Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697630194800.pdf (Australia)
Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Job Security - 2021 Inquiry Dr. Veronica Sheen* Introduction Thank you for the invitation to submit to this Inquiry.

Job security/insecurity has been the subject of my academic and conference papers, book chapters, and published articles since my doctoral studies on this topic, completed in 2011.

One of the most important developments in my work on job insecurity over recent years has been its intersection with the topic of ‘the future of work’.
An overview of this connection is available in Submission 119 to the 2018 Senate Select Committee Inquiry into the Future of Work and Workers.1 I have also taken up this connection in chapters for recently published international books: • Australia’s Precarious Workforce and the Role of Digitisation in Digitisation and Precarisation: Redefining Work and Redefining Society (2020) 2 • The End of the Retirement “Age”: How the New World of Work Is Transforming the Old World of Retirement in Who Wants to Retire and Who Can Afford to Retire (2020) 3 The key theme of this published material is that ‘the future of work’ is emerging as increasingly precarious employment through mechanisms such as digitisation and automation, in major changes to how work and employment are organised, and the breakdown and loss of traditional secure jobs across many sectors.
One important element of this last factor is the loss of secure employment in the public sector through ongoing austerity measures and the contracting out of many government services.
1https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Future_of_Work_and_Worke rs/FutureofWork/Submissions 2 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-26384-3 3 https://www.intechopen.com/books/who-wants-to-retire-and-who-can-afford-to-retire- Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen The purpose of this submission is to respond to two of the terms of reference: (B) – the risks of insecure or precarious work exposed or exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.
(H) – any related matters RESPONSE TO TERM OF REFERENCE B – THE RISKS OF INSECURE OR PRECARIOUS WORK EXPOSED OR EXACERBATED BY THE COVID-19 CRISIS.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia exposed the inherent risks to the broader society and economy of workers for whom employment arrangements are so insecure that they are unable to take time off when they are sick or at risk of contracting or spreading a viral illness at susceptible worksites.
There has been much research and commentary of this occurrence in 2020.

The focus of this has primarily been on the implications for health and safety – and mortality.

The role of insecure employment in the COVID-19 crisis gives insight into how serious social and economic problems can emerge from factors that are unacknowledged as carrying a weight of risk.
These are explored in my article published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review in 2017.4 While the article focussed specifically on the implications of precarious work for midlife women, these implications are generalisable across the workforce.5 Low incomes and difficult working conditions were central themes.
While Australia’s minimum wage is not low by international standards, low incomes are sustained through insufficient hours of work and unpredictable work routines in much casual employment as a number of people in my research told me.

Eliza, a woman in her 50s working in a call centre, explained: ‘casual (work) is very unsettling and uncertain.

Often I’ve been told, ‘Oh, the shift has now been cancelled’ so I’ve been called at the last to be told that.
I’ll think I’ll have some shifts and some income coming in and that’s taken away from me – and it’s as if the rug has been pulled out from under your feet.

So suddenly you don’t have the focus of work and you don’t have the income.’ There were examples of women who had been in casual or fixed term contract positions with employers for very long periods and had not been able to convert these into permanent work.
4 https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/elra/28/1 5 https://vsheen.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/women-retirement-age-elrr28-1.pdf 2 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen Maureen had been with the same community service organisation for 9 years: I have asked to go permanent part time many times….all I wanted was the pay I would be getting divided over 52 weeks, I didn’t want any more pay.
I just wanted a weekly wage but they wouldn’t do it… I am just stuck in this limbo of casual.

It means I don’t get paid over the school holidays and there is no sick leave and last year I was sick for two months and out of work for two months.

Over the school holidays, I just have the minimum pension and family payment…if I had (security of income) I would be able to budget better… I am living in a deficit, weekly, fortnightly, the credit cards maxed out.
The difficulty of living on a low and uncertain income was further exacerbated by processes of work intensification combined with surveillance and monitoring of performance, in a range of jobs.

These new forms of work organisation had profound effects on the health and well-being of workers.

Working in a factory, Margot reported: Because it is a casual workforce, they can monitor how quick you are.

All those people in the office, white collars, they’re working out who’s fast and who’s not.
And if you are not up to it – because they have you through a (labour hire) agency, you’re not back there.

It is like human battery hens.

Work intensification in an administrative role in a public sector organization had forced out permanent employee, Laura: We were monitored on an hourly basis against performance benchmarks and if we did not reach them you would receive an email so there was a lot of pressure.

They were always watching over you.


There were productivity bonuses for the office, they called it team work, but it was a real pressure cooker.

In nine years the individual benchmarks were doubled.

Most people really struggled on a daily basis to make it.
Losing her permanent job, she became long term unemployed with more vulnerability to such practices in a probationary position she was compelled to accept under welfare-to- work requirements: They graphed my performance which was 5 per cent below the average at the beginning.

By the end of the probationary period, I had achieved the average but I had already been sacked on the basis of the earlier performance.

As a human being you are expendable.


