Add Category
There's an growing chasm in the Australian workforce.
Some employees enjoy solid compensation and generous conditions, while others have only legislated minimums.
Labour hire contractors and gig workers can get even less.
"I think there is an increasing disparity," said union official Karen Batt, who just led an agreement between the Victorian state government and 56,000 employees.
She's worried about insecure work and gig jobs eroding rights that workers spent decades fighting for.
"It's absolutely important to have that 'floor' in conditions and rates of pay."
Almost 2,000-kilometres north, outside of Bundaberg, horticulturalist Reuben Murray is trying to find jobs on online platforms, competing against people who lack his qualifications but are willing to charge less for work.
The rates on offer are far less than the minimum wage.
"I've seen people offering 20 bucks an hour for two people," he said.
"That's not even the award rate for a casual under the gardening and landscaping award. That's atrocious."
"It's a race to the bottom."
Casual loadings give non-permanent employees 25 per cent of their hourly rate again, to compensate for not having conditions like sick leave and holidays.
But international research and some of Australia's top labour experts suggest the value of the those conditions — and the gap this creates — is worth far, far more than that.
'21st-century chimney-sweeps'
The rise of ‘knowledge work’, a war for scarce, skilled talent and hefty union-brokered agreements are exacerbating the gap.
Joellen Riley has studied at Oxford, been Dean of the Law School at the University of Sydney and spent decades amassing knowledge and understanding of laws around work.
As the 'gig economy' and on-demand work have challenged long-held norms and laws, she's become one of the nation's top experts in the field.
But when asked about how substantial the gap in benefits between one 'high condition' group of employees and those on legal minimums, the answer isn't easy.
"Oh, well, how long is a piece of string?"
One of the incoming federal government's election pledges was to strengthen and expand conditions for workers.
That's happened.
Employees now have written into law, as a minimum condition, access to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave.
Coming soon is a 'right to disconnect' and new protections for gig economy workers.
"There's a theory that the casual's loading, the 25 per cent pay rate, buys out, their paid leave entitlements," she said.
Where those employee benefits fall down is that people who are engaged as contractors or through labour hire arrangements generally don't get access to those conditions.
"So those are the people who get fewer of these labour standard improvements that we've seen in recent times."
That's clear in what Professor Riley calls a "very visible precariat" or workers engaged on 'gig' platforms that offer flexible work but unsteady income — with workers acting as independent contractors.
The Fair Work Commission will, from next month, have powers to set minimum standards for workers in ‘employee-like’ forms of work.
Decoded, that means potentially big changes to the gig economy.
"Because we have work-from-home highly-paid knowledge workers like me, we're snapping our fingers to have our servants drop us our meals and things."
"They're working at no minimum rates at all until such time as the Fair Work Commission does get around to making some kind of minimum standards orders," Professor Riley said.
Count it
There's another aspect to the gap.
One of Australia's leading labour economists, Jeff Borland, said we tend to focus on inequality in earnings because they're such a key part of what workers get from their work.
Also, we can easily count them.
But the 'conditions gap' is real — and it's likely much larger than we'd previously thought.
"It's increasingly being recognised that non-monetary benefits and features of work also have a big impact on workers' job satisfaction," he says.
"Hence that inequality in those non-monetary benefits should also be factored in to thinking about inequality."
One third on top pay
Professor Borland cites a UK study that suggests our 'casual loading' should be a full one-third of the hour rate again.
Currently, casuals receive 25 per cent of their hourly rate on top, to compensate for not getting conditions like sick leave and holidays.
That UK study, 'The true returns to the choice of occupation and education' from the Centre for Economic Performance said the value of those benefits is vastly more, at least 33 per cent.
The UK study across a broad range of jobs analysed “full earnings”: the sum of earnings and the value of non-money rewards, in 90 different occupations.
“Data on earnings alone substantially underestimate the true level of inequality in the labour market."
Even saying that conditions and benefits should be valued at one-third of wages could be a massive underestimation.
