In this edition:
1. With Clever Minds and Open Hearts
2. Job Insecurity Delays Life Choices, Says CEDA
3. Teachers’ Action Wins More Staff
4. Labor Supports Paid Maternity Leave
5. Unions, Business and Community Groups Address Long-Term Unemployment
6. Overseas In Brief
7. Refer a Friend Competition – results
8. Discounts on travel books
With Clever Minds and Open Hearts
“We have to have the humanity of both human rights and labour standards in balance with our genuine ambitions for growth and prosperity locked hand in hand.”
Below is an interview with ACTU President, Sharan Burrow based on the speech she delivered at the recent Population Summit held in Melbourne on 25 February 2002 in which she put women, fertility and paid maternity leave firmly back on the agenda.
What are the factors to consider in increasing Australia’s population?
Any public policy response to Australia’s future population levels must address the declining fertility rate; sustaining the environment; infrastructure and job creation for regional Australia; the sustainability of both business and employment; exposing the myths of immigration; acknowledging and planning for the domestic market of the ageing population.
What approach does addressing the above issues require?
To address such a broad range of public principles the solution is to have a bipartisan approach because it requires political courage, open minds, a commitment to public education and much more skilled research in addressing this priority area for Australia.
It means taking a wholehearted approach to income security for women in terms of their core role in fertility. Paid maternity leave is a critical right supported by accessible child-care.
Open minds are required to dispel the myths associated with immigration. It is often raised that a popular concern is that migrants take jobs and economic resources away from Australians. The state of knowledge reflected in academic economic studies is that this is actually untrue.
The ACTU has been quite vocal in arguing for a system of universal paid maternity leave. What challenges does Australia face in achieving this to address the declining fertility rate?
Sound public policy on work and family will do the trick to at least sustain fertility rates, let alone increase them. It simply is a disgrace that Australian women, 70% of them in the workforce, have no paid maternity leave or indeed income security while they provide a much valued population replacement. It’s also appalling when you think that childcare is not becoming more affordable and more available, but on the contrary many of our women are working to take home $70 to $100 a week because the public policy is not there to support their endeavours. If we are really serious about fertility policy then we’ll do something about it in a much more sustained and aggressive way.
What role will the ACTU take in addressing some of the other issues to increase Australia’s population?
You have to actually look at the costs of the environmental sustainability. You can’t plan in isolation for a population increase if we are not prepared to actually look at environmental repair. It is only right and proper to hand on a sustainable land to our children. I would argue as someone interested in jobs, because that’s our business as unions, that green jobs, which equal sustainability, are actually economically viable. In terms of increased manufacturing and technological production of green knowledge based exports we should be promoting vital opportunities for economic growth in these areas. You can’t write these things off though, a land whether it’s the richness of our topsoil, the salinity issue, whether it’s a question of greenhouse gases, whether of course it’s the very quality of the air in which we breathe or the use and the availability of water. The issues must be upfront and at the centre in any debate or any plan about population policy.
The question of infrastructure goes to the question of where people live. I don’t think we can have an external population policy without looking at a population policy within regional Australia. We failed as a nation to date to have genuine population policies around where people live, infrastructure decision and the maintenance and creation of jobs and therefore economic prosperity.
There is no way we would support population policy that says we’ll simply bring people to this nation who’ll drive down wages and therefore drive up profits. We have to have the humanity of both human rights and labour standards in balance with our genuine ambitions for growth and prosperity locked hand in hand.
Job Insecurity Delays Life Choices, Says CEDA
Job uncertainty is causing young people to put off home ownership, save less money and defer forming relationships and having children, research shows.
A report released by the Committee of Economic Development Australia argues that the erosion of full-time jobs since the mid-1970s and the shift towards a higher proportion of part-time and casual jobs in the 80s and 90s has had dramatic social consequences. These have included plunging fertility rates, a surge in demand for rental accommodation and an increase in single people between 24 and 35 living with their parents.
The proportion of 25 to 34 year olds in full-time work has plummeted from 78% in the early 1980s to just under 60% in 1996 and over the same period unemployed young adults increased from 3.2% to 7.7%.
The changing labour market conditions have contributed to a sharp fall in household sizes. The proportion of young adults living alone has risen from 12 per cent to 18 per cent and the proportion of couples with children has fallen from 54 per cent to 40 per cent between 1981 and 1996. More adults aged 24 to 35 lived with their parents. The report said about 46 per cent of men aged 25 to 34 had not entered into a relationship, compared to 37 per cent in 1986.
Australia has one of the highest rates of non-standard work (casual, part-time or unstable tenure) in the world. Job figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 14 March 2002 show that although the unemployment rate dropped from 7% to 6.6% in February, it was accompanied by a fall in full time jobs by 22,800.
What can you do to make your job more secure?
1. Talk to others
What changes/solutions would they like to see at the workplace?
2. Have a meeting
3. Seek advice from a union and join
contact the ACTU Hotline for referral on 1300 362 223
4. Establish an enterprise agreement in which a commitment to ongoing employment is stipulated
5. Ask your government what it’s doing to improve job security
Click here for the executive summary to the CEDA report.
Teachers’ Action Wins More Staff
Teachers have secured extra staff and resources in response to industrial action over unsafe working conditions at Lawrence Hargrave SSP.
About twenty teachers went on strike from the Lawrence Hargrave School in Warwick Farm for primary and high school students with learning disabilities and behavioural problems to protest the Department of Education not filling resignations and the increasing level of violence.
As a stopgap measure, teachers advocated the temporary closure of the school.
“I think that .... closing the school would be the safest thing to do until they reassess the position,” said teacher and NSW Teachers Federation Representative, Rob Deacon.
