Page 1063 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 16 March 2005
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It is essential to have regard for, and respond to, the needs of those workers whose acquiescence to long-hours work arises out of pressure and not choice. For many, long-hours work is essential as an additional income source. This has been built into household budgets and cutting back on overtime hours can cause financial hardship. Annualised salary structures can build in overtime pay, thereby negating the element of choice in performing long-hours work. However, a significant proportion of overtime work today is unpaid. ABS statistics show that 44 per cent of the women who regularly work overtime are not paid for this time. Work intensification registers as a major cause of both the increase in hours and the increasing likelihood that those hours will not be paid.
While our jobs today are frequently more interesting and stimulating, the burden on workers is increasing. During the 1990s, stress claims were the single largest cause of occupational disease, and overwork is a significant factor in causing stress. Researchers have identified the emergence of a dominant culture of long-hours work. This can work to entrench long-hours work as a benchmark within the workplace and across an industry, a de facto kind of new hours standard established by stealth.
The issue of understaffing is one of serious concern as it is usually more economical for employers to respond to increased labour demand by offering their existing workforce overtime, rather than taking on new workers. Yet, as researcher Barbara Pocock notes, “Many employees do not have the individual power to resist the pressure to work long hours, whether that requirement is a direct request or arises—very commonly—in an indirect way as a result of staffing levels and/or employer expectations.”
The distinction between voluntary and compulsory overtime drawn in the OEA template legitimises the unfortunate reality. This contract fails to recognise the silent hours that are the greatest contribution to time poverty in the modern Australian workforce. The realisation of work-life balance requires the capacity of workers and their families to arrange and organise this balance. Working families need stable working hours to organise their family’s function. Historically, this has presented little problem to full and part-time workers with predictable hours. The expansion of overtime work may present challenges for planning and therefore achieving a work-life balance.
The OEA’s template adds a further concern to this, in seeking to average hours of work over a four-week period. Workers who may be required to work long hours one week and very few another have no capacity to organise their schedules. Placing such a high degree of unpredictability on work threatens the capacity of working families to organise their time effectively. For casual workers, engagement is on an hourly basis, at any time, on any day of the week. The template makes no attempt to compromise, to find a balance between the importance of regularity of employment for workers and responding to the changing pressures of business. It only provides flexibility for the employer without regard to the need of flexibility to achieve a work-life balance.
Currently, two thirds of all casuals want to work set days each week or each month. There is an obvious desire and an obvious need for regularity of employment and the provision of a capacity to predict and plan for work. This is the very essence of a work-life balance and it is as necessary, whether the worker is full or part time or casual. It is true, and must be recognised, that in many workplaces where casuals are
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