Preparing for Labour Day

Posted on | April 25, 2008 | 3 Comments

Those of you on Facebook might have noticed that I’ve been helping the UQ Branch of the NTEU expand its online presence. I was motivated to do this after hearing that the Queensland Division was reconsidering the ‘expense’ of having a tent with free food and drink for NTEU members at the Labour Day celebrations because not enough members have been turning up.

Having gone to the event last year I can attest to how few people were there, but I also found it a bit strange that there weren’t more people there my own age. In an election year when the main issue was workplace reform, it seemed just as likely that the NTEU hadn’t been pitching its message in the right places. Now, it’s not as if I think web workers or younger academics are in any way inclined to see themselves in need of labour politics (far from it) but inviting people through a familiar interface does send a wider message of engagement. Anyway, I’ve set up the group as an experiment in seeing what might happen if union membership got a bit of a makeover… so do consider joining if this sounds good to you.

I haven’t been a union member very long, for the same reason a lot of my colleagues offer: when you are a sessional or junior staff member it makes little sense to spend your minimal wages on union membership, especially when you have a HECS debt and no chance of any ongoing relationship with your employer. For some reason I always felt that the union had little cause to advocate on behalf of sessionals either, figuring it already had its work cut out recruiting and representing full time staff under a Howard Government.

But things are changing: this website shows there is growing recognition of the significance of casual labour in the university. Filling out the survey there will help build a case for what’s actually going on in workplaces around the country, and I urge everyone on casual contracts to do it.

Talking to Michael McNally yesterday, he asked me how long I’d been in Brisbane, and whether there was any likelihood of an ongoing job. This is my fifth year at UQ, and even though I have achieved a lot, there is no structure in place which would mean I could be offered an ongoing research job by the university. Teaching seems out of the question given how little turnover there is in Brisbane and how few tenured positions there are in the first place. So unless something else comes up I will have to apply for more federal funding and another contract early next year to start again the year after — maybe in Brisbane, but probably not with an academic partner also on contract and wanting work.

A key problem research careers pose for labour politics is that a lot of the claims are about affective rather than financial security. I get paid well but I have to live with the anxiety of not knowing whether I can come up with a good idea at the right time to keep my job. This leads to the trap of overcommitment (i.e., overwork) as a safety-net against those times (that always seem imminent) that motivation or inspiration won’t strike when they have to. This has the added side effect of normalising a particular rate of output that teaching staff then have to compete against when applying for grants of their own.

All of this seems a genuinely new problem for humanities researchers who, unlike the sciences, don’t work in teams in labs set up by leading professors. Research careers have been rare in this area in the past. And while some of the union’s recent campaigns indicate it is coming to terms with this changing landscape, it has a long way to go. I actually think the ARC has done quite a lot to improve the range of options for academics wanting to pursue research careers — changing the guidelines for Professorial Fellowships to favour younger scholars is the latest example. There is now a clear trajectory from APD, ARF to APF that can genuinely rival the teaching and research path.

Of course, my current study indicates that conventional labour politics must be urgently renovated to take account of online culture. I’ve just been writing to Sydney University academic Brigid Van Wanrooy about her Centre’s submission to the Government’s National Employment Standards exposure draft, which called for a limit to working hours in Australia.

These two graphs, taken from the submission document, show the difference in working hours between countries with regulated hours and those that don’t.

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Meanwhile this graph I just love because it shows how working hours have changed since the year I was born!

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While the figures make a strong case for regulation, as stark as they are they lack the nuance required to understand workers’ motivations for working long hours (as an earlier paper of Brigid’s, co-written with Shaun Wilson, makes clear.) Further, I’d argue that online technologies are changing our capacity and willingness to report when we are formally working.

For instance, the employees I’m interviewing have the internet at home and will keep reading work email ‘recreationally’ (with a glass of wine, watching TV, in bed) often until they go to sleep. They regularly begin the day checking and writing messages over breakfast or get up earlier to do so before the kids are awake. As I argue in this article, soon to be published in Feminist Media Studies, this kind of ‘flexibility’ is being trumpeted by tech companies as the way to deliver women the freedom to maintain family commitments while still embarking on paid work – which doesn’t do anything to change the workplace culture that demands long hours as a sign of employee loyalty.

But other things my study picks up include how people use social networking sites to develop and maintain contacts and relationships for future work possibilities – what we might call “prospective” work that takes place in addition to their current job. That is when they aren’t spending a “second” or “third” shift promoting their band or some other quasi-professional pursuit through these same online networks. Are they still working in those moments, according to the sort of statistics government policy relies on?

These are some of the things I’m looking forward to talking about this Labour Day. It would be great to know if you’re coming, either here or here.

Category: Events, Research, Work

Comments

3 Responses to “Preparing for Labour Day”

  1. Rebecca Copas (usually curaezipirid in the internet)
    May 19th, 2008 @ 4:19 pm

    Your essay seems to be asking a question more than giving me any answer. I like the graph about working hours, and it’s good to see it levels out after a peak around 2000.
    It would be worth doing a similar graph back for more years, to catch the pre-forty hour working week comparison, and simultaneously compare the same period in unemployment statistics.

    However, as for me, I have never been able to keep up the facade of telling it like the lecturers want me to for long enough to get even an undergraduate degree; but am academic enough all the same.

  2. Ben Eltham
    July 28th, 2008 @ 6:20 pm

    Hi Melissa, Ben Eltham here from the Centre for Policy Development. This is a great paper.

    I’d like to cite in a forthcoming book I’m working on for UNSW Press. I shall be looking out for it when it gets published ;)

  3. melgregg
    August 4th, 2008 @ 11:00 am

    Hi Ben, Sweet. What’s the book?
    The reference to look for will be Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2008

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