive, as evidenced by the title of his 2013 book, You-Topia: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on Our Work, Our Life and Our Environment. You-Topia is a tantalising prospect until you start considering the implications for workers’ rights. Or living a version of it yourself.

Back on Earth, where increasing numbers of workers compete for jobs in online content mills and freelance farms, the future of independent work looks less promising. As Nikil Saval writes in Cubed, his new history of the workplace, “The more radical prediction for the future of the office – that it will disappear altogether – might similarly offer either more freedom or only the illusion of it.”

In the United States, freelancers now constitute anywhere between 20 and 30 per cent of the workforce, a fast-growing but vulnerable group sometimes referred to as the “precariat.” “Some of these workers have chosen to leave the permanent workforce; most have been pushed out,” Saval writes. “In many cases they lack health insurance and are at constant risk of insolvency.” The Government Accountability Office estimated the number of freelancers at forty-two million in a 2006 study. Since then global economic conditions have added millions to this number, though there seems little political motivation to count them again. Freelancers are a powerless group, as well as a precarious one.

The absence of health insurance became urgent early this year when I experienced a sudden pain in my hip pocket: with the introduction of the Obamacare legislation I would face tax penalties if I did not take out insurance by April.

I decided to join the Freelancers Union. Established in 1995 to deliver benefits to independent workers, this self-described “Federation of the Unaffiliated” now boasts almost 250,000 members. While membership cost me nothing, I was dismayed to learn their health insurance plan for individuals began at US$471 per month. Until the Freelancers Union attracts millions of members, it will continue to boast neither political clout nor affordable insurance. Reluctantly, I found a cheaper plan elsewhere.

Admittedly I’m a lot more fortunate than most freelancers. My time is largely my own to organise and I have a variety of interesting and occasionally well-paid jobs. Skype has liberated me from the commute and the pointless meetings and the nine-to-five. But there have been unexpected consequences too. While I’ve developed a wide social network in New York, I can’t say the same about my professional one. My working week always begins on Sunday, and not because of church. I am often using Skype well into the evenings. It’s convenient but exhausting. I’m always “on.” Paradoxically, just like my former employer’s work environment, my home office is often a mirage of freedom from employment – with a less ergonomic chair.

Skype is an illusionist’s tool and a mixed blessing. It offers the chimera of proximity and the promise of flexibility, without delivering either. Sometimes the sight of its cheerful blue icon on my desktop makes me want to scream. And like any illusion, my working life depends on a sleight of hand. The trick lies in the physical world, in the “analog” network established over years of living and working in Australia. Another paradox.

I depend on Skype, not only financially, but also emotionally. It’s my lifeline to steady income and to the lifelong relationships that confirm me as an Australian despite my status as a dual citizen. Every expatriate daughter learns that part of being the one who goes away is the responsibility for staying in touch. Even if I don’t feel distant emotionally from the people I love back home, Skype can exacerbate the geographical distance I feel. It’s the opposite effect of looking in a side mirror: friends and family are further away than they appear on screen. So Skype does not make me feel as if I never left; it helps me sustain the illusion that, online at least, it is possible to exist in two places at the same time. •

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Rana Plaza building collapses. Foxconn workers take their own lives. The Deep Horizon rig spills vast quantities of oil. Even in an era of humanistic people management and corporate social responsibility, Dickensian labour practices still seem to suffuse global businesses. As well as creating supply chains that facilitate irresponsibility, exploitation and outright abuses in the developing world, businesses in developed nations indulge in their fair share of questionable behaviour at home. Take Walmart, for example, which seems to be perpetually facing charges over labour violations ranging from closing down stores where workers form unions to threatening or firing employees for going on strike.

In the face of the seemingly widespread belief that businesses ought to pursue profits at any cost, Zeynep Ton argues that “there are different ways to make money.” The alternative approach she presents – the “good jobs strategy” – combines “operational excellence” with “investment in people.” Operational excellence boils down to four managerial “choices”: offering fewer products and services; standardising processes while empowering employees; training employees to accomplish multiple tasks; and overstaffing the workplace to create customer-friendly “slack.” Alongside comes a non-negotiable commitment to employees’ needs, development and self-determination.

In other words, The Good Jobs Strategy distinguishes itself from mainstream management practice with a little heart. It argues that employees need to find meaning in their work and that their satisfaction is ultimately good for business. Ton’s opening chapter sets the scene with harrowing accounts of the working lives of frontline retail workers she met through her research. We’re introduced to Janet, an intelligent, hardworking former business owner in her fifties who now earns just $11.60 an hour at a retail chain and never knows when and how many hours she’ll be working week to week. Ton condemns Janet’s employer for chasing a “bad jobs strategy” that enforces inhumane working standards in order to reduce costs.

Too many employers, like Janet’s, choose the bad jobs strategy, says Ton, and they consequently end up trapped in the “vicious cycle of retail.” Lower investment in employees leads to poorer operational performance, which leads to lower financial performance, which then leads back to lower investment in employees. Employers who reject this approach, and who take the risk to invest in their employees in the short term, will see longer-term pay-offs. Their reward is the “virtuous cycle of retail.” As a case study of Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona and smaller examples drawn from Costco, QuikTrip and Trader Joe’s show, these companies view their employees as “precious assets.” Investing in these assets through better pay and benefits, Ton argues, will inevitably deliver superior value to customers and investors alike.

Ton is to be applauded for questioning the dehumanising treatment of employees as “resources.” More than that, she makes a compelling business argument for investing in employees. The four strategies for operational excellence proposed in The Good Jobs Strategy are supported with in-depth case studies of retail companies, and grounded in concrete, practical strategies that managers can implement in their organisations.

The first operational choice involves offering fewer products and services in order to reduce stockouts, waste and supply chain expenses. Contrary to the popular idea that customers are happier when they have more choice, Ton argues that increased choice confuses customers and hinders good customer service. In a retail setting, fewer products mean that staff can more easily become experts in the store’s offerings and will more likely persuade customers about their benefits.

The second solution reconciles the ostensibly opposing choices of standardisation and empowerment. Stemming from theories of scientific management, the standardisation of basic, routine tasks was designed to maintain efficiency and consistency. With workers required to adhere to rigid protocols, human judgement becomes unnecessary. Empowerment, meanwhile, is grounded in the idea that workers should have the autonomy to exercise judgement. Empowered employees are free to make their own decisions based on what they think is appropriate for the situation at hand. Ton argues that companies should both standardise and empower. Safety procedures, for example, can be routinised but staff can choose how to display store merchandise to appeal to the local clientele.

Cross-training is the third element. Employees should be trained to perform a wide range of tasks to better respond to fluctuations in store traffic. When the checkout line lengthens at Trader Joe’s, employees shelving or arranging displays can open another cash register. When the store is quiet, employees can redistribute themselves to ensure other parts of the store are in order.

In what is perhaps the most novel operational strategy of the book, Ton convinces managers to defy conventional management wisdom and deliberately overstaff. As long as staff have been adequately developed, empowered and cross-trained, additional employees can assist with a variety of tasks and identify opportunities for business improvement. Employees who are not overstretched and overstressed are more likely to notice ways of helping the company to save costs or better meet customer needs. Ton describes how Costco employees in Florida noticed that their store landscaping feature was expensive to water and recommended that a well be dug instead. Their perceptiveness and initiative are credited to Costco’s commitment to staff investment. Stories like this, presented throughout The Good Jobs Strategy, underscore the need for businesses to see and value their employees as fully human.

Without wanting to detract from the many strengths of Ton’s proposals, though, I think a more fundamental question is worth asking. Can companies, as The Good Jobs Strategy argues, really “satisfy employees, customers and investors, all at the same time”? Can managerialist goals of profit, productivity and performance be reconciled with ethical goals of care, equality and justice?

If we ask the average human resources manager – a person whose role is predicated on balancing the needs of the business with the needs of employees – he or she might tend to agree. Businesses like the ones Ton showcases are certainly laudable for trying. But the idea that what’s good for the employees is always good for business might be an overly reductionist, starry-eyed view that overlooks the complex, pluralistic and dynamic nature of employee interests and needs. This view tends to portray employees as a homogeneous group of people who all want the same things. It also tends to ignore wider issues of power. Seemingly compliant workers are often readily attributed to the company’s exemplary management practices, while systemic issues of worker vulnerability and their limited choices and prospects remain invisible.

Although The Good Jobs Strategy appears to be grounded in extensive research among retail workers, I would have liked to hear more of employees’ voices. After introducing Janet in Chapter 1, the book relies predominantly on managers’ accounts of companies’ strategies and their effectiveness. Employees are characterised in generalised terms and thus treated as all the same. “Each time they can make a bit of someone’s day go better, they feel proud of themselves,” writes Ton at one point. “What’s more, if they feel their employer is helping them do this, they feel proud of their company and not only glad but even grateful to work there.”

Accounts like that so plainly obscure employee agency and resistance that I wondered if this was a deliberate strategy on Ton’s part. It’s possible she fears that if she reminds managers that employees are not an obliging mass of automatons – deploying themselves around a store depending on business need and debugging business processes in their downtime – then she might deter some from ever entertaining the good jobs strategy.

