Why work is getting harder
By Jonathan Singer
"Reasonable hours are safer hours", the ACTU declared during its October 25-29 national campaign publicising the health and safety dangers of longer working hours. The dangerous hours campaign increased the ACTU's effort, since the election of the Coalition government in 1996, to tackle the longer and more anti-social working hours and more intense workloads which now afflict workers.
The Work, Time, Life conference, held in Melbourne in November 1998, noted that working life is getting harder across industries, occupations and workplaces. Workers face the erosion of secure full-time employment, a profound intensification of work, increased employer control of working hours, income insecurity and the particularly harsh impact of these on women, young people and other disadvantaged groups.
The conference also noted the growing disparity between full-time workers, frequently working very long hours, and the unemployed and underemployed, who can't get enough work.
When and how long workers work stands out among the problems cited by the Work, Time, Life conference.
According to the September edition of the Agreement Database and Monitor Report, from the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, these issues appear to be the main focus of individual employee contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements, AWAs) and non-union enterprise agreements. ACIRRT's Ron Callus wrote in the October 22 Workers Online that 80% of all (even union) enterprise agreements include provisions to change the time people work.
In Australia a standard working day of eight hours was established by unionists' struggles during the 19th century. The 40-hour week was put into awards by the arbitration commission in 1948 after further union campaigns.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some unions won reductions to 35-38 hours in the working week, and the 1979-81 metalworkers' 35-hour week campaign established a standard 38-hour working week in their industry that then flowed across the work force.
Longer hours
Australians are working longer hours now, however. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over the past decade average weekly working hours for full-time employees have risen from 39.1 hours to 41.1 hours
ABS figures also show that, by the late 1990s, about 28% of all employed persons worked more than 45 hours per week. While employers and the self-employed have worked these hours proportionately more than employees over the years, 25% of employees worked more than 45 hours per week in 1998, compared to 21% in 1988.
Recent surveys suggest a further growth in hours of work. The human resources company Morgan & Banks found 74% of Australians said they were working longer hours now than they were two years ago; half of those working longer hours stated they were working an extra 5-10 hours a week.
Another survey, of nearly 7000 employees (all union members), commissioned by the ACTU, found 54% said they worked more than 40 hours a week and 12% more than 50 hours; 65% said their workloads had increased over the last year. Thirty per cent of 800 health and safety representatives in a similar survey reported working longer hours in the last three years.
ABS figures do not support such surveys; they suggest that working hours have remained steady. Why? The main reason would appear to be that unpaid overtime is increasingly prevalent but its amount is not emerging in official statistics.
ABS figures do show, however, the proportion of all workers who worked various unpaid forms of overtime increased from 23% in 1993 to 25.5% — 1.3 million people — in 1997. The ACTU survey had similar results; Morgan & Banks suggested still higher proportions of overtime not being paid. "Unpaid hours have risen sharply among clerical and service workers and tradespersons", Stephen Long wrote in the November 3 Australian Financial Review.
Much of this increase has occurred through salary packaging in agreements, which supposedly offers payment for longer hours of work but does not limit the hours. A 1997 study found that 7% of employed persons worked more than 60 hours per week. The Australian Services Union has highlighted the 65-hour week of Toshiba software engineer Owen Caughley to press its case in negotiations for a cap of 37 work hours per week at the company.
Unpaid overtime
In the finance industry nearly a million hours of overtime — the equivalent of about 25,000 jobs — is worked every week. This is more than the 23,000 retrenchments in the industry in the three years to 1997.
More than two-thirds of the workers involved receive no compensation of any kind, and only a quarter are paid for the work.
An ACIRRT study suggested that the unpaid overtime and working through meal breaks of Victorian nurses was equivalent to 300-450 jobs.
Eighty-seven per cent of those working additional hours in the Morgan & Banks survey said they were doing this without more pay. An example of this was provided by the recent school bursars dispute in the ACT: to complete the extra workload that had been put on these "part-time" employees, paid for 6¼ hours' work, they were working during lunch breaks, before and after school, at home and on school holidays, for up to 8 hours a day.
One reason unpaid overtime may not get official statistical recognition is that the work occurs on the boundaries of recognised working time. The ACTU surveys suggest that rest and meal breaks are increasingly encroached upon. In call centres workers are expected to take calls from the moment their shift starts; necessary set-up to begin the day's work (perhaps an hour a week) must be done beforehand, unpaid.
