This research on Australians in work is essnetial for understanding industrial relations and labour law debates. From the Executive Summary. ‘The aim of the Australia at Work project is to contribute up-to-date evidence-based research to a rapidly changing industrial relations policy environment.

Australia at Work tracks 8,000 workers over five years to understand the dynamics of Australian working life.

This report builds on Australia at Work: The Benchmark Report and provides a holistic
picture of working life in order to understand how policy can best engage with it.

The second wave of data was collected prior to two important developments: the global financial crisis that erupted in October 2008 and the introduction of the Government’s Forward with Fairness industrial relations legislation. The comprehensive picture provided here reveals the positive and negative elements of contemporary working life.

On the up side, most workers remain happy about their work and relations with their managers.

On the down side, there is a growing number of workers finding it difficult to get by or just coping on their household income, and high numbers continue to report ‘work overload’ and extended hours of work.

The labour contract and workplace bargaining While controversy reigns over matters such as awards and employment agreements, little attention has been devoted to how employees understand these instruments.

Tracking employees over time reveals that, while broad concepts of ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ bargaining are easily identified, there is a great deal of uncertainty among employees about the legal definitions of the labour contract.

A higher than expected proportion of employees believes their pay and conditions are determined by the award system.

By contrast, awareness of collective bargaining remains limited. Further, collective bargaining is only practised widely in certain segments of the workforce, namely the public sector. This needs to be taken into consideration when designing an industrial relations system which has collective bargaining at its core.

There are differences in the way men and women bargain in the workplace: 57 per cent of men feel they have the opportunity to negotiate their pay directly with their employer compared to only 44 per cent of women. This may be a reflection of relative bargaining power, as men occupy 70 per cent of managerial jobs.

In the last year, there was no significant movement in the numbers of employees on Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs). These individual agreements account for 6 per cent of employees.

A new feature of the Forward with Fairness legislation is that awards will no longer apply to employees earning $100,000 per annum and above. Of employees with earnings in this range, 28 per cent believe that an award plays a role in their pay and conditions and 18 per cent report that an award has a direct influence. Crucially, for these workers, awards govern more than just pay, notably, they set working time arrangements.

Among employees earning more than $100,000 those currently on awards are more likely to be working rostered hours (28 per cent) and less likely to be working very long and unpaid hours. Thus, it appears award workers on higher incomes benefit from working time regulation contained in awards, which will no longer be available to them after 2010.

Standard and non-standard work

The dichotomy between standard and non-standard work oversimplifies the experiences of employees. People in permanent, fixed-term contract, and casual employment all face trade-offs, particularly between control over working hours and job security. Permanent employees in high-skilled and full-time work experience high labour market security but the trade-off is often long hours of work.

While short-term casuals and fixed-term contract employees face job insecurity they are more likely to report control over when they work.

The self-employed generally experience high salaries and greater job tenure. Paradoxically, many people enter self-employment in order to gain some control over their work but it is this group who are working the longest hours. Full-time self-employed are working an average of 52 hours per week and 43 per cent would like to reduce their hours of work. The self-employed who rely on one client for the majority of their contract work often have more in common with employees than other self-employed people.

Unions at work

The steady decline in union membership in Australia is not a reflection of negative attitudes towards unions.

This fall is more likely to be a result of unfavourable industrial and legislative change as well as greater resistance to unions among some employers.

In fact, Australians’ attitudes to unions are comparable to countries with high union density such as Sweden.

Still, the majority (65 per cent) of employees report being ‘satisfied’ non-members. In-depth interviews revealed several reasons for this: low levels of union representation in the workplace; the financial cost of membership; management opposition to unions; negative views about, or poor experiences with, unions; and a perception that unions are for vulnerable workers.

However, on this last point, the facts suggest otherwise: unionised employees report higher earnings and more skills than their non-union counterparts across the labour market.

In this report, we take a closer look at unrepresented workers – those non-union workers who would prefer to join. Unrepresented workers account for 10 per cent of employees, suggesting a potential union membership rate closer to 30 per cent. Compared with satisfied non-members, unrepresented workers tend to be younger, better off, more likely to come from a non-English speaking background, and seek either voice or protection from labour market insecurities or both.

Read the rest of the executive summary and the research statistics and findings and arguments at
http://www.australiaatwork.org.au/index.php

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