Newsletter No. 28
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2005
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Young workers need unions, shorter work week A ‘street-savvy’ Generation ‘Y’ — confident 20-somethings who know what they want and how to get it — is largely a management and marketing myth rather than serious analysis of the situation of young workers around the world today. For a start, it focuses on the top end of the labour market in more affluent countries, when 85 per cent of the planet’s one billion young people live in developing countries with poor employment opportunities; whose greatest challenge is to gain the conditions to be able to ‘lead decent lives through decent work’ (ICFTU). Far from being confident, many young people are ‘terrified’ at the prospect of asking the boss for a pay rise. Far from craving flexibility and mobility, research shows they seek job security “after 10 years of moving around in casual jobs" as teens and students (‘Shy youth behind on pay’ SMH 16.7.05). Young people increasingly join the workforce — in casual, part-time, low paid jobs. In New South Wales almost 60 per cent have worked by the time they are sixteen — mainly middle class kids, as those in poorer suburbs must compete with adults for low skill jobs (‘Underage, not underemployed’ SMH 18-19.6.05). These young workers are not necessarily anti-union — supposedly a trait of an individualistic generation. Work’s part-time nature makes it a sideline activity rather than a core aspect of this part of their lives; and they often work in small workplaces not conducive to unionism. Though they are in and out of work young people know very little about unions, because they do not come in contact with them. Many do not know what awards they are under, or whether they are permanent or casual workers! (Evatt Foundation seminar 5.8.05). Currently, awards protect young workers’ rates and conditions: something the new Industrial Relations laws will soon abolish. Yet, a NSW study shows that even with award protections, 40% of young workers claim to have been injured at work, a quarter to have been physically harassed and half to have been verbally abused. While they like work for the money it brings, they dislike being exploited because of their age. It is unrealistic to expect a 14-18 year old to negotiate hours, wages and conditions with an employer, without awards, with-out unions and with no defence against unfair dismissal. Young women find it harder than young men to get good jobs. They are 60 per cent of the 560,000 Australians aged 15-24 without full-time work or study; and often get work that is lower paid, with poorer conditions. Teenage boys, if they are young enough, are now scoring apprenticeships or full-time work in expanding male dominated industries, but girls ‘are going backwards’ (Dusseldorp). This situation, and a power imbalance between employer and employee, puts young women at even greater risk of exploitation and abuse, if there is no protection. A government-run parliamentary committee on employment recently advocated further casualisation of work, to create more jobs and increase workforce participation, knowing these jobs are lower paid and insecure (‘Casual jobs hold key to boosting workforce’ SMH 15.3.05) This is not job creation, it is job splitting, a way to increase exploitation. While apologists forf low paying, insecure work claim a job is the ‘best way of getting another job’ (Andrews, SMH 24.10.05), the best research shows these sorts of jobs do not improve long term employment prospects of those who take them (‘Low-skill work study cuts deftly into expectations’ AFR 14.11.05). It is more likely a new generation of workers may never get decent work, but become a growing class of working poor. Full employment, which the government claims its new IR laws will create, is put forward as the main guarantor of decent jobs and workers’ rights; but even as the young are driven into a labour market based on short-term, expedient use of a labour force without rights, and in which they are extremely vulnerable, youth unemployment is rising. It will only accelerate a long term trend of youth wages weakening relative to average pay. The new IR laws will not guarantee workers under 21 a minimum wage (ACTU) and Howard advocated a $3/hour youth wage when the going rate was $8.50, because people ‘who now can’t get jobs’ would work for that rate (ABC). Giving young workers a low cost ‘competitive edge’ does not solve unemployment: it only shifts it to other groups, then used to lever down their wages in turn, as part of a ‘drive to the bottom’ pushed on workers everywhere. It needs a shorter work week, to ensure a better balance between demand and supply for labour, to generally increase work prospects — for young people and for workers throughout their work life (to counter the capitalist tendency to create a supply of labour surplus to demand). For this to happen, labour must be able to organise and bargain, that is, we need to have effective unions, and on this basis, generate the pro-labour and public interest policies that constitute the elements of a social democracy. Otherwise we will all experience the paradox Karl Marx noted 140 years ago: as labour’s productive power increases, more precarious becomes its function (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3). |