Twenty-nine per cent of recent AWAs, 17% of non-union enterprise agreements and 12% of union enterprise agreements involve provisions for a working week greater than 38 hours.
'Flexibility'
Changes to working hours to provide greater "flexibility" of employment are more common, and again more frequent in AWAs and non-union agreements. ACIRRT has noted that, despite the claims that "flexibility" would allow family-friendly hours for employees, most variations in hours favour employers.
Some of the types of "flexibility" introduced into working hours have been: longer daily spans of ordinary hours (for example, 12 or 15); standard working hours on weekends; time off in lieu for additional hours in "peak" periods; regular shifts of 12 hours or more; staggered start and finish times and meal breaks; reduced time between shifts and reduced notice of shifts; and averaging of working hours over a period of up to a year. The availability of rostered days off for full-time employees has fallen from 35% in 1993 to 29.5% in 1997.
All these changes aim to ensure that workers are at work only when the employer wants them to be, to allow the more continuous use of machinery and perhaps to help break up union organisation. Casual employment, where it is not just a device to avoid paying the entitlements of permanent workers, has a similar role: the enterprise agreements on the wharves, for example, are designed to achieve this.
Shift work and weekend and night work have also increased. According to the ABS, 17.4% of workers worked at night, up from 16.1% in 1992. The ACTU health and safety representative survey reported two-thirds of 12-hour shift workplaces had night shifts.
This has occurred with little regard to the effect on individual workers' lives and on community life. Some horrendous individual cases have been reported. The October 22 Workers Online reported that a truck driver had been sacked when she complained about being ordered to do a further delivery after driving for 30 of the previous 34 hours.
The story of an anonymous Woolworths worker, who worked from 8am until 3.30 the following morning, returned to work at 5am and finished work at 8pm, was carried in the October 25 Australian Financial Review.
Wages
In Australia the guard against longer and anti-social working hours has largely broken down. These were penalty rates, which raised the wages paid for these hours.
Federal industrial relations minister Peter Reith responded to the dangerous hours campaign by citing a 1995 survey in which 80% of full-time employees said they didn't want shorter hours, including 62% of those working 49 hours or more. He argued that many workers relied on paid overtime to maintain living standards.
Establishment media commentators have repeated the same theory — that longer hours are driven by workers' desire to get more money — although some admit that demands on working time do come from employers. In reality, the whip on working hours is firmly in the employers' hands.
Workers' desire for extra working hours — not only from full-time employees for overtime, but from part-timers who want more hours — is driven by the decline in real hourly pay rates since the 1980s and increased fears for job security. For example, in construction, where overtime is paid, building workers favour their long working hours during the current building boom because they know a recession will follow and they fear the further encroachment of subcontractors.
Elsewhere, where unpaid overtime is the norm, a culture of working until the job is done has often been established. And the employers decide what work is available, when and for whom.
Overtime has always offered advantages to employers that often were greater than the wage penalties: a worker's labour was available at the time the employer wanted it, without the costs associated with employing additional workers. Cuts in penalty rates for shift, weekend and night work, such as have occurred in supermarkets and on the wharves (casual workers are paid a flat rate regardless of when they work), also allow employers to work people when it's good for profits, regardless of the anti-social character of the hours worked.
Unemployment
Longer working hours also mean fewer people employed to do the work available, giving employers something else — more unemployed. This puts pressure on employed workers, through the threat to their employment, to reduce their wages and increase their hours of work, while the competition among the unemployed is made more cutthroat.
Longer working hours, therefore, pose the threat of dividing workers — those with excessive hours, those on standard hours, those employed part time, those unemployed.
To prevent that, the unions need to incorporate into their campaigning on working hours all the aspects of this problem. This would include demands for: a shorter standard working week (35 hours or less), real increases in hourly pay rates, the elimination or restriction of overtime and anti-social hours of work and penalty payments for all such hours.
The union movement also needs to demand new jobs to take up the work available, including public sector job creation.
Unions can respond to business's cries that this will hurt profits by demanding that company books be opened to the public to show whether this is really the case. More likely, business's real fear is that the shift in the balance between labour and capital favouring profits, which occurred under Labor and Coalition governments in the 1980s and 1990s, may be reversed.