By James Vassilopoulos
Twelve-hour shifts are increasingly being put into new enterprise agreements. Also increasingly common are cuts to penalty rates and the averaging of working hours over a month instead of a week.
The five-day, 40-hour week, with no work on the weekends, is fast becoming a thing of the past.
According to a report by Kathryn Heiler, from the Sydney University-based Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, these are just some of the measures bosses are using to increase "flexibility" in the workplace. The report is based on information obtained from 3000 enterprise bargaining agreements.
The bosses make more profits through the changes. The workers get a tougher time of it.
Many agreements have extended the ordinary span of working hours. So instead of workers working an eight-hour day between 8am to 430pm, they are having to work some time between the hours of 6am and 6pm.
Thirty-three per cent of agreements had a 12-hour span, which would theoretically allow for a 12-hour working day, in the year 1996-97. This compares to about 27% in 1995-96.
Six per cent of enterprise agreements had provisions for 12-hour shifts in 1996-97, and this is increasing year by year. The number of male shift workers doing 12-hour shifts rose from 10.8% in 1993 to 14.6% in 1995, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.
In a horrendous agreement which the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association signed with Pizza Hut, ordinary hours are between 6am of one day and 1am of the next.
Another change is the averaging of working hours. In 1996-97, 11.1% of agreements allowed for hours to be averaged over a month and 5.1% allowed hours to be averaged over a whole year.
This means, for example, that a worker may work 20 hours one week and 60 hours the next, as long as the average at the end of the period is 40 hours per week. An agreement in the electricity industry stated that "employees shall work 40 hours per week balanced over a 52 week period".
Overtime or penalty rates, where workers get a higher than normal wage rate for working abnormal hours, are also being attacked. A massive 70% of overtime worked by sales workers and 63% of overtime worked by clerks is unpaid.
The report by Heiler concludes that "workers may be unsure of starting and finishing times nor when there will be peaks and lulls in the work flow, making their personal and leisure lives more difficult to plan and their family responsibilities more difficult to meet".