back to the future: casual contracts now the new 'normal'

  Collective action transformed labour rights following the Second World War, yet 50 years later those rights are being eroded by the growing 'casualisation' of Australia's workforce. Mike Rafferty and Iain Campbell hope a bill to amend the Fair Work Act can solve the problem.

  Nearly everything you buy these days is supposedly tailored just for us and our specific needs. Advertisers of skin cream, mobile phones, superannuation, even car insurance want us to think they have our personal, individual interests uppermost in their minds.

  To reinforce that message companies drape their products and even corporate logos in personal pronouns such as 'you', 'I' and 'my'.

  Not to be outdone, over in our employer's human resources department the pitch to us as workers is much the same: out are standard, permanent contracts with a range of wage and non-wage conditions. In are individual, personal relations with companies - self-employment, "portfolio careers" and casual shifts.

  The difference is that while as consumers we are only likely to be disappointed or merely confused by modern marketing, as workers on casual and pseudo self-employment relations we face months and often years of insecurity, not knowing whether our next pay will be the same as the last.

  The reality for the 2.26 million Australians now employed casually, and for many of the more than one million people categorised as independent contractors, is that they do not get to choose their employment terms, the number of hours they work, or even the sorts of work they do.

  The scope of this problem is no longer marginal, confined to certain phases of our life, as students or between permanent jobs. Nor is it confined to industries and occupations where irregular or seasonal work remains important, such as construction and agriculture. Casual workers now constitute almost one-in-four of all Australian employees.

  In Ray Lawler's classic play The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, fictional 1950s seasonal cane cutters Barney Ibbot and Roo Webber spend their summer break in Melbourne. Their work in the preceding months sustains them for several months of holidaying and partying. Seventeenth Doll is set against the tensions between the lifestyle of the seasonal worker and the idea of some day accepting a receding youth and settling down.

  Today's casual workers earn barely enough to sustain themselves week-by-week. It's hardly a lifestyle choice. And with little other alternative, the 17th casual contract is usually followed by more of the same.

  There is, in short, no escalator or even step-ladder from casual work to secure employment. Many people on casual contracts are stuck on revolving casual contracts. They are long-term casuals.

  The consequences of long-term casuals becoming the new normal are increasingly apparent.

  Casual workers don't know from week-to-week how much money they will have coming in. It's impossible to plan for the future; decisions have to be made about which bills get paid and which don't, signing up the kids for swimming lessons or choosing to watch the kids' school concert instead of working becomes conditional on how many hours have been worked in the past weeks and how many hours the employer wants.

  It is worth recalling that we have been here before - the sorts of employment conditions that we take as standard were won in response to an earlier period of insecurity and precariousness, and the social and economic destruction it caused.

  Through collective action by unions, and legislative and regulatory action by governments, we transformed the category of casual to the sense of irregular and uncommon that prevailed for nearly 50 years after the Second World War.

  But this sense of casual has been undermined by a series of 'reforms' and inactions in the face of change. Now more and more people work in casual forms of employment but it's casual in the sense of employers and governments being unconcerned, rather than being marginal or uncommon.

  Thankfully, not everybody is unconcerned about the development. Last year the ACTU commissioned an inquiry into precarious work, and its report earlier this year found that casualisation of work was forcing people to put their lives on hold.

  And even more exciting, a current bill before parliament, sponsored by Greens MP, Adam Bandt, seeking to amend the Fair Work Act, is trying to restore the first definition of casual - or at least, "nudge" the system back in that direction.

  When casual employment is the exception and not the rule, people are really left to put their own stamp not just on their car insurance but on the things that really matter in life. Companies and governments take note, for the more than two million workers on casual contracts, employment insecurity and precariousness is really personal.

  Mike Rafferty is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow with the School of Business at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here. Dr Iain Campbell is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Social Research, RMIT University. View his full profile here.

  http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4437400.html