At
university in Melbourne I worked random jobs, making the hours fit like
a Jenga puzzle: early morning shifts at a bakery, afternoons as a
courier, evenings at KFC in Swanston Street. Three-hour shifts here and
there, the mad dash on the tram to get to the next job, eating stale
buns for breakfast and stealing hot chips for dinner.
Uni was six hours a week of classes. It was all good. Anyway – wasn’t this a rite of passage before we all settled into these steady, stable jobs?
Every adult I knew – my parents and all their friends – had been working in the same old grown-up jobs for, like, ever! And one day I would too.
Except under our feet, the economy was breaking apart, like those large floes of ice in Antarctica. Those of us on the wrong piece of ice found ourselves drifting into this new world – where it wasn’t just our teenage jobs that were junk jobs, it was all jobs.
Since the 1980s full-time permanent jobs have been disappearing and in its place are jobs that are contract, temporary, just-in-time and casual bits of work.
Under this new model, the commitment flows one way: the employer gives you work when the economy is good but in a downturn you’re on your own.
Throughout the 90s, this fractured approach to work gathered steam as we transitioned from an old-style stable, collective way of working into a casual labour economy. Job creation surged in part-time and casual employees, doubling between the early 80s and the mid 90s. The old, stable full-time jobs disappeared. They’re still disappearing. Almost 50,000 full-time jobs disappeared last year and more than a million people are underemployed. According to my colleague Greg Jericho, it is women and young people who are more likely to be in casual employment. This change happened in a generation.
So how does it look? A worker in this economy might be on a two-year contract but there’s not necessarily any funding after that. Or they might be working for a consultancy of one, hustling for projects and praying that their invoices are paid within 90 days. Or they might be freelance and juggling dozens of clients, working into the night – having a madly busy March, but fretting about an empty diary in April. Or they might be working in retail or hospitality – doing three-hour shifts or split shifts (or hustling for more work now that their Sunday penalty rates are no longer protected).
A winner in this new economy, says the sociologist Richard Sennett, is “someone who has the confidence to dwell in disorder, someone who flourishes in the midst of dislocation … The true victors do not suffer from fragmentation. Instead they are stimulated by working on many different fronts at the same time.”
They may be stimulated, but many of our institutions are still set up for the old way of working. For instance: have you tried to get a mortgage when you have bits and pieces of freelance work? I have, and the banks all said no.
Feast and famine, always on the hustle – that is life in the new economy. So excuse me, Richard Di Natale, if I don’t get all excited about your new proposal to have full-time employees work four days a week.
These full-time employees that the Greens are advocating for have already reaped the benefits of generations of political toil: superannuation, holidays, sick pay and a whole raft of protections.
It is fighting underemployment, casualisation and the normalisation or contract or piecemeal work that needs real political firepower.
The hospitality staff or those who have lost their full-time manufacturing jobs, they don’t want to work four days a week, they just want to work. And they want to be able to plan their lives around their work – not be on some bullshit zero-hours contract where they get a call from their employer to drop everything and come in.
With contingent work you have a contingent life.
The other day, a friend told me about a colleague of hers. He was a casual academic, teaching in a large Australian university. Each academic year he’d find out just before class went back if he had a teaching job.
After decades teaching without permanent work, so much of his life was contingent: where he lived, how he lived, if he could plan holidays, have a family, sustain relationships.
When his teaching contract wasn’t renewed last year he killed himself.
In the United States the casualisation of academic staff came to a head with the death of a part-time professor, Margaret Mary Vojtko, who died destitute after her contract was not renewed. She’d been a casual worker for 25 years.
Secure, steady, full-time employment: it’s not a yoke, it’s essential to actually have a fulfilling, secure life. It matters. It matters more than people who are already secure and sorted getting an extra day off.
Uni was six hours a week of classes. It was all good. Anyway – wasn’t this a rite of passage before we all settled into these steady, stable jobs?
Every adult I knew – my parents and all their friends – had been working in the same old grown-up jobs for, like, ever! And one day I would too.
Except under our feet, the economy was breaking apart, like those large floes of ice in Antarctica. Those of us on the wrong piece of ice found ourselves drifting into this new world – where it wasn’t just our teenage jobs that were junk jobs, it was all jobs.
Since the 1980s full-time permanent jobs have been disappearing and in its place are jobs that are contract, temporary, just-in-time and casual bits of work.
Under this new model, the commitment flows one way: the employer gives you work when the economy is good but in a downturn you’re on your own.
Throughout the 90s, this fractured approach to work gathered steam as we transitioned from an old-style stable, collective way of working into a casual labour economy. Job creation surged in part-time and casual employees, doubling between the early 80s and the mid 90s. The old, stable full-time jobs disappeared. They’re still disappearing. Almost 50,000 full-time jobs disappeared last year and more than a million people are underemployed. According to my colleague Greg Jericho, it is women and young people who are more likely to be in casual employment. This change happened in a generation.
So how does it look? A worker in this economy might be on a two-year contract but there’s not necessarily any funding after that. Or they might be working for a consultancy of one, hustling for projects and praying that their invoices are paid within 90 days. Or they might be freelance and juggling dozens of clients, working into the night – having a madly busy March, but fretting about an empty diary in April. Or they might be working in retail or hospitality – doing three-hour shifts or split shifts (or hustling for more work now that their Sunday penalty rates are no longer protected).
A winner in this new economy, says the sociologist Richard Sennett, is “someone who has the confidence to dwell in disorder, someone who flourishes in the midst of dislocation … The true victors do not suffer from fragmentation. Instead they are stimulated by working on many different fronts at the same time.”
They may be stimulated, but many of our institutions are still set up for the old way of working. For instance: have you tried to get a mortgage when you have bits and pieces of freelance work? I have, and the banks all said no.
Feast and famine, always on the hustle – that is life in the new economy. So excuse me, Richard Di Natale, if I don’t get all excited about your new proposal to have full-time employees work four days a week.
These full-time employees that the Greens are advocating for have already reaped the benefits of generations of political toil: superannuation, holidays, sick pay and a whole raft of protections.
It is fighting underemployment, casualisation and the normalisation or contract or piecemeal work that needs real political firepower.
The hospitality staff or those who have lost their full-time manufacturing jobs, they don’t want to work four days a week, they just want to work. And they want to be able to plan their lives around their work – not be on some bullshit zero-hours contract where they get a call from their employer to drop everything and come in.
With contingent work you have a contingent life.
The other day, a friend told me about a colleague of hers. He was a casual academic, teaching in a large Australian university. Each academic year he’d find out just before class went back if he had a teaching job.
After decades teaching without permanent work, so much of his life was contingent: where he lived, how he lived, if he could plan holidays, have a family, sustain relationships.
When his teaching contract wasn’t renewed last year he killed himself.
In the United States the casualisation of academic staff came to a head with the death of a part-time professor, Margaret Mary Vojtko, who died destitute after her contract was not renewed. She’d been a casual worker for 25 years.
Secure, steady, full-time employment: it’s not a yoke, it’s essential to actually have a fulfilling, secure life. It matters. It matters more than people who are already secure and sorted getting an extra day off.
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