Covert strategies of anti-managerialist resistance notwithstanding, I’m left wondering if the good jobs strategy will be implemented widely unless the fundamental tensions between managerialist and ethical values are recognised. Will it simply live and die in popular management’s fickle limelight? It would certainly be a shame if global businesses didn’t make a concerted effort to implement Ton’s ideas.

At the same time, The Good Jobs Strategy has aroused my appetite for alternative, dare I say radical, forms of management theorising and practice. I find myself craving management guides that challenge head-on the ways in which conventional business practices dehumanise employees and treat the needs, viewpoints and desires of managers as paramount. The managerialist ideal of aligning employee needs with corporate ones is big business in the management theory industry and demand for it and all its promises remains strong. But even this seductive fantasy cannot deny that employees are emotional, dynamic, fragmented and complex. We have agency, desires, interests and needs, and these do not necessarily conform to the goals of the companies we work for. Perhaps it is time to articulate managerial practices that speak to the complexity of organisational life and the vital need to put people first? •

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THE MENTAL and physical harm suffered by asylum seekers detained in Australia is not new, but there is a growing body of evidence providing fresh insight into the effect on those responsible for enforcing this cruel and inhumane system.

Before its untimely demise last month, the Global Mail published an anonymous first-hand account of the experience of working in an Australian detention centre. The man had been employed by Serco, a British company contracted by the federal government to operate detention centres on the Australian mainland and on Nauru and Manus Island. Serco staff sign a confidentiality agreement so evidence of the experiences of detention workers is scarce.

The account reveals a hidden harm of Australia’s detention of people seeking asylum: the impact on staff employed to carry out the policy. The staff member relates his own experience of relationship breakdown, sleeplessness, stress and thoughts of self-harm. He tells of arguing with his partner, going into the kitchen, pulling a knife out of the drawer, and thinking maybe if he cut himself he would understand why asylum seekers self-harm.

There has been extensive research demonstrating the harm caused to asylum seekers in detention. In 2004, the Australian Human Rights Commission Inquiry, A Last Resort?, found that detained children suffered numerous and repeated breaches of their human rights. Last year, the Commonwealth Ombudsman confirmed that detention for longer than six months has a “significant, negative impact on mental health.” The same report found there were eleven deaths in detention between 2010 and 2013, at least four of which were suicides. What of the harm caused to staff of detention facilities?

In 2011, Suicide Prevention Australia reported over 1100 incidences of threatened or actual self-harm in detention centres in that year alone, and recommended suicide prevention training for all staff working in immigration detention. According to statistics from the then Department of Immigration and Citizenship, rates of self-harm by asylum seekers in detention peaked at thirty per 1000 people in August 2011. That month there were also fourteen incidents of self-harming among the 420 children in detention.

In 2012, Serco employed 5252 staff in a broad range of government contracts in Australia, including prisons, hospitals and military logistics. Since 2009, the Australian government has paid $756 million to Serco for running detention centres. The contract has recently been extended for six months.

Serco provides minimal training to staff. Turnover is high, qualifications are low; in 2011 the Australian reported that backpackers and recent high school graduates were being employed as casual subcontractors. Such practices are disastrous for asylum seekers and damaging for the employees themselves.

The Serco contract doesn’t require guards to hold any formal security qualifications during their first six months of employment, and thereafter only a one-week Certificate II in security operations. This level of training seems manifestly inadequate to properly equip staff to deal with the detention environment.

A 2011 Senate inquiry into Australia’s immigration detention network highlighted weaknesses in the government’s contract with Serco. A recurring issue raised during the inquiry was the failure of the service contract to specify a minimum staff–detainee ratio. The inquiry also expressed concern at the use of untrained subcontractor staff inside detention centres.

A 2013 Commonwealth Ombudsman report into deaths in immigration detention highlighted the need for mental health training for Serco staff. The Ombudsman recommended that such training be endorsed by the Detention Health Advisory Group, which has since been rebranded and then disbanded by the Abbott government.

In 2011, the ABC reported the claims of an anonymous Serco staff member that the company was desperately short of staff and deliberately inflated worker numbers on paper to cover up the shortages at the Christmas Island detention centre. In 2012, a leaked Serco training manual revealed staff members were instructed to use force to incapacitate detainees. The manual included techniques to kick, punch and target pressure points on asylum seekers.

On 28 March 2011, Serco subcontractor Kieran Webb cut down Mohammad Atay, a nineteen-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who had hanged himself in his room at the Curtin detention centre in Western Australia. On 6 July 2011, Kieran Webb hanged himself in Bali.

On 23 July 2013, a group of Salvation Army staff contracted by the federal government to work with asylum seekers on Nauru wrote publicly about their experiences via a staff member’s blog: ‘We comforted men who were brought to Nauru in handcuffs by the Australian government under false pretences. We watched their numerous peaceful protests against the uncertainty of their future. We saw the scars of self-harm, and suicide attempts.’

From March 2014, the Salvation Army contract to provide welfare support to asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru will be taken over by the construction company Transfield Services. Given the emotional damage welfare professionals have experienced working in the detention system, how will a construction company equip staff to deal with the stresses of conditions on Nauru and Manus Island? Similarly, what is the impact on Customs and Border Protection Service staff tasked with rescuing and returning distressed vessels?

An analogous argument has been made in relation to the death penalty in the United States. Even if you believe in capital punishment as a legitimate act of the state, what is the impact on staff ordered to carry out executions of fellow human beings? A number of execution wardens have recently come out against the practice. According to Donald Cabana, a former Mississippi prison warden who presided over executions, “there is a part of the warden that dies with his prisoner.” A 2002 Stanford University Study highlighted the common experience of staff, including dissociative mechanisms, persistent guilt, stress and depression among execution teams.

The latest anonymous account about working for Serco points to comparable experiences for detention centre staff. Even if you could rationalise the damage to asylum seekers on national security grounds, it seems difficult to justify the mental health damage to the people working in detention centres.

The detention of asylum seekers and the harms that flow from this policy are a source of national shame. The incidental impact on the staff members who enforce the policy and witness the suffering of those detained is a hidden harm that needs further investigation. What is clear is that thousands of Australian citizens, alongside asylum seekers, are becoming victims of our government’s policy. •

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ANNE-MARIE Slaughter’s recent role as director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton explains the viral attention her 12,000-word essay in the Atlantic has received over the past few weeks. An ex-colleague of a secretary of state, former dean of a big policy institute and law professor at Princeton is obviously going to be listened to. But this doesn’t explain the lightning response her essay is sparking the world over – including attracting a million-plus online readers.

Her essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” has touched a nerve that, among women of a certain age and education, jangles at the slightest touch. For these women, the mere mention of work–life balance – and any hint of valuing family over professional advancement – puts them on the defensive. The concept of having it all, of fulfilling work and a happy family life, makes their ears prick up and look warily at each other. (I should know – I’m one of them.)

So great has been the impact of this essay that just keeping up with the responses has been, for Slaughter, equivalent to the high-powered White House position she recently left. Clearly there is something about the work–life debate that makes female columnists especially narky. In a 10 July opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review, Emma-Kate Symons let fly. Slaughter’s thesis is “skewed by upper-class pretensions… It’s anti-feminist, elitist and dangerous for women.” “Goodness,” I thought, “is she responding to the same essay I’ve just read?” And if “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” were all that Symons says it is, would it really have been circulated the world over in a matter of days, and recommended on Facebook 168,000 times?

So what’s all the fuss about? The Atlantic essay describes at length Anne-Marie Slaughter’s change of heart on stepping down from her “dream job” in the White House. Within days of resigning she had, she realised, changed sides. One day she was held up as a high-powered exemplar of a successful work–life balance. The next day she was openly admitting to having – temporarily – toppled off it. No news there. As countless surveys attest, the women in the latter category far outnumber the women in the former.

“Millions of women,” she notes in her essay, “feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).” To respond to what she calls “the maternal imperative” at the same time as climbing the professional ladder in the shortest possible time is, she writes, to attempt to achieve incompatible goals.

Ultimately Slaughter is calling for a shift in professional culture towards a more flexible and compassionate attitude to family demands, one that would inject more give into a system that all but forces women to choose family over career in times of personal stress. In an interview with Der Spiegel in the wake of her essay, she summed it up this way: “We are making it impossible to pursue your ambition and be the parent that you must be and want to be.”

In some ways Slaughter is an unlikely advocate for this point of view. In Der Spiegel she freely admitted that she did academic work in her hospital bed just hours after giving birth, went back to work at three months, has always been the family’s primary wage earner, and has travelled constantly. Given all this, her rise to director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton – a role she coveted for decades – comes as no surprise.

The real irony is that the Atlantic chose to call her essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” when in fact she insists that women can have it all, and that she has managed just that – though not at the White House. Yes, women can have a successful career and a happy home life, she suggests, on one condition. “I have always been able to have it all,” she told Der Spiegel, “but what I realised was that this was because, as a professor, I controlled my own time.”

