“This industrial revolution is a sneaky one,” says Dr Alan Montague, a lecturer in business at RMIT. “It’s changing absolutely every job, and we just take on new skills without realising that we’re using new technology.”
We are talking over Microsoft Teams, something which, just a year ago, Montague would not have done. But when the pandemic struck in March, use of it and other video conferencing platforms proliferated.
“Before Covid-19, even though I am very capable with computers, I wasn’t using Teams,” he says. “And now I want to use Teams all the time.”
It’s a small change borne out of necessity. Video conferencing has been around and in common use for decades. Thanks to the coronavirus, it has become essential.
The sneaky revolution, says Montague, is shown in the things left behind. If your employees are able to complete their work at home, and even prefer to do so, then a large inner-city office is no longer an essential part of doing business. Which means the cleaners who cleaned that office, the parking attendants, the barista making coffee in the foyer, are also no longer needed.
And for younger people entering the workforce, that’s a problem. Entry-level, unskilled work is the most at risk of being wiped out.
“There are no jobs that are specifically future proof,” Montague says. “We’re now in the era of accelerated change.”
In 2020 automation does not mean putting robots on a manufacturing line. It’s the use of apps to order food, choosing online shopping over bricks-and-mortar stores, and talking to a chatbot when you call the bank.
“We’re going to have to start to retrain a lot of people so that they sustain their employment,” Montague says.
That could involve a radical rethink of education. University degrees should be restructured to allow people to undertake relevant part-time work within their intended profession, like an apprenticeship – a term Montague says will offend academics who are “not vocationally oriented”.
“But the reality of the situation is simply this: the best survival kit is employment, and a wage and a salary, to look after the basic needs. It’s as simple as that.”
The transition from education to work has long been defined by insecurity, says Prof Paula McDonald from the Queensland university of technology business school. During the pandemic that problem has been amplified.
In Australia 45% of the total decline in employment in May was due to young people losing their jobs. Over the year, 70% of people working in accommodation and food services – primarily young people – had their hours reduced. And many had been in casual jobs for less than 12 months so were not eligible for jobkeeper, the Australian government’s solution to helping businesses retain staff during the shutdown.
McDonald says Australia, due to its own recalcitrance, has longer to work out how to solve the problem of job losses caused by automation than other developed nations. The laws governing automation may be lagging behind – but so is the uptake of technological fixes.
“Australian businesses aren’t great at innovating,” she says.
Rates of employment in sectors at risk from automation and dense with entry-level jobs — retail, hospitality, transport and logistics – are either holding steady or growing.
“The problem is they are the very sectors which often have the lowest quality jobs,” she says. “The issue we have to think about and put policy around is not just the creation of any jobs, but the creation of good quality jobs.”
Quality jobs require sustained government investment beyond short-term youth unemployment and jobready schemes, she says. Those programs, like the Youth Jobs PaTH internship program, can underwhelm. Only 4,785 internships were completed in the first 18 months of that program, well short of the projected 30,000 a year.
McDonald points to the “flexicurity” model in Denmark, a policy structured around flexible and reliable contractual arrangement, lifelong training, effective active labour market policies and adequate social security systems.
The consequence of not creating good quality jobs – work that is secure and offers a living wage – has been clearly demonstrated this year, she says.
Cobbling together more than one job
The second wave of Covid-19 in Victoria spread through the aged care sector due to aged care workers who held multiple jobs across different facilities, and South Australia blamed its lockdown on a security guard at a quarantine hotel who held a second job as a pizza cook.
“The health implications that have come from that are a direct result of the kind of on-demand labor, where an individual worker is not getting sufficient hours to make ends meet so they’re cobbling together more than one job,” McDonald says.
“What Covid has done is really shone a light on the absolutely crucial role of government in in creating a secure and sustainable labour market. We can’t just leave employment, and care and health and education, we can’t just leave it to market mechanisms. We need we need government to be investing and really thinking through creative solutions to some of the long-term problems that we’ve got now …
“I don’t know how conservative governments can come to grips with that, because it’s contrary to their ideology.”
Dr Tess Hardy, the co-director of the centre for employment and labor relations law at Melbourne University, says the problems presented by insecure work have been “crystallised in the past six months”.
Hardy says the Victorian government’s decision to highlight the risks of insecure work as applying not only to workers but to the broader community, and to give support directly to those workers, was a shift in the political conversation. Government support during recessions is usually directed towards businesses.