When education is taken into account, the deviation between earnings and non-money rewards explodes: from 29 per cent for the lowest-educated to a whopping 65 per cent for respondents with a degree.
Conditions lost
Reuben Murray loves his work.
"I like the way I'm on the tools constantly," he said.
"Actually out there doing something physical."
However, working for yourself has significant costs compared to the perks that come with being employed.
Reuben gives the example of if he was doing the same job, working as a gardener, but for his local council.
He'd probably make between $35 and $40 per hour.
"And to get 35 bucks now as a permanent, you'd also be getting paid annual leave, paid sick leave, a whole range of conditions that you don't get working through Airtasker or working as a contractor in general."
More than just the pay and conditions, people working as independent contractors incur costs in their work.
'"But as an employee, the company takes care of your wages, superannuation, WorkCover and public liability (insurance), maintenance on the tools, maintenance on the vehicles, fuel, all that sort of stuff," he said.
Minimum conditions
Those legislated conditions — and an annual process to lift the minimum wage — have given people at the lowest level of the Australian economy access to more opportunity than similar nations without a constantly lifting floor of pay and conditions.
Professor Rae Cooper from the University of Sydney said workers who are employed in leading firms — and in the public sector where unions lead broad enterprise agreements — tend to do better in relation to rights and conditions.
You'll also find workers getting above-minimum conditions if they have in-demand skills and operate in highly-profitable areas of the economy, like mining.
"People on the minimum, such as award-only, tend to be in frontline jobs. Minimum rates are so important for these workers because they set the floor for what employers must pay them."
Workplaces seeking to retain talent go beyond. They have to.
What unites
Andrew Siwka is managing partner of The Royals, an advertising agency based in Melbourne and Sydney with about 45 employees.
Agencies are a wide mix of roles.
Some create, others deal with clients, still more are involved in logistics, it takes all types.
"It's an incredibly diverse group of people," he said.
"Trying to get the best out of that group of people has always, always revolved around a cultural thing.
"That's what unites us. That's what brings us together. That's what gets us through the best and worst of times."
The Royals have looked at the kind of provisions that sometimes spark from tech companies, perks like unlimited leave and days off on your birthday.
"Yeah, we've looked at all of those things," Andrew said.
That's because an increasing question at 'knowledge work' organisations is how they can win the war for the best possible talent.
"Free beer and pool tables and dartboards, table tennis tables and arcade machines are all nice to have, create a space, an an environment," he said.
"But ultimately, what's important to these people is the importance of the creative output."
To enhance that, the agency spends one day a week, called 'Unnatural Fridays', on creative projects beyond the pressing deadlines of their clients.
It's a spark-filled respite from the sometimes brutal world of advertising: where the loss of accounts can mean rapid redundancies and the pressure of short deadlines can mean substantial workloads.
While not ignoring those challenges, the company has tried to mitigate them.
"Sustainability is key," Andrew said.
"Our industry has a reputation, probably rightly so, for burning people out."
"For us, our ability to build a sustainable environment and prove that to people, I think that's what attracts people to come here, what keeps people here."
"I think that the way that we've done that is that I have built a sustainable culture."
Big win
The members of Karen Batt's union work everywhere from prisons to child protection and the Environmental Protection Agency.
"That's the collective strength of a group of people that work whose only commonality is that they are defined as public servants," she said.
By negotiating on behalf of 56,000 people, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) was able to get a better deal with the Victorian state government than public servants could individually.
"Being able to push for better pay, better conditions, changes in the way they work — that's something we believe collective action is part of," she said.
But those elevated conditions — which essentially includes a trial of a 4-day working week — aren't available to workers across the economy.
Future gap
And that's what concerns Joellen Riley.
"We're seeing this rising level of inequality, and it's not just between the billionaires and all of us who work for a living," she said.
"I think even people who once upon a time would have considered themselves 'ordinary workers' are so much significantly better off than the people who are serving them.
"We need to be mindful about making sure that we haven't created a whole lot of, sort of, 21st-Century chimney sweeps who are doing all sorts of work to support us but we're ignoring their need for labour protections".