Of course, most women in full-time work with children at home can’t control their work schedules – which means, according to this definition, that most women can’t have it all. These are precisely the women who have caused the avalanche in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s inbox. “In 95 per cent of the cases,” she told Der Spiegel, “the response is ‘Thank you.’ I am bowled off my feet. I knew that the cause was important, but I didn’t realise how many women feel they are struggling with trying to make it all happen – working around the clock and being there for their children.”

Not everyone agrees with her. Sheryl Sandberg, the second to the top at Facebook, recently admonished a younger generation of women not to take their feet “off the gas pedal.” You aren’t committed enough, she exhorted. This is a view, Slaughter points out, that assumes commitment is “a function of personal determination.” Or, in simple terms, that women struggling to reconcile work–life demands should “just try harder.”

Working women, says Slaughter, already try harder and work harder than they’ve ever done. “The lives that working women lead are equivalent to training for a marathon, and more, in terms of discipline and sheer will-power.” She should know – for two years she rose at 4.20 am each Monday for the train to Washington, returning late on Friday.

And so it was that, late one Sunday night in New Jersey, her ten-year-old son begged her in tears not to take the train to Washington the next morning. The sacrifice that she was asking him to make – to let her go so that she could work on behalf of the country – just didn’t wash. “I don’t care about the country,” was his flat reply. Realising that her son needed her more than her country did – that she was indispensable to him, but not to the State Department, and that her absence might be harming him at a deep level, led to her decision to rejoin Princeton’s law faculty before her tenure there expired. “I didn’t just need to go home,” she recalls, “I wanted to go home.”

On leaving her post in Washington – “increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet” – she received two main reactions. The first, mainly from older women, was disappointment that such an important role model should be seen to retire from public life. The second response was curlier. “I wouldn’t generalise from your experience,” a colleague told her. “I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great.” It was the second reaction that she found the more hurtful – a “rude epiphany” that unleashed in her a “blind fury.”

The final trigger for Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic essay came not from anger but sympathy. She was asked to give a talk in Oxford about work–life balance to a large mixed group of bright young things. After she finished speaking a young woman came up and thanked her for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” “The audience was rapt,” she noted. This talk led to several similar talks (she commonly gives forty to fifty a year), and at a dinner following one of these talks she chatted to a couple of young female lawyers who were discussing the dearth of legal role models who demonstrated a successful work–life balance. The only models they had, the two women complained, were women who “take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” “Both were very clear,” she writes, “that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.”

SLAUGHTER’s essay is long and demanding because the issues she tackles are just that. Critics have slated her for being elitist. But her campaign – to create a groundswell of support for more flexible and compassionate ways of working at a professional level – is directed at the whole of society, and not just her demographic (which she freely describes as “highly-educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place”). Of course the critics are right – critics often are, to some extent. Most women will never hold a high-powered job in the rarefied atmosphere of the White House. They will never ask themselves, late on a Sunday evening as they pack for Washington, “Who needs me more, my family or my country?”

And yet, in another sense, Slaughter’s decision to leave the White House reflects every working mother’s struggle. “Who needs me more, my family or my work?” is a question that conceals a trickier question within it. “What do I need more, in my journey to be myself, my family or my work?” And it’s pointy questions like this one, Slaughter suggests, that weigh less heavily in the minds of fathers than in the minds of mothers.

It’s important to mention that Slaughter’s sons were ten and fourteen when she faced her crisis in Washington. They weren’t one and three, for instance – the age at which the Mummy Wars are commonly fought. The teenage years, she insists, are every bit as vital as the early years in terms of family relationships. Being available as a parent in the teenage years “is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.” This, she observes, is a particular problem for ambitious women who are often “peaking at forty-five to fifty-five” – messily coinciding with their children hitting their teens.

In the second half of her essay, Slaughter unpacks the assumptions that are often rolled out to explain the professional success of women with children. It’s possible if you are committed enough. This is the cry of first wave feminists who feel let down by younger women’s less strident efforts. “What’s the matter with you?” they seem to be asking today’s less driven women. It’s possible if you marry the right person. This assumption is just as loaded. Not because it isn’t true – Anne-Marie Slaughter’s husband put in the lion’s share of her sons’ care – but because it’s the society you live in, as much as the man you marry, that keeps the work–life seesaw in balance. It’s possible if you sequence it right. This assumption has some force for Anne-Marie Slaughter – as a necessary but not sufficient condition for women to succeed in having it all. Besides, in her experience there is no sequence, no ideal timing for childbearing, that doesn’t involve a few trade-offs.

The career arc, as she draws it, looks rather different today from the way it looked in the mid twentieth century. Instead of having your kids in your twenties, staying in one job for your whole career, retiring at sixty-seven and dying at seventy-one, these days we can, she reckons, have children later, work until we’re seventy-five, have multiple jobs, and enter an “encore career” in our seventies. Assuming “health and fortune” are on our side, we might expect to enjoy a fifty-year career stretch that allows for a bit of “stair stepping” – or “putting money in the family bank” – during the middle years.

Slaughter still works at a high level for long hours at Princeton – she just no longer takes a plane to Washington to work. Yes, she makes a stand for more compassion and flexibility in the workplace, for school and work schedules to better coincide, and for all of us to talk openly about the most central relationships of our lives. But not for a minute does she suppose that any of this could ever be simple or easy. The strength of her essay is that it’s nuanced – dare I say balanced?

Halfway through the essay she stops her flow to cite an American study on happiness. Despite a narrowing gender gap at work, the study finds that the happiness levels among women in general has declined. “Women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.” On top of a wage gap, there is now a well-being gap, with women exhibiting more stresses than men. Perhaps this is what has got so many women talking.

In concluding, Slaughter makes a special plea. She would like society to value those women who, during periods of family stress, choose to value family over professional advancement. “If we really valued these choices, we would value the people who make them; if we really valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retrain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.” But of course what she is really seeking, apart from a bit more give within society, is for we, as individual women, to value the choices that the maternal imperative compels us to make – which is a much a taller order. •

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LET’S state the obvious: no Australian running for parliament would ever pledge to cut ties with his or her electorate after winning the seat. It’s Politics 101: if you spend time and money ingratiating yourself with your potential constituents, the last thing you’d want to do is alienate them after the poll. It would be political suicide.

Or would it? In Ireland, the leader of the centre-right Fine Gael party did just that. Enda Kenny vowed that, if elected, he would direct his ministers to do no constituency work for their first one hundred days in office. Promising to end the “circus” of ministers attending events in their constituencies, he made a deal: no unveiling of plaques, no kissing babies, no stump speeches, no constituent schmoozing. Nothing. Instead, a Kenny cabinet would “hit the ground running” and focus on the country’s battered and over-exposed economy. It would be one hundred days of unadulterated delivery.

“If this becomes a reality, ministers will concentrate completely, to the exclusion of all works, on the national responsibilities of their portfolios,” Kenny said in February, shortly before the election. “Their constituencies, I’m quite sure, will be happy to accommodate them.”

These fighting words may well have helped Kenny become the country’s new taoiseach (prime minister); yet within seventy days his pre-election commitment was in tatters. And the problem wasn’t the constituents — their ability to accommodate the prolonged absence of their representatives was never put to the test. The issue was the politicians: they couldn’t keep away from their electorates.

In May, the Irish Independent listed the functions Kenny had attended in his western electorate of Mayo since coming to power, and it added up to an impressive level of local involvement. The taoiseach had raised a flag at the Galway–Mayo Institute of Technology, sounded the starting horn at the West of Ireland Women’s Mini-Marathon, opened the Mayo ploughing championship, turned the first sod at May Abbey National School… And his Spartan, outcomes-focused cabinet members were doing the same around the country.

The take-home message is this: don’t stand between an Irish politician and a constituent. The country’s political reality has turned MPs into what columnist Fintan O’Toole described as “demented ward-heelers.” And Ireland’s multi-member electorates, in which politicians compete against both fellow party members and political opponents, are part of the problem.

“It is not war with the enemy but friendly fire that the Irish politician fears most,” O’Toole wrote earlier this year. “That fear sustains the crazy system of doling out ‘imaginary patronage.’ Everyone does it because, if they don’t, it’s sure as hell that some hungry colleague will be out on the street corners pushing the drug.”

In Australia that addiction is, if nothing else, out in the open. The substance has been legalised and the industry that is building up around its distribution has taken on an air of respectability. In fact, even without multi-member federal electorates the cult of being accountable to one’s community has become the one, constant thread in our political culture.

What Australian politician would claim to be anything less than a “tireless worker” for his or her electorate? What kind of martyr would enter into a parliamentary debate without claiming to be in regular contact with the “real Australia” of the constituency? (The vested interests and the elites, of course, live in ivory towers that have no postcode.)

Electorate offices are now outreach machines for politicians who have become travelling salesmen for themselves. On Saturday mornings you will find MPs sitting behind card tables at the local shopping centre, their rolled-up sleeves embracing the semiotics of suburban struggle. If you’ve had a tough night up with a crying baby, they feel your pain because they’ve been there themselves (“If I had a dollar for every nappy I’ve changed…”); if your local council is driving you nuts, well, those jokers have been giving your local member headaches for years.

Accessibility, responsiveness and empathy are what we’ve come to expect from our politicians; they, in turn, have set themselves up to feed those expectations. Their staff numbers are growing and they pay commercial rates for offices in shopping strips to be certain of attracting through-traffic. They crave involvement.

