Risk, Welfare and Work by Marston Greg;Moss Jeremy;Quiggin John;

Author:Marston, Greg;Moss, Jeremy;Quiggin, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Conclusion

This overview suggests that a significant if uneven risk shift has occurred in Australia in recent decades. Those with high levels of personal wealth and private income have been protected, at least until the chill winds of the global financial crisis hit. They have been able to find sources of private insurance, health, education and retirement sustenance. Many women are not so lucky if their relationships fray, even where they have lived in wealth. That said, Australia is not the US: sources of social sustenance provided by the state in the form of a decent workplace safety net, workplace benefits and state sources of sustenance are superior to those that exist for most US citizens. Nonetheless, the great expansion in risk mitigating public sustenance in the postwar years, has stalled.

A great risk shift has occurred affecting many, including precarious, workers, bogus ‘sub-contractor’ and ‘self-employed’, those who lack voice at work (especially many young workers and the unskilled), those who risk their relationships and health through long hours or intensified work, children and dependents who experience poor quality care, as well as overloaded working carers. The decline in work-based and state-based sources of sustenance has left women, communities and charity to make up the gap.

What might be done to thicken up the sources of social sustenance and increase their risk mitigating effects? Several proposals seem obvious. First some form of guaranteed minimum income would permit workers and carers to de-commodify their time and undertake the caring work which reduces the risks facing those who need care over their life cycles (and who does not?). More income support for carers, at least in intensive caring periods (like early parenting) are especially significant for women. Strong work-based safety nets are also relevant, especially forms that link the top of the labour market to the bottom, so that inequality—with all its risks and disadvantage—do not multiply. Support for low paid workers—especially through access to education and health are also important. It is also important to find ways to pool the risks of training (both for employers and employees) through approaches to training and skill development. Given both under- and over-work it also seems essential to be attentive to the risks associate with working time. New social standards on working time (addressing long and short hours, common social time and predictability) are necessary. The risks of work-related insecurity are significant and can be reduced by mechanisms that permit transition from short term casual work to ongoing employment contracts.

The second long boom of the postwar period in the 1990s through to 2008 did not see the kinds of expansions in forms of work-place-based or state-sourced social sustenance that characterised the immediate postwar period. Instead the period saw massive growth in engagement with the labour market, especially by women, without compensating growth in household or community sources of sustenance. These years also saw increasing inequality in the incidence of risk, with the precarious, unemployed and overworked, facing very different fortunes relative to the secure, employed worker with a good fit between working time preferences and outcomes.

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