Downturns

Posted on | March 3, 2009 | No Comments

Don’t believe Dopplr, I’m actually in Brisbane this week. It’s a nice change to be back in the humidity and the neighbourhood without the obligation of going in to the office :-) I feel able to relax a bit and enjoy looking at things with a slightly less local lens.

This is the final year of formal interviews with my study participants and it’s struck me how much has changed since the Working From Home project began. When I first started talking to people about technology and work culture we were living with Work Choices, the ALP was in Opposition and the ACTU’s “Your Rights at Work” campaign was just beginning to build. In Queensland the economy was surging and Brisbane was welcoming thousands of migrants from the south each month. A wave of optimism buttressed a suite of cultural and civic policies seeking to design the perfect lifestyle city for “creatives”. I remember sitting in a Southbank auditorium in 2004 as a crowd of suits fawned over Richard Florida thinking: man, am I in the wrong business.

There’s still a lot of construction going on, thanks to Campbell “Can Do” Newman’s City Council mandate to build a heap of tunnels and apparently solve traffic congestion. As you come in to town–once you get past the stalled airport link debacle–a massive piece of machinery is doing something on the Gateway Bridge. The developments around Breakfast Creek and Bowen Hills are all still bordered by bunting; vast tracks of dirt forever promising a cosmopolitan playground of work/life affordances in the generic white collar and cocktails depictions on banners draped along the cyclone fencing.

Visiting one of the workers in my study today I was shocked to see a huge luxury apartment complex had been built to overshadow her magestic art deco flat on the top of Kangaroo Point cliffs. She can now look down on the yuppies swimming in their lap pool on the other side of the fence, and later in the year she’ll probably see them in the crowds enjoying the cutting-edge festival program she puts together. (On the bright side, at least her contract was renewed; and she’s building a fine reputation in the career she wants after a long and lonely apprenticeship.)

I’ve only just started the interviews, but already I get a sense that something has changed in Brisbane. It’s not just the orchestrated seriousness of Anna Bligh’s face perched above the major arterials into the city. The election has been called and Brisbane could make history by voting for its first female premier. A whole flank of my study’s participants seem to have been made redundant since last year’s interviews, and as their CEO rides off into the sunset, the survivors hardly seem happy to have been spared. What will happen next for this great city and its workers? Stay tuned to find out…

Category: Research, Work

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