In fact, the electorate responsibilities of many federal MPs are driving them to breaking point — and it’s all self-inflicted. Particularly in marginal seats, our elected representatives are choosing to take on more work than ever before, and they are prepared to sacrifice their personal lives to deliver. Where does all that hard work go? What do the 150 members of Australia’s House of Representatives actually achieve for their electorates? And how worse off would we be if our local MP skipped the odd community meeting and caught a movie instead?

MEET Bruce Billson, a gregarious forty-something guy with a volcanic laugh and an engaging personality. His busy diary and ridiculously over-burdened desk exemplify the growing workload now faced by MPs in marginal seats.

Billson had a stint as veterans’ affairs minister in the dying months of the Howard government, but he would readily admit that his greatest political achievement has been to keep the marginal seat of Dunkley, southeast of Melbourne, in Liberal hands since 1996 (he now holds it with 2.04 per cent). His office in the bayside outer-suburb of Frankston accommodates five members of staff (the standard four, plus one for his policy work as shadow small business, competition policy and consumer affairs minister). And everyone’s busy.

“The design would be to say that you’ve got one staffer for the portfolio and the other staff to deal with the rest,” Billson says. “In reality, it doesn’t play out that way. In terms of constituent enquiries, there would be two-and-a-half of the team dedicating themselves almost entirely to that task. You then look at the community engagement relationship, the building-stakeholders-staying-in-touch activity — that’s probably nearly another three-quarters of a person’s role. And then the balance is the shift between what we call ‘Canberra work,’ which isn’t just in Canberra: that’s the parliamentary debate, the legislation… And what weaves through all of that is the portfolio work.”

In other words, the bulk of the office’s workload is centred on the electorate. When Billson’s press officer shows me a large folder of the correspondence that has gone out over the past week, he’s not doing so out of a sense of bravado. It’s more of a horrified acknowledgement that this is what they do just to stay afloat.

“There is an expectation that you’ll support, respond to and provide assistance to the electorate,” Billson says. “If you don’t do that well, you’re failing to meet a very fundamental expectation that people have of you. If you do that quite well, people think ‘well, so you should.’”

While many MPs are coy about the quid pro quo of electorate work, Billson is happy to acknowledge his state of “perpetual electioneering.” “I don’t think you can win a lot of votes by being very responsive to the local electorate,” he says jokingly. “But you can lose plenty if you’re not.” And don’t mention the emails: he gets over 800 of them in the course of a day. Billson lets me look over his shoulder as he goes through recent additions to his inbox, and while there are a couple of Google alerts, there are also forty genuine pieces of correspondence.

“This one’s about Medicare funding for PET scans; here we’ve got some people talking about some internal party issues,” he says. “There’s something about what’s going on in Sri Lanka and a problem with a memorial for a football team that drowned when its ferry came back to Mornington [in 1891]. There’s a local CEO talking to me about infrastructure pressures on growth areas. More on the boating disaster. Something about changes to Fair Work; an issue of religious funding; a view on Bob Katter; a local sustainability centre…”

Billson hasn’t had to do anything. His mere existence as an MP in a marginal seat over the past hour has generated at least three hours’ work for one of his staff. The internet has “transformed” electorate work, he says. “In some respects, in a positive way; in other respects — welcome to my nightmare.”

One of the problems is identifying genuine constituent emails from a tide of nationally orchestrated campaigns that hits the computers of all federal MPs. “There was one recently where a resident in Langwarrin [on the Mornington Peninsula] was most upset that my response to him wasn’t of the quality and thoughtfulness — and timeliness — that he would expect for ‘a swinging voter in a marginal seat.’ In other words, ‘you should be working your tail off for my vote, sunshine!’

“I thanked him for his feedback and his critique of the quality of my response, but I asked how I was supposed to have known that — and to protect the innocent I’ll change the email address — foxymama@hotmail.com was a resident in Langwarrin with a particular concern. How would I pick that out of the fog of emails that come in? That’s one of the dilemmas — that you can underperform in some people’s eyes without ever knowing quite what the expectation was, or that they are a local constituent. But we try to optimise our response to those people in the electorate.”

When I ask Billson how many staff he would require to keep up with the incoming correspondence, he isn’t able to answer. “No matter how many we had, they would still be run off their feet.” In other words, higher levels of service would drive up the demand. Which could explain why many British MPs, who have comparatively fewer resources, manage to circumscribe their electorate contact hours (which they call “surgery”) to a few a week. Whether this lessens the democratic legitimacy of their relationship with constituents is another story.

THE politics of the Greens may be too radical for some, but when it comes to constituency work the party’s only MP in the House of Representatives, Adam Bandt, is solidly mainstream. “I want everyone who approaches me and my office to walk away saying ‘Adam Bandt and his staff helped me fix my problem,’” he says. “The last thing that anyone deserves from their member of parliament is the feeling that they have just been flicked to someone else.”

Who could argue with that? MPs helping constituents has to be good for everyone, and indeed most politicians will be able to rattle off some great examples of pastoral care. For Adam Bandt it’s a story of helping to get a visa arranged for someone to make it to their wedding in Australia (Bandt’s electorate officer scored an invitation to the reception). Another federal MP tells me of tracking down a specialised gardener to help an eighty-two-year-old constituent who was having problems with her Australian natives.

But this goodwill on the part of the MP isn’t codified. There’s no job description. He or she may choose to spend all spare time available on constituency matters, or tell staff members to focus exclusively on big-picture policy. In fact, other than showing up for parliamentary sittings every so often, MPs can do as they please. Pay increases are not linked to electorate productivity benchmarks; you can tell your eighty-two-year-old constituent to find her own gardener and lose not a cent of your income.

The extent to which a politician does any constituency work is a rough-and-ready convention — arbitrary and discretionary. “The only real performance appraisal of an MP is the election — there is nothing else,” says Stephen Bartos, a former senior public servant who is now a director of Sapere Research Group. But he also admits that the real impact of “good” constituency work on the ballot box bottom line may be overstated.

“There are MPs whose constituency work will make a bit of a difference — one or two percentage points against a swing,” Bartos says. “It’s not a huge difference, though, so a general tide will sweep them away, no matter how hard they’ve worked.” This means that spending Saturdays meeting and greeting in the mall may have less of an impact on an MP’s future than, say, the decision of a party leader to break a campaign promise.

So, why bother? What drives marginal seat politicians to hand over increasingly large chunks of time to their electorates? And what kind of people do they become in the process?

IN THE mid 1990s I had two unhappy stints working for MPs. I eventually realised that it wasn’t them — it was me. Whatever qualities are required to be a politician’s staffer, I didn’t possess them.

I had come to the job after spending my adolescence in Italy, where national politics lacks what is known as presenza sul territorio. There were no geographically based constituencies in the 1980s, just an impersonal system of proportional representation across often large regions. As a rule, Italian politicians don’t have electorate offices (although they pocket an allowance earmarked for that purpose) and direct contact between electors and the elected is rare.

Australian politics, with its intricate topography of electoral divisions, was a breath of fresh air. I imagined a landscape of political microcosms, in which a relationship between the MP and his or her community could flourish; local issues could then resonate nationally. On paper, it was the best political system in the world; in practice, it soon became unbearably pedestrian.

One of my bosses was an irascible, hard-working MP in a marginal regional seat who was widely acknowledged as a “strong local member” (which I found out years later was a euphemism for someone not destined for greater things). On the second day of my employment, she stormed into my office. “Where are they?” she shrieked. “Where are my letters?” (I have learnt to drop the expletives when retelling this story, or it sounds too unbelievable.) “When I get to work, I want my letters!”

I was later informed that the MP, who started work at 5 am (often after a kip on the couch if she had come straight from a function the night before), liked to have constituent letters to sign and place into the out-tray. She wanted the electorate to know she was in touch. My job was to help generate that correspondence.

When she wasn’t berating employees, she was barnstorming her large electorate in a van: a flag-raising ceremony at a school, a lunch at the RSL, a meeting at the local chamber of commerce (“Where’s my speech about the Business Incubator?” she bellowed at me on day three, astounded that I had never before heard “business” and “incubator” in the same sentence).

When she was out for the day I jokingly asked the others (back then federal members only had a staff of three) if we could finally relax. They rolled their eyes and muttered something about “generating work.” Sure enough, when she exploded back into the office at 7 pm, she had a list of things for us to “follow up.” Letters to be written, enquiries to be made, further visits to be organised.

Practically all of her work was constituency-based — even when she was in Canberra. “Could the minister inform the House how policy X will benefit my constituents in town Y?” was her usual contribution to Question Time. She would then print out the minister’s predictable reply from Hansard and send it out to the good burghers of town Y. She didn’t have to spend much time on party matters: the seat was too marginal for anyone to want to challenge her for preselection. She had a job to do and she did it well by beating the odds and holding on to a seat that would have fallen with a less single-minded local member.

The other MP I worked for was far more interested in the internal machinations of his party than electorate work in its purest form. What that meant was constituent enquiries in his suburban, marginal electorate were essentially a chance to build his reputation as a fixer — a reputation that would then echo around party branches.

But he was also deeply suspicious of everyone and everything (he once had the office swept for listening devices: none were found) and he sensed that constituent sentiment could be used against him. He hated sending people away dissatisfied and was always happy to leave them feeling that he was on their side, no matter what.

One of my first enquiries was from an angry man with a strong accent. “Someone wants to know if you think Macedonia is Greek,” I said, with the caller on hold. The MP’s brow furrowed, as it did when he was asked to focus on the complex issue of his self-preservation. “Who’s asking?” he snapped.

My experience working for the MPs convinced me that marginal seat politics were creating a class of people who had to be obsessively parochial in order to survive. MPs were too terrified of electoral defeat to want to soar among the big ideas of national politics. Meanwhile, though, the picture of society emerging from their constituents’ complaints was too fractured — and too biased towards discontent — to really come together as a useful mosaic of Australian society.

“That may be the case, but they have to win their seat,” says Carlo Carli, who was a state Labor MP in Victoria between 1994 and 2001. “For a lot of MPs, they’re not going to have a seat if they don’t do the work… Remember, you can’t soar if you don’t have a seat.”

Sure — first, you have to last. But does that imply that only MPs in safe seats can afford to drag themselves away from their electorates long enough to be intellectually engaged in running the country? Would Paul Keating have taken on important economic reforms if he had spent his spare time lurking around the Bankstown RSL?

The 2009 British satirical comedy In the Loop features a fictional minister for international development by the name of Simon Foster. One day, he is in Washington, arguing the pros and cons of military intervention in the Middle East, and the next he is at “surgery” with disaffected constituents. One resident has written to demand that Foster do something about “cyclists looking smug,” while a woman is angry about the faulty septic tank which her property shares with the minister’s electorate office. A discussion about who is responsible for filling the tank ends with Foster saying, apologetically, “Of course you’re not an elephant, and you certainly should not be treated as if you are one.”

Did it ever get that bad in my experience? Maybe not. And in fairness I should say that while for me marginal-seat work became an impediment to thinking about policy in more abstract terms, my bosses viewed their grounding in reality as an asset. They argued — and they might be right — that close contact with the community made them better politicians. And better people.

IN 1967, Labor MP Gordon Bryant argued that electorate work was all about talking to people. “It’s not that the federal member has any magic or any authority,” Bryant wrote. “[B]ut what he does have is a line of communication readily at hand into the last pigeon-hole in the most remote department. He has a phone and he uses it.”

An ability to dial may not feature prominently in modern job applications, but the late MP’s idea of taking an interest in one’s electorate certainly resonates with today’s crop. Federal politicians find out what’s going on even when it has nothing to do with the Commonwealth government — they know it could all end up being their business anyway.

Writing in 1994, British academic (and Conservative peer) Andrew Norton identified at least seven constituency roles of the member of parliament. They are: safety valve; information provider; local dignitary; advocate; benefactor; powerful friend; and promoter of constituency interests. An Australian MP would have no problem recognising all of these categories, although the home-grown edition may read more like this: information provider; local dignitary; promoter of constituency interests; powerful friend; and safety valve.

The provision of information, which Bruce Billson jokingly refers to as a “triage or concierge” service, is straightforward. People don’t always know how government works and whom they need to turn to; in fact, research that Stephen Bartos conducted in 1993 found that 80 per cent of Australians didn’t understand the difference between federal, state and local government.

What usually happens is that people with a problem turn to the most prominent politician they know and ask for help. The office staff will then channel that enquiry to the appropriate bodies, while being careful not to give the impression of fobbing the constituent off (even when they have good reasons to do just that).

Under the rubric of “local dignitary” comes the community outreach — chairing meetings, speaking at a TAFE graduation, cutting a ribbon, judging the cake competition at the local CWA. Again, it’s all self-explanatory. “Promoter of constituency interests” can have some federal implications. A constituent comes in to offer an opinion about policy or to complain about the way he or she has been treated by a federal agency. The MP may choose to take up the issue in parliament, or informally with ministers. It’s what representative democracy is all about.

But when politicians become a constituent’s “powerful friend” — a role that MPs usually take on with relish — things can become ethically tricky. Because when constituents ask MPs to intervene on their behalf, to intercede in a dispute, what are they actually asking for? And how appropriate is that relationship anyway?

Gordon Bryant, who was Bob Hawke’s predecessor in the Division of Wills, told the story of a constituent whose sister had emigrated from Europe to Venezuela but was now being denied the chance to migrate to Australia. Bryant was able to ascertain that the decision to deny her a visa was wrong and “on Christmas Eve, [she] embarked for Australia.”

Heart-warming stories of this kind may have struck a chord back then, and Bryant was suggesting that MPs were playing a valuable role in the oversight of the federal bureaucracy. And indeed, MPs view the “oversight” or “safety valve” aspect of the job as an important part of what they do.

The question for modern readers is whether in an age of accountability, transparency and customer service, the hit-and-miss noblesse oblige of powerful politicians stepping in is still appropriate. Perhaps what constituents should be getting from their MP is the phone number of the ombudsman, or a good lawyer, rather than a promise to intervene.

In Bryant’s Venezuelan scenario, for example, who told the woman that she wasn’t eligible to come to Australia? What repercussions are there for bureaucrats providing misleading information? Why were the phone calls of the Member for Wills answered by a departmental secretary (as Bryant eventually reveals) whereas the constituent’s enquiries were ignored? And if Bryant had decided, on a whim, not to take an interest in his constituent’s case, would the sister still be stuck in Caracas?

The same ethical question could be raised every time an MP gets a constituent a win — even for the noblest of causes. A Liberal senator for Queensland, Sue Boyce, recently told ABC Radio National that she had to lobby the immigration minister to intervene to ensure that a mildly disabled child with strong family ties to the Gold Coast was allowed into Australia. Migration rules would otherwise have prevented that child from getting a visa.

Boyce readily admits that the system in which a family’s welfare hinges on the personal intervention of a politician is unsustainable and says the system needs to be changed. “It shouldn’t be the minister who has to make the decision,” she said. “The stories that come to the ministers are often quite heart-wrenching and I think they would all like an opportunity to see this cleared up so that it’s not entirely their responsibility.” As things stand however, it’s only the lobbying of individual MPs that can make a difference. What happens to the families whose case isn’t taken up by a politician?

In short, if MPs are being granted a real or implied power to help administer the functions of the Australian public sector then shouldn’t we be able to quantify that power? If politicians see it as their role to act as intermediaries between citizen and state, how can this work be assessed and reviewed? And how do we ensure this work is being carried out ethically?

Stephen Bartos believes that aggrieved citizens who choose to go to their local MP rather than the ombudsman are doing so because the politicians are more visible, and may well offer a better service. “What MPs have, which other agencies don’t, is that much higher visibility of going around to a community event and being recognised at a bus-stop.” Typically, says Bartos, politicians tell the constituent “that they are interested in their problem and that they’ll solve it in their office. And that’s something a lot harder for, say, the ombudsman’s office, or a consumer complaints office, to deal with.”

LABOR MP Andrew Leigh has 125,000 voters in his ACT seat of Fraser, making it the second-largest in the country. So in spite of his comfortable 15 per cent margin, he’s no stranger to the demands of constituency work, with a few hundred emails coming into his Canberra office every day. “One of the things I find hardest about the job is drawing a line around that,” he says. “Of not being constantly in a situation of turning away from my two-year-old who wants to be read a story in order to respond to yet another constituent email from the kitchen counter.”

But in terms of requests for MPs to intervene, Leigh argues it’s not usually about pulling strings, but rather about helping the constituent through the complexities of the case. “I would be deeply concerned if the [government] department was making an ad hoc decision based on the fact that an MP had written to them,” he says. “But that’s not the sense I get. The sense I get is that the department sees this as a chance to explain what’s going on, why something appears like an anomaly when it isn’t.”

But Leigh agrees that the MP’s role as a “powerful friend” can become “awkward” unless properly managed. “There are a couple of things I won’t do,” he says. “I won’t write an immigration support letter for a person that I don’t know. I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to intervene in a complicated decision that the department is making — based on much more information than I have — in order to support a constituent who has phoned me up, over a constituent that doesn’t think to phone me up.”

Fintan O’Toole’s complaint about “demented ward-heelers” in Ireland refers to politicians’ obsession with “doling out ‘imaginary patronage.’” But in Australia, that patronage isn’t always imaginary — letters from MPs supporting a constituent’s cause do carry weight, particularly where ministers have discretionary room to move (immigration is the best example of that).

In Italy, a politician’s offer of patronage would be seen as an attempt to create a relationship of political “clientelism,” a practice that traces its origins back to ancient Rome. Anthropologist Amalia Signorelli describes clientelismo as “a system of interpersonal relations in which private ties of a kinship, ritual kinship, or friendship type are used inside public structures, with the intent of making public resources serve a private end.” Clientelismo has become an expression of corruption because politicians actually have access to public property (in the form of jobs) which they are at liberty to hand out to repay political patronage.

So, let’s assume an Australian MP’s letter of support is worth something, then that something is being given to a constituent, free of charge, purely at the whim of a politician. Yet the value of that gift does not belong to the MP — he or she is merely administering it on behalf of the Australian state. Electorate staffing jobs can also be used to pay off political debts, but on the whole our clientelism is more subtle. That’s largely because MPs recognise the ethical dimension of what they’re doing and are usually careful not to cross the line. Usually.

When, on 31 August 2000, the Labor Member for Wills, Kelvin Thomson, wrote a “To Whom It May Concern” letter in support of drug dealer Tony Mokbel, he claims not to have known about his constituent’s colourful history. But the letter itself, which refers to Mokbel’s “successful establishment as a local businessman,” highlights the mechanics of political patronage. The logic for writing these letters is that an MP’s intervention (in this case, supporting Mokbel’s application for a liquor licence) will tap into a broader network of support — for example, those to be employed at Mokbel’s future business, or his family and friends.

In 2005, Liberal backbenchers campaigned for former immigration minister Amanda Vanstone to grant a visa to a man suspected of links to Calabrian organised crime — just five years after the department had ordered his deportation. The logic of such decisions is simple: do ut des — I give, so that you may give (through political support and/or party donations).

Politicians who intervene directly in what should be independent public service decisions do it in the hope of establishing networks that they will use come election time. The question that no politician is keen to answer is whether such intervention, with the inconsistencies it entails, is an appropriate form of governance.

How much would the granting of a visa have been worth, in dollar terms, to someone who may have faced prosecution in Italy if deported? And who did that amount belong to? Australia, or the Liberal Party? Who owns the value of MPs’ ability to bring about ministerial intervention?

THERE’S little appetite for reforming MPs’ role as political patrons — particularly when politicians list examples of their direct intervention as being among the highlights of their career. There is also a strong belief that their role in offering constituents some oversight of the public service outweighs any consideration about process.

Adam Bandt, whose office in the seat of Melbourne has 250 electorate matters currently on its books, says constituent involvement is too important for it to be curtailed by regulation. “I think that we’re in a unique position… of having a bird’s-eye view of how the system works at the different levels and being in a position of being able to have access, from ministers down to departments. I think it’s a good system.”

Back in Frankston, even Bruce Billson is prepared to say that being on the receiving end of 800 emails a day isn’t as bad as the alternative — no contact at all. “The democratic process is untidy, we all know that,” he says. “But there’s been no better way of trying to govern through processes that are as responsive to those being governed as they can be.

“Getting an outcome for a person who is feeling that there’s no one on their side is incredibly satisfying,” he says. “So, if I can help resolve problems, or relieve a burden or a concern that’s troubling someone’s life, or bring about some change that makes a local person’s prospects for the future better, I reckon that’s pretty worthwhile.” •

The post The everyday politics of perpetual electioneering appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN Susan became pregnant with twins, she saw it as an opportune moment to invest in a wireless broadband connection. As the head of a small university department, she carried a lot of responsibility and could already anticipate that her absence on maternity leave would pose a problem for colleagues. As it turned out, her workplace did contact her every day of her maternity leave with queries of one kind or another. Her willingness to engage in work when she was on leave was admirable testimony to her commitment to the job, but it also indicated her employer’s inadequate staffing and planning procedures. Susan realised that there was no one to explain details to her replacement while she was away. Yet her own actions contributed to ensuring that these shortcomings would continue in future.

By the time the twins were born, Susan was reliant on her home connection to stay in touch with work. “I’m a bit obsessive about it,” she says, estimating that she would check her email roughly every half-hour. “Even if I’m cooking I’ll go and check if I’ve got another email come through. Is that bad? That is bad.” Returning from work at the end of the day, she would take her laptop out on the deck with a glass of wine to answer her email, which was “kind of unwinding while still doing something.” Susan was an archetypal multi-tasker. She answered email while watching TV and even when she was in bed.

Susan had decided to stay home one day a week to spend time with her boys and cut down on the time they were in childcare. “Someone said, why don’t I cut down my work to four days a week? I said, well, I do more than five days a week work anyway, so why should I not be paid for it?” She didn’t feel guilty about spending the day with her kids, because she knew she would make up the time later. On her home day she used the time the boys were sleeping to do essential work: “They’re only little for so long and I don’t want to have them in care all the time, and I know I miss out on seeing all these little milestones being achieved.”

Susan was finding that one of the few things she could do while the boys were awake was “answer small emails. Sometimes I can mark some assignments and do a bit of searching on the web. Anything that requires full concentration, I have to wait until they are asleep.” The arrangement was “a bit of a holding pattern,” she says. “I’m doing my job and I think I’m doing it well but I’m not extending myself to the point where I could see myself moving. If I’m looking for a promotion in the next year or two, I wouldn’t be thinking about that until I could really put more than my 100 per cent in.”

Susan’s perception that she would need to put in “more than my 100 per cent” reflects a judgement about the kind of work rate expected of full-time employees in her industry. “I think that probably towards the middle of next year I’ll have to face the reality that if I want to move forward in my career, I really have to be here every day.”

Dilemmas like these were a recurrent theme during research for the Working From Home study, funded by the Australian Research Council, which began in 2007. The project set out to investigate technology’s impact on the lives of employees in the information and communication spheres of the “knowledge economy.” To gather material for the study we chose four large organisations – in education, government, broadcasting and telecommunications – and recruited twenty-six people, whom we interviewed each year for three years, where possible, to track their working lives. We found that the relationship between work, home and technology was complex and often fraught.

The study took place during a period of considerable social change. In politics, a federal election with a strong emphasis on workers’ rights saw the Labor Party triumph in 2007 after twelve years in opposition. Soon after, the global economy turned violently downward, pushing Australia from prosperity to near recession and bringing unprecedented levels of national debt. Meanwhile, evolving communications technology facilitated the tremendous interest in social networking sites, from MySpace to Facebook, and then the surge to Twitter. In the final year of the study, the release of the iPhone in Australia changed the communications landscape once again.

Our interviews revealed the extent to which these new technologies encourage the tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of their daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of fulfilment and intimacy. The growing attraction of mobile communication devices is one of the strongest indications that a substantial number of people see paid employment as the most compelling demonstration of virtue, accomplishment and self-identity that society makes available. With a range of online subcultures developing in support of these tendencies, a mutually reinforcing cycle of chronic connectivity has developed among professionals at each level of the workplace hierarchy.

ONE of the major hopes for remote-access computer technology was that it would solve the problem of the “absent father” – the parent whose work prevented the experiences and pleasures of watching children grow up. Today, professional demands affect both parents, and while technology may allow them to be present in the home, many are working even when they appear to have left the office behind.

Miranda, a telecommunications employee, was one participant in the study who described her frustration when her husband works at the dinner table. “The only time I find there are issues from a household relationship point of view,” she said, “is if my husband has the laptop at the dinner table, which he has done in the past and I’ve gone off my nut… I give him the raised eyebrow and put a stop to that one. But he does it from time to time.”

Miranda’s husband was the deputy principal of a local school, which meant he sometimes needed to be on call. Checking emails at the dinner table is something he did more often “when there’s a bit of stress at work.” But Miranda would ask, “What’s twenty minutes? Unless someone’s died. And even then they’re dead, so twenty minutes isn’t going to make a difference.” On these occasions, with her dad proving unresponsive, Miranda’s daughter would talk to her mother during dinner, and that’s when Miranda would “put my foot down and tell him to put it away.”

Like many of the women in our study, Miranda preferred to use technology in areas shared with other members of the family – in her case, the dining room. As she explained, “This is like the centrepiece of the household, this dining-room table.” While her daughter did her homework at the table, Miranda would be in the kitchen making dinner. “Then I’ll come over here and sit at the laptop and I can work, email, do whatever I need to do. And she’s there and she can ask me questions, ask for help.”

Barbara, a head librarian, also worked at the dining-room table, a preference that had developed early. “I think lots of people use the dining-room table or the kitchen table to study,” she told us. “I feel strangely uncomfortable at the desks upstairs. I mean, it just isn’t my workspace.”

Men, by contrast, often have a dedicated office away from the rest of the house. Miranda’s husband used his study “as a place of escape, especially if he knows there’s work to be done in the house.” Clive, a university professor, also confined his work to one room that was “slightly isolated from the rest of the house.” Clive’s teenage children used their laptops in other rooms, and even in bed, to his bewilderment. “Marjorie would divorce me if I did that.” In contrast to Clive’s large, self-contained study, Marjorie had a desk and computer set up in their bedroom.

Clive described his use of technology at home as “almost a hobby.” In these relaxed surroundings, Clive felt more comfortable blurring the lines between work and leisure: “So if I’m doing an email here and then I slip into Facebook and do a quiz on books or something – in a way, I suppose I play with technology more here than I would at work.” A recreational element enters the equation as wireless connectivity makes the business of work effortless. “I think we’re all sort of habituated to working at different times,” said Clive. “I think that’s the very bizarre piece of it. When you’re home, it’s a bit like the equivalent of doing a model railway or being a stamp collector in the past, or something like that.” The downside was a sense of physical isolation among family members dispersed across the house.