Federally, that has remained the case. The Morrison government has used the economic crisis to introduce a series of reforms that benefit employers, but which unions say will further entrench insecure work.
The industrial relations omnibus bill allows employers to apply for pay deals that are below minimum award standards, negotiate with part-time workers to trade away overtime rates in exchange for extra shifts, and wipes out back pay for casual workers who have been misclassified and are really performing permanent work.
It also introduces criminal penalties of up to four years in prison for wage theft. Victoria passed the first wage theft laws in the country in June, followed by Queensland in September.
This follows a series of high-profile wage theft cases in the hospitality industry, as well as against the retail giants Coles and Woolworths and institutions including the University of Melbourne and the ABC.
Hardy says research shows that the best way to deter companies from wage theft is not by increasing penalties but by increasing the perception that they will get caught. It is the same as the effect that seeing a speed camera has on a lead-footed driver.
“We need to try and figure out how to replicate the speed camera in the context of underpayment, and to do that we need more eyes and more actors with the ability to sanction the wrongdoers in some way, even if it’s smaller fines or other forms of sanctioning,” she says.
One way to achieve that would be to change the cost rules, so that unions or private lawyers can recover legal costs if they successfully make a claim on behalf of a worker or group of workers.
Apps that allow employees to share information about dodgy employers are also helpful but don’t remove the central fear that if workers raise a complaint about their employment conditions they will lose their job. “And in a recession, that fear is magnified,” Hardy says.
An on-demand workforce
Healthcare, including aged care, is increasingly reliant on a highly casualised workforce. According to a national survey of the on-demand workforce conducted for a 2019 Victorian parliamentary inquiry, 7% of people who used a digital platform like Airtasker to find work were in the aged or disability care sectors, or performing other care roles such as babysitting. It’s a less visible part of the gig economy, which is still predominantly made up of transport and food delivery services, but it is growing.
Rates of independent contracting in the healthcare and social assistance sector were already growing faster than overall employment growth in 2018, the survey found.
“Right now there are financial incentives to disguise what in substance is employment as some kind of independent contracting or freelancing arrangement … engaging someone through a digital platform may be an effective way to disguise an employment relationship,” says Prof Andrew Stewart, an employment law expert from the University of Adelaide.
That could result in a daisy chain of contracts, leaving it unclear who has a direct contract with whom.
“You’ve got person A arranging care for person B using funding that’s supplied by government agency C, getting in touch with provider D, which has an arrangement with platform E which supplies the services of work at F,” Stewart says. “Who has got the contracts and who has got responsibility?”
Stewart says a broad crackdown on the use of digital platforms could impact legitimate freelancers and sole traders who are benefiting from new ways of finding work. A better solution could be to regulate the work itself: mandating certain quality standards which can only be effectively ensured by staff who are employed directly.
It is a myth, says Stewart, that the gig economy has flourished because young people want absolute flexibility at work.
“They are doing that because that’s what’s on offer, not because that’s what they want to do,” Stewart says. “And if you give them the opportunity of a stable job and a stable career, many will take it.”
As a young person who “craves certainty”, Emma agrees. The communications graduate works in the public service, which is why her last name is withheld.
It is steady, well-paid work with opportunities for advancement, the kind of employer many people stick with for life. It does not light up conversation at the pub but she enjoys the work.
“I think there’s a lot of pressure to make your job your life, and you have to absolutely love it all the time,” she says. “But sometimes people just want to work in a job where they’re stable, they love the team, they like the work and it pays them. And then on weekends and after work, they can do their hobbies, and have those two separate.”
But she says young people may be less inclined to tolerate poor working conditions than people were previously because they are more aware of their rights.
“If someone’s being treated not so well in a workplace, or they’re not getting the pay that they should for the work that they’re doing, I think my generation are the ones that are going to say that’s not that’s not what I want to do,” she says. “You’re not giving me the the tools I need to move forward in my career, so I’m going to try somewhere else.”
Hardy recommends young workers read up on their rights and entitlements on the fair work ombudsman’s website, join a union if appropriate, and seek assistance from a union or a community legal centre before having a difficult conversation with an employer.
“You can try and ensure that the start to working life is a positive one, and not one that is characterised by underpayment and disappointment,” she says.
