This week’s public holiday is, in its own small way, something of a big deal — it’s the first national reduction in working time in close to 40 years. What happened? Or, rather, what hasn’t happened?
It’s about 40 years since weekly working hours were reduced to 38 and about 50 years since the Whitlam government made four weeks’ annual leave the national standard. Long service leave hasn’t significantly changed since the 1950s. The 10 or 11 weekday public holidays (depending on where you live and who you work for) have been pretty much as they are since World War II.
As Kenneth Slessor tells us in his poem “Five Bells”, there’s a bumpkin calculus in how we mark off structured time. There’s a clash in value: for the worker, time off is freedom; for the employer, it’s loss of control.
That’s why employer resistance to cutting working time has grown. Now, even a change as small as the one-off special public holiday for to mourn the death of the queen generates groans at “lost productivity”.
Lucky we’ve got a monarch. It seems to be the only way we make progress. The last special national holiday was in 1987 to mark the queen opening the new Parliament House. Even that was ignored by some states.
The queen’s … er, king’s birthday holiday was one of the colony’s first holidays, proclaimed by Governor Arthur Phillip, although the current June date in most states recognises the birthday of the current monarch’s great-grandfather, George V, who died in 1935.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this: back in the 1930s when Australian workers (starting in newspapers) were winning the first week of mandated annual leave, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that by the end of the century we’d all be working an average of 15 hours a week. A fair guess: modern students of pre-history estimate that was the working week before the neolithic agricultural revolution.
Would have been nice. Instead, even with all the leave put together, Australia’s full-time formal hours average at more than double Keynes’ confident prediction.
And, in the real world, the gap is getting bigger: since the 1980s’ 38-hour-week, employers have been using social engineering — the pressure to get the job done regardless of the time it takes — and compulsory overtime to get more out of each worker.
Work has been made more consistently dense through that great managerial euphemism of business process re-engineering resulting at the extreme end in companies like Amazon where US unions describe the working pattern as “brutal”.
Employers resisted the promise of the 38-hour week. Other than the 19-day-month won in some heavily unionised sectors such as construction, it’s mostly been implemented through a (sometimes purely notional) 24-minute shorter working day.
Free time has become just another of those 20th century benefits lost in the decades-long shift of income from labour to capital, translated to profits and senior executive super-salaries.
The collective tools Australian workers used to get more free time are broken.
Traditionally, free time would be won first through union-led sector campaigns: famously Melbourne’s stonemasons with the eight-hour day but also the Amalgamated Engineering Union with the 44-hour week in 1927 or Sydney’s printing unions with annual leave in 1935.
The 38-hour week first took off through the metal workers’ wages and hours campaign in the early ’80s. (That was the campaign that led then treasurer Paul Keating, as deregulator-in-chief, to accuse AMWU secretary George Campbell of having “the jobs of 100,000 dead men around his neck”.)
The win would then be spread by state and federal industrial contributions through the awards system or sometimes by government regulation and legislation. State Labor governments would hurry the process on, extending the benefit to public employees. Once the AMWU won the 38-hour week, for example, it was quickly made universal through wage cases under the Hawke government’s accord.
The enterprise bargaining of the 1990s was designed to shatter the process, to stop benefits flowing across the workforce. In its place came the Rudd-Gillard industrial reforms relying on legislated national standards, which entrenched last century’s gains.
The result? If we want to change working hours, it’s in the hands of the federal government.
Even within the constraints of its “productivity” rhetoric, there’s room to move: a universal 19-day month would, theoretically, have no productivity impact; long-service leave could be standardised to the federal standard at three months after 10 years instead of 15; a couple more public holidays would still leave Australia within the band of similar economies. (Germany’s richest state, Bavaria, has a lucky-for-some 13.)
But as the kickback against this week’s public holiday shows, employers can’t get enough of your time. This week, after 40 years, we’re seeing a cautious breakthrough. As ever, more will come only if we’re prepared to fight for it.
Is the working week too long? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
“That’s why employer resistance to cutting working time has grown. Now, even a change as small as the one-off special public holiday for to mourn the death of the queen generates groans at “lost productivity”.
Lucky we’ve got a monarch. It seems to be the only way we make progress.”
I love it! The way we can progress in the field of industrial relations, workplace reform and social justice is to have a dead monarch and, ipso facto, a public holiday is contracted and created. Workers can get workplace justice any other way. This is the best and probably the only reason for sticking with the monarchy and not becoming a republic. I guess employers are going to take one for the team to show their loyalty to the Crown and, by inference, the country. What’s the bet that many of them will coerce or pressure their employees into not getting the requisite penalty rates or taking unpaid leave of they have to take the day off? Absolute whingeing mongrels. Absolutists themselves and workers can only get some justice, a small win, by accident. Makes you sick. The sooner that the FWC is abolished the better. The FWA has to go as well.
Sorry, it should read..”Workers can’t get workplace justice any other way”.
How exactly do workers fight when they don’t have the right to strike? Join a union when history tells us the unions sold us out in concert with Hawke/Keating? How do you fight modern capital whose definition of productivity is actually unpaid overtime and wage theft, not investment and technological innovation? The game’s not only rigged against us, we can’t even buy a ticket to the venue!
The idea that most workers work a 38 hour week has long passed.
A significant amount of workers now would be rare and lucky to get 38 hours work per week.
And then another significant number of workers who are on a 38 hour week, are lucky if they don’t actually work a lot more hours.
If the death of a monarch is what it takes to get us more time off, let’s hope some bastard Royal gets inspiration from Kind Hearts and Coronets and cycles through the rightful heirs on a frequent basis.
On a serious note, I do wonder if the reason we still work 40 hours is that for many jobs time is the main quantifiable measure of work. While some jobs no doubt have at least since connection between time and output, how do we keep that quantification when direct output is hard to measure?
Companies experimenting with 4 day weeks or shortened work days might help change the conversation, but just as easily I can see those companies regressing the moment some ambitious middle manager wants to prove his worth by getting the team members to work longer and harder. Because, really, what else is management good for?
Its not just time off. Im abroken down old bloke doing an 11 hour week as a groundsman for the local school. Not to arduous but in fact to get everything done I have to put in several hours a week of my own time. Trying to get paid for that is unbelievably difficult so I just dont ask anymore. Tools are another thing. All their stuff is broken or just not up to the job so I bring my own. Easier than getting the ok to upgrade. I also chuck in the occassional spare parts and materials out of my own kip. Maybe I should ask for a submarine or fighter jet. Seems to be plenty of money for them. Im happy to wait.