CLIVE’s experience is one of the happier examples of working from home, partly because his children were older and partly because he was relatively senior in the university. By contrast, a number of other parents in the study reported struggling to finish work because their children required more interaction at home. In Tanya’s case, her part-time status meant that she could finish her formal day at the library mid-afternoon and pick up her children on the way home. These shorter days fitted the school schedule, and sometimes Tanya stayed home entirely if her kids were sick or needed transport to appointments. This flexible arrangement was the backdrop to her tendency to finish off a report or check her email at home if she felt she was falling behind.

“Because I work till 2.30 to get the kids, I’ll often have a five o’clock deadline for something so I end up coming home and then finishing something,” she says. “I don’t always do it, but just every now and then it will involve doing a report. And then it’s the case of trying to compete with limited space with everybody else.”

Tanya recognised that “there’s not the explicit expectation that I’m going to do that, it’s more up to me I suppose.” She acknowledged that she has discussed her extra home work with her partner, who “doesn’t think I should be working when I’m not getting paid for it.” She told us that these tensions often arose when she wanted to work in the home office and her partner needed to be online as well. Tanya saw it as “really imperative” that her husband, as a small business owner, was available online. “So yeah, it is a bit difficult sometimes. But just occasionally I just really have to do something and I will throw everybody off, but then that just puts my husband back with his work, basically.”

Wireless broadband was the technological advancement that helped the family stay online and be together. Like several other working mothers we interviewed, Tanya used wireless to stay connected online and maintain involvement in other things happening around the house. Tanya described this shift in the dynamics of the house as “a double-edged sword.” Wireless allowed her to break free from the confines of the study and move out into shared space, but the quality of interaction seemed to change in the process. “You’re with the family but you’re not kind of thing.”

A number of parents in the study shared Tanya’s sense of partial presence in the company of family when combined with online connection. In her words, “It feels nice and superficially it looks like everybody’s a bit more involved together, but probably the reality is not.”

Geoff, an IT manager, registered a version of this experience. He and his wife Linda, a software engineer, had two young daughters. Linda’s work often involved long hours on urgent projects with fixed deadlines. In some cases this meant working from home until as late as three in the morning to get a job done. Geoff saw this as one of the negatives of online connection at home, although it was better than Linda having to take a taxi to work because “she’s able to do it here and then just go straight to bed.” In the binge culture of this kind of work, location made little difference to Linda’s working hours. Despite her presence in the house, she was inaccessible to her family during these times.

Geoff’s job at a university generated home-based work of its own. He was obliged to respond to crises during the workday, and commuting to different branches of the university took up time between jobs. This didn’t leave him enough time to answer all his emails at work – there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Most nights, rather than stay late at the office, he spent time answering emails at home.

On the surface, this arrangement might seem like a testimony to technology’s flexible benefits – giving Geoff the freedom to leave work and still keep up with his employer’s expectations. But it’s not as flexible as it might seem. Geoff answered his emails upstairs in the home office, away from the family; his daughters, meanwhile, “have kind of learned that they don’t come near me really if they know I’m doing something.” He worries that TV and the internet “have basically taken over in our house as the primary means of entertainment and interaction.”

A degree of exhaustion pervades Geoff’s description of family life. He was genuinely worried about the amount of attention he could give his kids, and struggled to generate the energy to engage with them after a long day of work.

Donna, meanwhile, was trying to limit the amount of work she did at home. “But if it’s going to make my life easier the next day at work it’s worth it,” she added. We can get a glimpse of the intensity of her work – as a project coordinator in a government institution – in the way she described the difficulty she has in adjusting to being home. “I spend maybe an hour trying to get in my head, ‘now I’m home.’ My work’s still very on my mind.” The days she spends working from home involve less of a transition: “I don’t have that whole, ‘Well, I’m home from work, I’m stuffed, I’ve had the journey…’ It’s a little bit softer.” Some things helped to ease the adjustment on arrival home from work: “I have a glass of wine and sit on the couch and I just stare at a wall. I put the TV on but I actually don’t watch it.”

During the course of these interviews Donna reported that her daughter Chloe spent a lot of time on the computer. At one stage, Chloe was taking days off school to use the internet to talk to her online friends. “She wanted to visit them when we were up in North Queensland. She wanted to stay with them! Never met them, considered them to be friends.” Donna thought Chloe seemed depressed and withdrawn. She took her to see a counsellor, who diagnosed an internet addiction, estimating that “90 per cent of the kids she sees have internet addiction.” In light of the range of comments from the study’s participants who diagnosed themselves as addicted to email and other online platforms, this seemed crucial. Is internet addiction less of a problem when it affects adults and relates to work? If so, why?

The second time we met Donna, during a period when her workload had noticeably slowed, it became apparent that Chloe’s depression may have had other causes. Having taken some time off for a holiday, and facing a less hectic workload, Donna had started to reflect on the amount she had sacrificed to stay on top of her job. “I think my daughter could have done with me a little bit more at home during sort of Year 11 and 12,” she said. “But now it’s almost too late, she’s finished Year 12, and she’s working herself and doing similar hours that I’m doing.” Donna continued: “I think she could have really done with a lot more support at that time… But my partner works a lot of night shift and he does a lot of hours every week and usually has twelve- to fourteen-hour days and sometimes seven days a week. So it’s not like he’ll notice, because he’s not there either.”

One of the factors Donna acknowledged to be driving her long hours at work was the bond she’d made with one of her colleagues. “The other person I worked with was very passionate and a workaholic with, you know, no partner, no children… a single person, a career-minded person and she was fantastic. We just drove through everything.” She admitted that “if I had to work with her again I’d probably end up doing the same thing.”

CONTRADICTIONS like these highlight how work-based relationships generate their own kind of intimacy, with accompanying benefits for self-esteem and motivation. In Donna’s words, “You’re enjoying what you’re doing and you’re running on adrenaline.” For a number of people we interviewed, work was a source of fulfilment that rivalled family life. It took priority to the point where other relationships could sometimes be neglected.

Clive was one study participant who noticed the potential consequences of such a shift. Working from home, “the positives are also the negatives. What is it doing to relationships and what is it doing to interaction and conversation? Is it really meaning that when I come home, the atomised reality of work becomes an atomised reality of home?”

Despite a lot of good intentions, the quality of home life is irrevocably affected by attention-seeking technologies. Indeed, in many cases, online devices appear to be as demanding and compelling as children. Meanwhile, the next generation of workers grows accustomed to providing entertainment for themselves by way of the same devices. The long-term effects of these changes are yet to play out, but we can already see the challenge that online connectivity poses to cherished ideas of domestic fulfilment. As Clive concluded, “It’s so immediate and so visually stimulating. Why would you want to exchange it for cornflakes?” •

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As interning encompasses a seemingly infinite range of “experiences,” it’s been wide open for abuse. Steven Greenhouse’s article, “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not,” published in the New York Times in April last year was one of the first to focus attention on potential abuses. Greenhouse reported that the US Department of Labor was cracking down on employers who sidestepped the federal criteria for hiring unpaid interns. Internships – work experience is what we called it once in Australia – are supposed to be a form of training augmenting secondary or tertiary education. Increasingly, however, they are taken up after university and do not comply with the specifications of the US Fair Labor Standards Act. That law states clearly that unpaid internships should be similar to vocational or academic training, and should not replace existing workers or be to the employer’s “immediate advantage.” Though much of the evidence was anecdotal, and nationwide statistics were difficult to compile, Greenhouse reported that employers in a number of American industries were strongly suspected of substituting internships for entry-level jobs.

The Greenhouse piece stirred up a media storm – the issue even made the Colbert Report, to great comic effect, and there are a lot of intern gags around. But young people burdened with student loans and needing to find paid work in order to take on unpaid internships might have a hard time getting the joke. For those who can’t afford even that, none of this is funny. A more recent flurry of articles in the British press gives some indication of how widespread and vexatious the phenomenon is, and how it can be turned to advantage by lobby groups. The Guardian’s Laurie Penny has argued that judicious placement of interns can be used to skew parliamentary policy-making. She cites the case of Christian Action, Research and Education, a lobby group currently being investigated by Britain’s charities commission, which has spent thousands of pounds providing British MPs with interns sympathetic to its campaign to abolish abortion. But this isn’t the only organisation seeking to place “right-thinking” interns in parliamentary offices. Despite the British government’s social mobility policy and David Cameron’s announcing a drive against unpaid internships, the Conservative Party has embraced the invidious American practice of auctioning internships as a form of fundraising.

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation is the most comprehensive and penetrating examination of these developments to date. Perlin covers all the angles – historical, legal, economic, social and experiential. Very readable and positively mind-boggling in parts, the book’s cumulative effect is a challenge to all of us. The plain facts are that employers are getting away with murder, educational establishments are complicit, young people are being sold a crock, and a lot of talent is being wasted or, worst of all, excluded.

Perlin’s motivation for writing the book arose from a disappointing internship he signed up for himself, in London as it happened, while studying for a master’s degree. He translated material from Chinese into English until there was no more left to translate, and not much else to do. A fellow intern, equally dispirited, put him in the picture. “Internships,” he said, “are a world of spin.” Despite what regulations there are (and how they’re being enforced), no one really knows what interns are meant to do, or what employers are meant to do for them, or even how many there are. What people do know is that internships look good on resumés, and in the brave new world of service economies, the well-padded resumé rules.

