Down and out in Oz before Howard's IR revolution
This is Webdiarist Terrence Pihlgren's first piece for Webdiary, a review of Elisabeth Wynhausen's book Dirt Cheap. Terrence writes: "I'm a former IT worker, now 61 years old and a self funded retiree. I live on Mornington Peninsula with my wife and two dogs and have three adult children and six grandchildren. I came across Webdiary about a year ago and have followed it ever since, posting occasionally." See also Rubens Camejo's Stretching the safety net dollar to breaking point.
Inspired by an American book by Barbara Ehrenreich called Nickel and Dimed, Elisabeth Wynhausen took 12 months absence from her job as a journalist with The Australian with the intention of testing whether she could get by as a low paid worker in Australia.
The book is a mix of anecdotes of her experience and statistics she presents to support her points. It is an enjoyable read, laced with her wry humor, although when I finished reading it I felt somewhat depressed at her findings.
A couple of things I didn’t like about the book. By necessity EW used false names for the suburbs and the companies she worked for. I found difficulty with this device, and would have preferred to know. However, accepting she had to protect the interests of the workers she portrayed, this is not a major criticism.
One other annoying thing for me was the constant concern she had that she would be recognised and uncovered as a reporter. This never happened, and I felt her fears were unrealistic, as except for those on TV, most media people are not well enough known to be recognised out of their normal setting.
EW established a few rules to govern her project. She would apply for any unskilled jobs she saw advertised, and take the first one offered. Her accommodation could not be shared so she could write about her experiences each night. She concocted a history of unskilled work, but interestingly employers never checked her claims.
Finding a job
Generally Australians believe there are plenty of unskilled jobs out there. One surprising point, given the low employment rate, was how difficult even low paid jobs were to find. EW applied for advertised jobs for a month before she took her leave of absence, with virtually no replies. She cites one job where 500 people applied. Ultimately EW has to resort to door knocking, which resulted in casual work. EW found the low paid jobs are not considered to be worth listing on the Internet.
Retail jobs dried up during the colder months, and the casualisation of the workforce meant that retailers simply did not call people in to work as demand slackened.
At one stage EW admits to feeling desperation at not being able to find unskilled work. Although she knows she has another life where she is a successful journalist, there is an impact on her self-esteem that no one wants to hire a bright articulate worker.
I did a little bit of research of my own on the availability of jobs. I analysed the jobs advertised in my local paper for the Frankston area for two weeks:
Number job ads from Frankston Independent, 17th and 24th May 2005
5 positions requiring special qualifications
8 positions with or without experience.
Population Frankston 120,000
No. Households 48,000
Expectations of Workers
More than one in four Australian workers are casual. Surprisingly EW points out that no other country in the world has a higher rate of casualisation of the workforce.
Lack of consideration for the individual was a constant theme with many of the jobs she did. Workplace agreements were merely a formality; there were no negotiations and the contract was simply presented for the workers to sign. Yet the government refuses to recognise the considerable imbalance of bargaining power between unskilled workers and their employers, who have legal and other professional resources.
EW would apply for a job, then on attending would be informed the job involved duties and conditions of work that had never been mentioned when she was hired. At one of the jobs she did in a private club, she was informed she would be working the same days each week so could get another job on her days off. She later found that without consultation she was rostered to work eight days in a row including her days off, so she could not have successfully held down another job.
She found that the much mooted work place flexibility referred to by the government and employers was all on the employer’s side. In one job EW had with a department store she was expected to be on call 24/7 with about 20 minutes notice. If she turned down a request, it might be some time before there would be another opportunity to work.
EW was offered between 0-38 hours a week, usually in 3 hour shifts so the employer would not need to pay for a break. (In some states a minimum shift of two hours is allowed.)
The difficulty with this arrangement was that she would not know from one week to the next how many hours would be available, and because she was on call with as little as 20 minutes notice, found it difficult to balance a second or third job. One other complication, basically a poverty trap, is that Centrelink payments are based on when the hours are worked not when the money is received, so a part pension is reduced although the employee may not yet have the money in hand.
The Pay
How low is low? The office-cleaning job EW took on offered three hours a night at $13 an hour - $39 a day less tax. If the costs of getting to work are factored into this, low is indeed very low. Some women cleaning houses in the suburbs were paid as little as $10 an hour.
Most of us have heard about casual workers being paid $20 an hour to make up for the lack of holiday and sick pay. EW’s job with the department store paid $19.06 an hour, pretty fair we might say. Her gross pay packet was $624; after tax earnings were $544. However the 32.45 hours required to earn this were spread over three weeks. So she had earned $200 a week, $33 less than the government benefit for an unemployed single person.
The expected low wages were exacerbated by the fact that low paid jobs are in areas where the workers cannot afford to live. This results in long travelling times to get to jobs offering as little as three hours a day. And EW quotes housing stats prepared by RMIT which show that most low-income families had to spend more that 30% of their income on housing.
Some employers even felt they were being generous paying wages. One boss of a cleaning company said, “I too good to people”, after a cleaner had left the job as soon as he got his first pay cheque.
Stealing Time
Underpayment - by not paying the employee either the proper hourly rate or demanding extra time from the employee and then deliberately not recognising the time worked - was prevalent. To me it was rather sickening that wealthy people and companies would exploit the weakest and lowest paid. For example, an office cleaning job ripped her off by more than $2 an hour and a nursing home expected her to work 45 unpaid minutes after her shift. EW points out although this is actual theft from the workers, the Federal Government turns a blind eye. In 2003 although there were 5,000 underpayment complaints but only seven prosecutions.
EW quotes figures to show with the new economy, whilst many have prospered, low paid workers have gone backwards. Over two million casual workers are denied the benefits of permanency, such as predictability of income, paid holidays and sick days.
She found that low paid workers, in addition to missing the perks enjoyed by full time workers, were no longer valued. They were invisible to management, who never consulted them or considered their needs when assigning work.
What about her original objective? Was she able to get by on the wages she received?
At the end of her book she concludes that minimum wage employees can get by provided they work full time. However if workers are in the “zone of intermittent employment” otherwise known as casual work, where they wait for days not knowing whether they will be called to work, life can be bitter.
No, she didn’t get by, because she found full time work elusive, and spent her working hours, like millions more, unappreciated, underpaid, and unseen.
Elisabeth Wynhausen has painted a bleak picture of these workers. With the IR changes announced by the government their numbers might increase, and some people who were previously amongst the winners in the new economy might join the legion of the dirt cheap workers.