“They can get some experienced staff into the school and then the school might have a chance to help these students, we basically need a massive intervention of some kind now or someone could get seriously hurt or injured and we’ve only been lucky that hasn’t happened so far,” Mr Deacon said.
Following the action taken by teachers on Monday 4 March, DET officials immediately entered into negotiation which resulted in the school receiving two additional permanent teachers and the allocation of additional resources to employ more teachers aides.
For further information
Contact NSW Teachers Federation
Phone 02 9217 2100
Fax 02 9217 2470
Email info@nswtf.org.au
WWW http://www.nswtf.org.au
Labor Supports Paid Maternity Leave
Although opinions differ over whether universal paid maternity leave should be met by government or employers, the ALP has indicated its support to widening its availability to private sector employees.
Australian workers are currently guaranteed a minimum 12 months unpaid parental leave for a baby’s primary carer. The ALP has reiterated its commitment to paid maternity leave as an intrinsic advance for working mothers as well as an option to stem Australia’s declining fertility rate. Both Jenny Macklin and Wayne Swan recently signalled Labor’s commitment to engage with industry, unions and employer groups on options to deliver paid maternity leave plus ongoing support to families until the youngest child begins school.
In her International Women’s Day speech, Jenny Macklin pointed out that among industrialised nations, only Australia and the United States do not meet the ILO convention of granting a minimum of 14 weeks paid maternity leave with no length of service conditions. Less than a third of Australia’s female employees have access to employer-funded paid maternity leave and these benefits are generally the preserve of women in the public sector and larger private organisations.
“There is little on offer to the large body of women who work in shops, offices, cafes and factories,” Ms Macklin said.
“We have gone from baby boom to baby bust—almost—in the space of a generation,” said Mr Swan in an interview on seven’s Sunrise program,
“The care of children ought to have a higher priority in our national economic and social agenda, and all I am saying is one of the issues—and it is only one—is paid maternity leave. But there is also paternity leave, there is also the early years agenda: what we do to support families when their children are young.”
In her International Women’s Day speech, Democrats Leader Natasha Stott-Despoja, asserts that a national system of paid maternity leave must be at the helm of Australia’s assistance to working women. Many low-income women can take maternity leave only if they have an alternative source of income, and yet their access to paid leave is probably disproportionately low.
Recent reports of housing developer, Wintringham, offering 12 weeks fully paid parental leave to its male and female staff is being heralded as a breakthrough first.
For its part the ACTU points to the International Labor Organisation’s convention183 providing for fourteen weeks paid maternity leave as a minimum for Australia to adopt. The ACTU has called on the federal government to ratify this convention. In the meantime a bargaining kit provides affiliates with the arguments to support employer-sponsored leave.
Click here for more information.
Unions, Business and Community Groups Address Long-Term Unemployment
Australia’s most powerful lobby groups are taking a combined approach to call for a budgetary redress to the plight of the country’s 350,000 long-term unemployed people.
The ACTU, Business Council of Australia and Australian Council of Social Services have joined forces with the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, the Youth Research Centre at Melbourne University, Jobs Australia and the Dusseldorp Skills Forum, an independent not-for-profit association. Their Pathways to Work alliance is calling for significant new programs to reduce and prevent long term unemployment to be funded from this year’s Federal Budget in May.
The initiative builds on previous innovative programs the Dusseldorp Skills Forum has implemented to promote active engagement with the worlds of learning and work for young people for whom a school environment alone is not suitable.
To improve the labour market outlook and school-to-work transition for disadvantaged youth, DSF piloted a unique program that secured job placement for school leavers while minimising the risks to both employers and workers. A not-for-profit labour hire program, Career Workeys adopted the group training scheme model and aggregated casual work into the equivalent of a week’s full time job and income.
“The tension between community life and school is difficult for a significant number of young people, such as those from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities,” Mr Spierings said.
“The academic streaming upon which the education system is so heavily structured is not appropriate for many of these people and we must look at new opportunities to provide better support and resources for educational pathways to learning through the workplace and a wider variety of experiences.”
The program has since been taken over by the local group training company but Dusseldorp Skills Forum runs a range of skills based projects, some of which are available to the public to participate on a voluntary basis.
For more information
Contact: John Spierings, Research Strategist, Dusseldorp Skills Forum
Telephone: 03 9639 7211 or 02 9212 5800
Fax: 02 9212 1533
Email: john@dsf.org.au
Web: http://www.dsf.org.au
Overseas in Brief
British tire of 'macho' long hours culture - Minister promises to cut excessive hours after report reveals laws fail to stop workers being chained to their desks
Time to quit for the family? - news that a UK chief executive has quit his job to spend more time at home has reignited the debate about the right balance between work and family.
Lights out for long hours? - just as a rethinking of America's 'overwork ethic' broadens, a rising tide of layoffs may have more workers worried about looking busy.
Is work taking over your life? Escape the long hours culture and start living again.
http://www.ivillage.co.uk/workcareer/survive/persondev/articles/0,9545,156471_163230,00.html
Long hours harm sex lives
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1202000/1202482.stm
Competition Results
Congratulations to Lois Hoffman of the ATO and CPSU Tax Section WA member for winning the Village Cinema Complimentary double pass in last edition’s refer a friend competition. Lois’ name was drawn out of a hat. Thanks to all other competition participants.
Travel Books Discount
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1. visit the Explore Australia website
2. select and order the titles you wish to purchase
3. fill out the feedback form at the bottom of the page and indicate that you are a Work on Life subscriber to be eligible to receive 10% off.
In addition to highlighting workplace success stories that promote a healthy work and lifestyle balance, this e-bulletin also provides:
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