No WorkChoices - we're toiling round the clock

ALMOST a third of Australian employees work unsocial hours - between 7pm and 7am - and even more complain they have no say about when they start or finish. Source: Sydney Morning Herald

As the Howard Government seeks to soothe unease about its workplace laws, a Bureau of Statistics survey reveals the deep incursion work has already made into family and community life.

The figures show 37 per cent of employees work overtime or extra hours - and about half of them do so for no extra pay.

Thirty per cent said their shifts regularly overlapped the hours between 7pm and 7am as part of their main job. Three in five said they had no say about when they started or finished.

As for weekends, 16 per cent said they were required to work on Saturdays, and 8.5 per cent on Sundays. One in four were not always allowed to choose when to take their holidays.

"It is not just family life, but community life that is being compromised," said the director of the Workplace Research Centre at Sydney University, John Buchanan. "It just rips the heart out of the football team."

Dr Buchanan said the trend towards irregular working hours was driven both by businesses seeking to maximise profits and workers seeking to fuel their ever-growing consumption desires.

"On the demand side, employers are looking for ways to get the most out of their workers," he said. "On the supply side, we're caught in a fairly destructive work-spend cycle so that as we earn more money, we spend more, and as we spend more, we have to work more to keep up our consumption. It's a lot harder for people to achieve that within standard hours, so they're working overtime."

However, a professor of industrial relations at Griffith University, David Peetz, said the shift was driven more by employer demands than employee wishes.

"I don't think people have decided, 'Gee, I wish I could work late at night.' Sometimes it is driven by employee wishes, but the trend we have seen over the long term, of an increasing incursion into the balance between work and life, is driven more by what employers want."

As industrial relations firms as a key election battleground, the new figures sparked fresh debate about the impact of the Government's industrial relations laws.

Dr Buchanan said the new laws had sped up a trend that was in place over the past two decades. "WorkChoices legislation formalised the abolition of the standard working week. [It] allowed the elimination of penalties without increasing the base rate."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald