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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 856 ..

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 32, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MS DUNDAS: The shadow minister went on to say that good policy requires better measures of underemployment and overwork. This is because the principal measure of labour market performance, the unemployment rate, was developed in an era when the labour market was based on full-time bread winners. So the official definition of "employed" does not distinguish between those working one hour a week and those working 60 hours a week. Huge changes in the labour market in the 1980s and 1990s, including the shift to part-time work and casualisation, are therefore not reflected at all in the main measure of labour market performance.

Underemployment of part-time and casual workers is now a very serious problem, especially when compared to the growing problem of overwork. Yet, proper understanding of these important trends is missing from public debate and policy-making because they are not captured in the official statistics that we use.

So what is the current situation? In Australia today there are more than 15 million people over the age of 15. Of these, 6.7 million are employed full time and 2.3 million are employed part time. Of those employed part time, over 430,000 would prefer to work additional hours. Many of the full-time workers wish to work fewer hours, although regular data is not collected on these issues.

One simple change that we could implement would be ask respondents to the ABS labour force survey to state both the number of hours they worked and the number of hours they wanted to work. This would make it possible to measure the nature and extent of not only unemployment but underemployment and overwork, and to do so much more accurately than is currently the case.

The labour market statistics would tell us that the number of people officially unemployed is now back to the levels experienced in 1985. However, the number of hours of underemployment is around 24 per cent higher than at that time. While unemployment and substantial underemployment create enormous personal and social costs, another labour market problem that is barely considered in the labour force statistics is that of overwork.

The proportion of jobs requiring long hours has also continued to grow steadily. While the overworked are unlikely to suffer from the financial problems of the underemployed, the impact of long hours on health and family commitments and the capacity to engage fully with the broader community are substantial. Overwork is a growing problem, with no sign of abating.

Involuntary overwork is as much a failure of the labour market as underemployment. It is therefore important to have accurate measures of the extent of overwork, and to ensure that policies are in place to enhance the capacity of the labour market to match the desires of workers to the needs of employers.

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