The pressures in call centre and market research work are described by Eliza: There is a strike rate or quota per hour so they want a certain number of interviews per hour completed and they average out to what they think is achievable and they average out by looking at the number of people in the project and how many interviews they need per hour from each person on the project.
What they do is take an average, worked out mathematically and the 3 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen average is what they expect, that and above but not below.

If it’s below, every hour or two they will be coming to you to tell you that they have just had a printed list of the lapse time between calls you’ve made, how long you were on each interview and how many interviews you’ve got this far.
These experiences are also recounted by leading world health epidemiologist, Professor Michael Marmot.

In the Boyer lecture series6 he gave in Australia in 2016, he tells of the experience of Alan who worked in a warehouse: On arrival for his shift, Alan was handed what was in effect his controller and conscience: a hand-held electronic device that directed him to Row X to pick up item Y and put it in his trolley; then to Row P to pick up item Q, and so on.
When his trolley contained about 250 kg his device would direct Alan to the packers.

Then he'd be off again for another load.

His target was 110 large items an hour (more for smaller items), two a minute.

That was the job, for nine and half hours, plus the hour of breaks.

His hand-held electronic gizmo was not just his controller, it also fed back what he had done, so his performance could be monitored to see how he did against his target.

He was warned when he did not keep up the pace.


If he fell too far behind he would incur half a penalty point; more, a whole point.

'Did you ever,' I asked Alan, 'in all the time you worked there, meet your target and finish a shift with a sense of achievement?'

Not once, was his answer.

7 Just like the women I interviewed, Alan couldn’t keep up the pressure and lost his job after eight weeks.
The story also contains what I was told in my interviews about the gruesome competitiveness of these jobs between workers and the isolation that they feel.

There is never a sense of security in these jobs.

'Did you feel that once you got used to it, at least you knew that you had secure employment?'

Marmot asked, No, he always felt he was on borrowed time because of the penalty points.
Professor Marmot makes the point that job insecurity, and the noxious work practices that foster this, have profound negative health consequences and contribute to health inequalities.

These effects have important implications for how a deadly viral infection, such as COVID-19, can contribute to a major global catastrophe as we saw in 2020.
6 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/boyer-lecture-living-and- working/7804514 7 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-31/amazon-union-push-alabama-could-change-global- working-conditions/100027230 4 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen Summary Such issues are taken up in recently published research (2021) in the BMJ (British Medical Journal): COVID 19 Pandemic and the Social Determinants of Health.8 Completely consistent with my own research and the observations of Professor Marmot, the authors say: The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted that precarious work and exploitative and adverse working conditions intersect with multiple factors, including ethnicity, migrant status, class, and gender, to influence which population groups are most exposed to covid- 19 infection.
People in precarious forms of work have limited access to sick leave and healthcare services and their often low wages mean they cannot afford sufficient quality food, water and sanitation, and housing.

They may also be hesitant to quarantine when they have covid-19 because they cannot afford to lose income and are unable to work from home.

This well summarises the deadly cost that insecure jobs have inflicted on individuals, the broader society and economy in Australia, as elsewhere.
RESPONSE TO TERM OF REFERENCE H – ANY RELATED MATTERS.

My research and publications particularly expose the way that the Australian social welfare system has a central role in fostering insecure employment.
This was the theme of a conference paper that I gave at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva in 2013: Social Policies Lean on Deficits in Labour Regulation in Australia to Fuel Jobs Growth and Reduce Welfare Dependency.9 In effect, the research shows that the low rates of income support payments for unemployed people and the tough activation requirements to take any work on offer are core factors which contribute to the growth and sustenance of insecure employment in Australia.
These two factors are entirely current in the social welfare system of 2021 with the end of the COVID-19 Jobseeker payment and supplements to other payments including the Parenting Payment.

The new Jobseeker payment in 2021 includes a minimal increase to the former Newstart payment, maintaining a level well below the poverty line.
It also carries 8 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n129 9 https://vsheen.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/vsheenrdwpresentationilo2013.pdf 5 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen very stringent job search and job acceptance requirements including a hotline for employers to report anyone who does not accept a job offer.10 A range of negative health outcomes from such a punitive social welfare system have been well-documented.11 The role of the social welfare system in fostering insecure employment has been taken up in international research published in 2018 which explores how it is integral in ‘normalising’ precarious work and asserting it is an alternative to unemployment.
12 It is important research in that it is making a conceptual transition between the worn-out differentiation between unemployment and employment.

The way that social welfare works through activation strategies is that it demands that unemployed people take up any form of work regardless of low wages, insufficient hours or precarity.
The nature of contemporary social welfare systems in many countries including Australia promotes the growth of precarious employment because there is a large pool of people available, and forced, to take up such jobs.

An example from my own research of the negative effects of the enforcement of the take-up of damaging employment is reflected in the situation of Janine, aged 52.

She was attached to an employment service provider to assist her with her job search efforts and retraining.
They wanted me to do a course that lasts a few weeks and be in work straight away.

And I thought, I’ve done all those menial jobs.

I want to do something different, something I like.

The rigid welfare-to-work requirements meant she worked part-time as a cleaner although she sustained a repetitive strain injury which made this work very painful.
She won’t be eligible for an age pension until she is 67, which means at 52 she had another 15 years of potential workforce participation which is likely to be compromised by unsustainable employment.

She had identified an interest in working as a carer in the mental health sector, had started relevant training, but had been forced to give it up to take a cleaning job the employment service provider found for her.
The employment service provider would have been able to claim a positive outcome when Janine started her cleaning job and may have obtained a payment for this.

It wasn’t much of an outcome for Janine though pushing her back into unsustainable, insecure work with undoubtedly negative health consequences.
10 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/23/hotline-to-dob-in-unemployed- australians-who-reject-job-offers-blasted-by-business-welfare-groups 11 https://theconversation.com/the-true-cost-of-the-governments-changes-to-jobseeker-is- incalculable-its-as-if-it-didnt-learn-from-robodebt-158059 12 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017017751790 6 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen Summary As the researchers say in their article on normalising precarious work 13 …The consequence is a blurring of the unemployed/employed divide and a normalisation of the take up of fragmented, low paid and short-term jobs.
Based on their research across 6 countries in the EU – UK, France, Denmark, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain – they argue for a 4-pronged approach to revitalising employment protection and covering security, opportunity, fair treatment, and life beyond work (SOFL).

Across the countries they studied, aspects of these settings were variously evident.
Fundamental to the SOFL vision however is reconstituting a social welfare system so it does not play a role in fostering the growth of precarious work which is an outcome of their conditionality requiring unemployed to take on poor quality employment - which of course in itself sustains precarious work and contributes to its highly damaging effects as we experienced during the COVID-19 crisis.
CONCLUSIONS The COVID 19 crisis in Australia brings to light the challenges and risks that must be countenanced by the extent of precarious employment now embedded in the Australian labour market.14 The core points of this submission are as follows: • Insecure employment is profoundly damaging to the health and wellbeing of individuals which has vast implications for community health as we saw in the COVID crisis in 2020.
• The social welfare system is a core driver of the growth and sustenance of insecure employment in Australia with unemployed people forced into precarious, low quality jobs with all their associated health risks.

• The ‘future of work’ is unfolding as a dystopian labour market of insecure employment with a multitude of dehumanising practises such as constant surveillance and monitoring.
13 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017017751790 14 https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/2020-year-end-labour-market-review-insecure-work-and- the-covid-19-pandemic/ 7 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen SPECIFIC RECOMMENDATIONS With such serious outcomes of insecure employment for individual and social health and well-being, as well as the massive economic costs, it is critical that the Government immediately: 1.
Increase the Jobseeker payment and other relevant payments including Parenting Payment, to a level that ensures people have an adequate income (at a level consistent with the Age Pension).

2.

Remove compulsion for unemployed people to take up insecure and inappropriate employment.

3.

Ensure unemployed people have access to training for secure and sustainable employment.

4.

Regulate casualised employment to ensure that there is an appropriate mechanism for transition to permanency.
BROAD RECOMMENDATIONS There are many long-term issues that Government must countenance, and respond to, in relation to insecure employment and the enormous risks that this poses for societies as we have experienced with the COVID crisis.

One of these is the goal of full employment with all people working for adequate wages, decent conditions, and the number of hours they prefer.
Ross Garnaut in his new book Reset, puts forward a plan as to how this may be achieved.15 There is also a need to consider, and respond to the unfolding ‘future of work’ with all its dystopian potentials for ongoing insecurity in people lives which will most certainly result in an increase in levels of inequality – and all its associated health risks.
This is a core theme of Guy Standing’s book for the International Labour Organisation, published at the beginning of the 21st century: Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality.16 Twenty years on, the content of the book remains totally current in its message that basic economic 15 https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/reset 16 https://www.versobooks.com/books/780-beyond-the-new-paternalism 8 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55 Submission to Senate Select Committee on Job Security – Dr. Veronica Sheen security is a human right.
It is highly disturbing that Standing’s analysis of social welfare systems around the world, including Australia, points to their toxicity in this respect by forcing people into insecure employment.

He argues for reform of social protection systems so that they assume their central role of averting social risks and ensuring basic security for everyone.

If we wish to avert another crisis along the lines of the COVID-19 crisis, this is necessary.
*Dr. Veronica Sheen is an independent researcher specialising in the changing nature of employment, the future of work and social policy.

She completed a PhD in 2011 on the topic of employment insecurity.17 She has twice presented her research at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

She has also presented at a wide range of national forums and has had many articles and chapters published.
She attended by invitation, the OECD Forum, Bridging the Divides, in Paris in June 2017, which had digitalisation as a core theme.

She has taught social policy and social research at Monash and Victoria Universities.

A full overview of her published material and background is available on her website.

https://veronicasheen.net/ 17 Research findings published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/elra/28/1 9 Select Committee on Job SecuritySubmission 55