BY JONATHAN SINGER
A payroll worker in the banking industry recently told me, "We're well-paid, but we're not paid for overtime. We work until the job's done." That's become a common experience over the 1990s.
In the 1980s, real earnings fell but, by 1995, the real amount that adult full-time workers received for their ordinary working hours (what statisticians clumsily call AWOTE, average weekly ordinary time earnings) had recovered to the level they'd been a decade before. By the late 1990s, they'd increased, by 18% between November 1989 and November 1999; total average earnings of these workers had increased by a similar amount.
However, aggregates can deceive: the increases were distributed unevenly. The already better-paid workers were favoured, the gains for most workers were less, and for the worst off, they went backwards.
According to unpublished Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) earnings surveys data presented in the ACTU's living wage case, the earnings of the worst-paid 10th of the full-time adult work force increased by just 2.7% from 1991-96 and by 4% from 1996-1998. The average figure, a grand total of $451.80 a week, left these workers still 2.5% below what they were earning in real terms in 1985.
The 50th percentile, the dead centre of the range of adult full-time earnings ($693.80 a week), gained 8% between 1991-96 and 5% between 1996-96. That amount was a 7.5% increase on their earnings in 1985.
The top 10th (the 90th percentile), who earned an average of $1191.40 a week, gained 8.2% between 1991-96 and 7.5% between 1996-98. That's a 13.6% increase on what they received in 1985.
Worse conditions
Statisticians say the increase in AWOTE is a combination of slight increases in wage rates, which have barely kept workers abreast of the inflation rate, and changes in the work force, so that when they sample they find more higher-paying jobs than a decade ago.
These "new" higher-paying jobs could be a result of workers being reclassified upwards for their existing work, disguising real pay increases, but largely it's a result of productivity related wage increases, the cost of which has been far worse conditions of work.
In part, this was because of the increasing number of casual jobs; over the 1990s, casual employment rose from less than 20% of the total work force to more than 26%.
These workers, many of whom were "casuals" in the same job for five years or more, faced not only less job security but also missed out on the range of entitlements which permanents had access to. Only 10% of casuals were entitled to long-service leave payments, for example, compared to 80% of permanents, and only 48% of casuals had superannuation entitlements, compared to 97% of permanents.
As a result, the proportion of all workers receiving holiday leave fell from 81% in 1989 to 72% in 1999, and those receiving sick leave fell from 80% to 72% over the same period. Only 61% of all employees received long-service leave in 1999, down from 64% in 1993.
Again, the impact of this was unequal: in the higher-paid occupational categories of managers, administrators and professionals, long-service leave entitlements improved.
The attraction of casual employment to workers was that the pay packet was larger, at least at first. Awards provided for an additional loading of typically 20%, as compensation for all the entitlements casuals missed out on, and similar rates tended to apply even when an award wasn't in force.
But, as one miner who went from permanency at a Tasmanian West Coast mine to casual contracts at several different mines told me, this also had a price. Over five years, he went from working 36 hours a week to an average of 55. The work became more intense — 12-hour shifts with fewer, shorter rest breaks — and more dangerous, since miners increasingly worked alone.
The culprit in the West Coast mines was a series of enterprise agreements negotiated between employers and the unions. That was a pattern repeated in many workplaces around the country, as enterprise agreements became dominant over the 1990s and awards were reduced to "safety nets" for the worse off. Non-union agreements and individual contracts produced strikingly similar results.
Increased hours
Over the 1990s, the pattern became such that, to get a wage rise, you had to give away part of your working conditions.
Regardless of the form of the agreement, enterprise or individual, employers aimed to get productivity improvements through changes in patterns of work — in effect, to intensify work effort.
"Flexible hours" appears to have been the main focus of individual contracts and non-union enterprise agreements, according to research released in September by the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations, Research and Training. Ron Callus wrote in the October 22 Workers Online that 80% of all (that is, even union-negotiated) enterprise agreements in the late 1990s included provisions to change the time people worked.
