Is any job safe?

Is any job safe?

By Sue Boland

Increasingly, employers and their spokespeople are telling us not to expect job security. In April, Business Council of Australia president Stan Wallis was quoted as saying that job security was not “a simple entitlement” but “a condition wholly dependent on company performance and productivity”.

 

In the early 1980s, employers didn't state such views openly. Trade unions were much stronger then, and only a small proportion of work was contracted out.

In the early days of capitalism, workers had no security of employment. They were often hired on contract or as casual labour, sometimes just a day at a time. Over the last 200 years, workers have organised in trade unions to fight for a degree of job security and, therefore, income security.

The 1980s and '90s trend of “outsourcing”, or contracting out, is turning the clock back.

The Waterside Workers Federation in the 1930s ended the notorious “bull system”, in which the waterfront bosses would pick men for work each morning. There was no guarantee of work the next day.

The WWF won the labour pool — a roster (known as “order of pick”) from which the employers had to pick the next person in order when they were hiring. The roster removed the right of employers to pick and choose, thus ending competition between workers for jobs.

In the meat industry, something similar to the bull system was in operation. Workers had to turn up at abattoir gates each morning and hope to be picked by the boss. The meatworkers' union ended this system when it won gate seniority: employers had to give preference to workers who had been at the gate for the most days.

Measures to increase job security have featured strongly in workers' struggles. Some of the measures which unions won were:

• permanency of employment;

• limitations on the number of contract, casual and part-time workers;

• employers having to give notice before sacking workers;

• reinstatement or compensation where an employer discriminated (unfair dismissal laws);

• application of seniority when workers are laid off — the last employed to be the first fired.

With each advance, employers complained that unions were interfering with their “right” to hire and fire. Employers want profit security, but they don't believe workers have any right to job security.

Job losses

The waterfront dispute has focused workers' attention on the loss of job security which has been gathering pace over the last 12 years.

A Sydney Morning Herald/AC Nielsen-McNair poll published in October found that 27% of households had experienced retrenchment in the previous five years, and 41% had experienced retrenchment at some time. 

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that 3.3 million full-time jobs have been lost since 1986.

Some of the big job cuts include:

• 2500 jobs cut by Shell since 1995;

• 18,000 of a projected 25,000 jobs cut by Telstra in preparation for privatisation;

• 77,400 jobs lost from the federal public service, 100,000 from the Victorian public service and 90,000 from the NSW public service since 1991;

• BHP's decision to close its Newcastle steelworks, at a cost of 2500 jobs;

• 30,000 jobs abolished by the four major banks since 1991, with a another 60,000 likely to go by 2005.

Enterprise bargaining, introduced in 1991 by the Hawke Labor government, played a major role in converting workers from full time to part time or casual. One-fifth of the work force is now casual and about one-fourth of work is part time.

Less than 50% of workers work a standard week without overtime and without working on weekends. Enterprise bargaining deals have increased the number of male shiftworkers doing 12-hour shifts from 10.83% in 1993 to 14.06% in 1995.

In the 1990s, new part-time jobs have outnumbered new full-time jobs by eight to one.

Under enterprise bargaining, many unions traded away the right to job security by giving up limits on part-time and casual work and limits on work outside standard hours.

Workers were told that “flexibility” would create a win-win situation: bosses could fit workers around production schedules and workers could fit work around family commitments. The result has been flexible working hours for the company, and the loss of any control over their hours by workers.

Enterprise bargaining enabled the bosses to implement a fundamental shift away from full-time work towards casualisation by abolishing full-time permanent jobs and replacing them with part-time, casual and contract jobs.

Outsourcing

In a watershed dispute in 1985, the Electrical Trades Union in Queensland fought to prevent the South East Queensland Electricity Board from increasing the amount of contract labour in the industry. The defeat of the union was seen by employers in all industries as a green light to increase contract labour.

Between 1990 and 1995, 35% of employers outsourced at least one business function previously performed in-house.

In the 1980s, contracting out was generally limited to areas which were seen as non-core areas — maintenance, cleaning and transport. In the 1990s, companies started to outsource all areas except policy and management.

By 1998, 23% of all firms had outsourced parts of the manufacturing or production process.

Outsourcing is popular with companies around the world, not just as a means of cutting costs, but of cutting costs in a massive way by busting the union. A contract labour force finds it harder to organise to defend conditions, and is more easily intimidated.

In 1995, Kellogg sacked its entire staff and outsourced their jobs to Skilled Engineering. Kraft in Melbourne sacked all its maintenance staff, contracting jobs to Skilled Engineering and forcing production workers to perform some maintenance tasks.

Management talk has changed from the 1980s “employee empowerment” to describing workers as an “input” to be hired and fired with maximum flexibility.

Downsizing or outsourcing is a technique for reducing wages and working conditions without having to cope with a discontented work force that has just experienced a pay cut.

Downsizing in the United States resulted in workers being retrenched and replaced by lower-waged workers from supplier firms. This allowed companies to push for productivity gains from the remaining workers, who feared the sack if they didn't cooperate, while simultaneously reducing real wages.

In the first wave of downsizing, 12% ended up leaving the labour market altogether, and 17% remained unemployed two years later. Of the 71% who were re-employed, 63% took a wage reduction, half of these experiencing a wage loss of 25% or more.

This method of redistributing wealth from workers to capitalists worked well in the US. From 1950 to 1978, real family income grew for all in the US, even the poorest. However, real family income for the poorest 60% declined 1979-1994, while the richest 1% had their income increased by 88% in the same period.

The budget and jobs

Just before the budget was released, the federal government was crowing about a minuscule 0.3% drop in unemployment, from 8.2% to 7.9%. This is hardly a result to boast about, considering that the economy has experienced continuous expansion since 1991.

When the next recession sets in, unemployment is likely to grow considerably.

Youth unemployment is officially 27.1%, and the number of long-term unemployed increased by 6000 — most of them women.

Despite high unemployment, the government plans to cut a further 9000 public sector jobs, make it more difficult to claim unemployment benefits, increase the number of compulsory work for the dole positions, abolish the free employment service (the Commonwealth Employment Service), abolish the right of workers to use unfair dismissal laws against employers of fewer than 15 people and encourage employers such as Patrick to sack workers .

The government and employers are going to penalise workers triply: making them unemployed in the first place, then restricting their right to claim benefits, then introducing a GST so that the people on the lowest incomes pay the most tax.

What should unions do?

Because employers and the government have made attacks on job security a central part of their offensive, that needs to be a central feature of union campaigns.

There are some positive examples that we can learn from. In the US, the 15-day strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against the United Parcel Service last year won the conversion of 10,000 jobs from part time to full time over a five year period.

The National Tertiary Education and Industry Union has just won an IRC case giving more security to junior academics and administrative staff, who are generally employed on a casual or short-term contract basis. South Australian education unions won an increase in staff at the end of 1996.

After the productivity increases of the past decade, a shorter working week (with no cut in pay) is desperately needed in order to prevent a further increase in unemployment.

This is a demand being taken up by the labour movement in Europe with some success. Public sector workers in Denmark recently struck for two weeks as part of a campaign for a shorter working week in the form of one extra week's annual leave.

Increased productivity will automatically increase unemployment unless the union movement finds a way to win a shorter working week.

[ Lessons from shorter week campaign.]