The generation joining the white-collar workforce today is arguably the most highly credentialled ever to seek paid employment and yet, paradoxically, the one least equipped to secure it. They’ve been taught, instead, to be “entrepreneurs.” Starting in primary school, writes Perlin, a list of “experiences” is developed, all of them directed towards building up resumés and “following dreams.” It’s free-wheeling American capitalism gone mad. Perlin turns his sights on its loopiest expression in his chapter on internships at Disney World. In no way distinguishable from any other form of burger flipping or low-level hospitality work, a Disney World internship is nonetheless extremely sought after. The living conditions are appalling and interns work long, unpaid, clearly illegal hours. But brainwashed into believing they are enhancing their education, and that the shitwork they provide is actually an investment, they’re loath to protest.

The Disney World example, though extreme, throws a strong light on the whole phenomenon. Perlin traces its exponential development back to Gary Becker, the Chicago School economist who first wrote of “human capital” in the 1970s. The concept, eagerly adopted as a key element in free marketeering, has effectively shifted responsibility for training from employers to their prospective employees, and significantly contributed to the prolonged adolescence increasingly characteristic of first-world societies. In succeeding chapters Perlin offers instance after instance of twenty-somethings accumulating internships in order to embellish their resumés, all too often with discouraging results. Some never get off the merry-go-round, and with the ongoing recession it’s possible that many never will.

As for those who can’t afford internships, who need to work simply to stay at university or repay hefty student loans, even the privilege to be exploited is closed off. The class implications are obvious. In any case, the most valuable internships are always going to be available to those who have connections, whose parents or family or family friends have pull. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the media, arts and fashion – industries that shape attitudes and influence public policy. As for Washington DC, the title Intern City is well-deserved. Indeed, for those of us clueless enough to associate interns with the medical profession, the first we may have heard of the Washington variety was with Monica Lewinsky, whose choice internship with the White House came through a family friend. Washington’s intern hierarchy reaches down through the committees, congressional offices and think tanks to the lowliest of NGOs. You can’t get far in the capital without an internship, but living conditions are so precarious that new arrivals in the city are presented with a guide to the ubiquitous happy hours and receptions where they can avail themselves of free food and drink.

Unheard of not too many years ago, internships are with us in Australia. Unlike the States, which has a long tradition of volunteerism, doing work for nothing or a pittance has hitherto been very un-Australian, even if it’s trumped up as education. Many of the internships advertised on websites such as Australian Internships and Professional Pathways Australia are not available to Australian citizens or permanent residents, and are connected, if loosely, to our overseas education industry. But internships here are becoming more common, as Australia’s economy becomes increasingly globalised and our society more Americanised. What this could signify for Gen Y and beyond is a future more precarious than anything we’ve known.

Perlin spends time distinguishing between apprenticeships, which are associated with blue-collar work and have recently been much maligned, and the nebulous world of internships. The US Office of Apprenticeship is a federal body dedicated to encouraging well-formulated, adequately paid training for skilled workers. But apprenticeships are not keeping pace with internships, as most tertiary institutions focus on training for service industries. Perlin speaks of a mere 500,000 active US apprenticeships compared with up to two million internships. Apprenticeships are often funded by unions, and union clout has seriously diminished, especially in the States, while interns, fed on a diet of human capital ideology since primary school, regard themselves as autonomous entrepreneurs and are notoriously resistant to organising. In Europe, however, where the economic downturn has hit equally hard, interns have formed a network to protest against lousy conditions and pay. These victims of “precarity” have cultivated a sense of humour too, holding carnivals honouring the patron Saint Precaria, the only agency they can think of that might lessen the unpredictability and contingency of their working lives.

Perlin is to be congratulated for staking much of his own working life on this book. Up-to-the minute, well-researched and cogently analytical, his book has attracted critics nonetheless. Heather Huhman, an internship enthusiast who runs a company called Come Recommended, is criticised by Perlin for using six unpaid interns out of a staff of eleven to help “students and recent college graduates pursue their dream careers.” He got this information from her website, but Huhman has hit back, accusing Perlin and his publisher of lacking due diligence and questioning his credentials. What is Ross Perlin but a freelancer, she asks, as if this would disqualify him from critiquing the way she makes a living.

Perlin has shifted the debate back to where it belongs, to a discussion of the value of labour. He argues that stakeholders should work in consort to ensure that if an internship is not genuinely educational then the internee shouldn’t be paid less than the minimum wage. Since studies repeatedly show that paying minimum rates doesn’t reduce the number of low-paid jobs, Perlin maintains the same would be true for interns. Employers who pay are more inclined to treat interns as investments, to be nurtured as any other kind. As for prospective interns, “You shouldn’t have to work for free to break into the white-collar world. To allow that is to devalue work, threaten jobs, and exclude the less privileged.” •

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WHEN paid parental leave came into effect on 1 January this year it received relatively little press coverage, which might seem strange given its importance for those looking to juggle the demands of a family and a career. There was the odd story about a family missing out on the payment by a few hours following the birth of a child late on New Year’s Eve. But there was nothing of the fanfare that had surrounded the policy’s announcement in the 2009 federal budget, nor of the debate that it had sparked during the 2010 federal election campaign.

Part of the explanation must lie in the bipartisan backing the policy has enjoyed since Tony Abbott pronounced himself in favour of a far more generous scheme than the one now in place. In a speech on International Women’s Day last year, Abbott put forward a plan to pay a parent of a newborn child full salary compensation for six months. For most families, this would be worth significantly more than the current payment of eighteen weeks at the federal minimum wage.

Another reason for the low-key response to paid parental leave might lie in the complexity of the issues it raises – the level of compensation, the length of leave, whether superannuation should be included and how much of all of this should be reserved for a spouse, to name just a few. These invite real debate and are part of a wider conversation about what sort of society Australia should be.

The complexity of its policy objectives is reflected in how paid parental leave works. It is linked to the national minimum wage and, in even the most straightforward cases, affects a recipient’s tax liability, Medicare levy and family tax benefit entitlements. Families faced with such exotic concepts as the “quarantining of FTB-B” could be excused for wondering whether a PhD in immunology might not be a prerequisite for working out how much better off they will actually be.

Compare this to the baby bonus, a simple payment of five grand, tax-free. When introducing it in 2004, Peter Costello claimed that it would encourage families to have “one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country.” Since then the debate over the baby bonus has done little more than tap into vague fears about declining fertility rates and a looming economic crisis brought on by an ageing population.

The linking of the baby bonus to population debates goes against the traditional rationale for supporting parents of newborn children. Professor Chiara Saraceno, an expert on social policy at the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin, stresses that European parenting policies have had “very little” to do with addressing low fertility rates. Rather, maternity leave schemes have always been, and continue to be, shaped by issues such as the loss of jobs and wages, the needs of children following childbirth and the reconciliation of work–family issues for mothers. “More recently,” she says, “particularly in Scandinavian countries, the concern has been to allow adequate time for parents to care for their child.”

This year’s International Women’s Day might, just like last year’s, put paid parental leave back in the public spotlight. If it does, a national conversation about how to provide our children with the best possible care may gain momentum. Such debate cannot begin too soon. The government has signalled that the policy will be reviewed in two years, and given how considerably political support for the policy has changed in the two years since it was announced, there is every reason to expect that attitudes towards parenthood in the workplace will undergo a similarly radical transformation.

The Productivity Commission’s report that set out the design of the policy didn’t attempt to predict how it might evolve. But the commission did sketch the details of parenting policies in other countries, particularly in Europe, to which the Australian model could be compared. For example, many European countries provide maternity payments that compensate most or all lost income during a period of leave, along the lines of Abbott’s proposal.

Experience in Europe has also shown that well-designed policy can bring about changes in attitudes towards parenting. Labor’s election promise to provide fathers and partners with an extra two weeks of leave is based on the Norwegian policy, where the availability of paternity leave on a “use it or lose it” basis has resulted in most men taking time off work following the birth of a child.

It is in the area of childcare that Australia could learn a lot from Europe. According to Saraceno, “childcare is high on the agenda of all European countries” and the Scandinavian countries, as well as Italy, have always had childcare systems “with a strong educational focus.” This is not to say that the tension between quality and quantity of childcare services, a major issue here in Australia, is not also a problem in Europe. Saraceno admits that “the goals of increasing the number of places and improving the quality of services are sometimes at odds”, and the situation has not been helped by European Union monitoring that emphasises quantity over quality and does not distinguish between public and private services.

There are no simple answers to these questions. But there are lessons to be learned from other countries. Paid parental leave in its present form represents an important first step in this process. It has the potential to transform social attitudes about the relationship between parenthood and a career, and to catalyse debate about what we as a country provide for the next generations of Australians.

One final point that should not be neglected: by linking paid parental leave to the national minimum wage, the adequacy of this wage has become an issue not only for those who earn it, but also for all those workers looking to have children. It will be interesting to see whether this has any impact on the minimum wage case this year. My guess is that we are unlikely ever to see a repeat of the Fair Pay Commission’s 2009 decision to grant no increase in the minimum wage. •

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