The changes introduced frequently included regular shifts of up to 12 hours or more, longer working weeks, compulsory overtime or after hours meeting attendance, reduced notice of shifts, weekend work with no penalty rates, the list goes on. Many workers had any standard working day and week eliminated altogether — their rates were changed into an annualised salary and they worked whenever they were told to.
For example, in one hospitality industry agreement, workers were split into two "work streams". One stream was given a 13% higher ordinary hours rate, in exchange for giving up any entitlements to penalty rates or overtime payments.
In some cases there were provisions for lower pay, for new employees in particular. The December 2 Australian Financial Review reported a deal struck with unions at Melbourne's Crown Casino, which discounted the salaries of new employees by up to $5000 through their first four years of employment.
In a food processing enterprise an agreement allowed for workers to vote for pay reductions if circumstances would normally require redundancies.
'Simplifying'
The other major area of trade-off in agreements was aimed at "simplifying" entitlements. The most common was to "cash in" annual leave loadings. Other allowances and loadings were commonly amalgamated or absorbed into regular pay; the only gain was that workers sometimes got extra parental or stress leave but again the cost was that leave entitlements became far more easy for employers to vary.
Many "safety simplifications" involved reductions in the number of workers required for particular jobs and provisions for reductions and transfers in staffing, as did a 1996 agreement covering NSW teachers. Parts of pay increases were offered for reduced absenteeism or following grievance procedures in industrial disputes.
Workers could also be required to undertake further training or acquire skills in new areas ("multi-skilling"), or carry out additional responsibilities, such as paperwork or vehicle cleaning and maintenance in transport industries. Thirty eight percent of employees in an 1998 ABS survey reported taking on more responsibility at work in the previous year, 36% said they'd taken on new, different or extra duties.
A common measure to increase management control over work was making pay rises, either for individuals or whole work groups, subject to performance assessments. In individual agreements especially, performance pay criteria were often vague and sometimes dependent on the company's performance. Non-union agreements also often made working conditions subject to the enterprise's personnel manual, which the company could subsequently change without consultation.
Call centres became a particular focus for management control, with monitoring of the numbers of calls taken by operators and "listening in" on calls both written into agreements.
'Self-management'
At the same time, "self-managed work" became a new buzz-word. Workers were "allowed" to regulate their own working hours in order to "complete a particular role or project", as a finance sector agreement put it, with a single payment covering all hours worked, including those in excess of ordinary hours and perhaps with provisions for taking time off in lieu.
The direction enterprise and individual agreements may be taking working conditions is indicated by a clause in a public sector agreement reported by ACIRRT:
"The employee shall devote such of the employee's time as is necessary for the proper discharge of the employee's obligations and responsibilities and the parties note and agree that the employee's remuneration is fixed on the basis that reasonable time worked in excess of or outside business hours is contemplated and incorporated in this agreement.
"The parties further recognise that from time to time the employee may be required to work extensive hours in order to achieve [workplace] goals. Where that occurs over an extended period the parties recognise the detrimental effect which that may have on the employee's performance and in that event commit to mutually recognising and addressing the circumstances of excessive work with the intention of mitigating any detrimental effect with the provision of adequate resources and flexibility in work patterns where practicable."
Such a clause would basically give management leave to run the place exactly as they like, with no consultation with the individual worker.
"Self-managed work" expressed and reinforced the explosion of unpaid overtime that occurred in the 1990s. ABS figures show average hours worked by full-time employees increased by about an hour in the 1990s, while paid hours remained unchanged. In 1997, 25.5% of workers performed unpaid overtime, up from 23% in the early 1990s.
Other surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest a still more rapid growth of unpaid overtime, the time amounting to the equivalent of many tens of thousands of full-time jobs.
When it comes down to it, the wages paid to workers reflect the cost to them of reproducing their capacity to work. This cost has increased over the 1990s, because of the loss of leave provisions and job security through casualisation and through the extension and intensification of the working day.
In these ways workers have borne most of the cost for the increase in (to use the language of "human resources") the value of human capital and its productive capacity.