Only connect - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Morton
BUT, IN A SENSE, IT SHOULD HARDLY SURPRISE US THAT there's so little outcry about this particular scandal. To begin with, it's old news. More than two hundred years ago, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, English cities were full of displaced, unemployed, threadbare men who'd come from the country seeking work and found neither work nor wives. Some of these members of the late-eighteenth-century urban underclass ended up in Australia, at Her Majesty's pleasure. It's arguable that what's happening now is an upheaval no less far-reaching in its consequences than the Industrial Revolution: if that's so – and I happen to believe it is – then it's hardly surprising that there are winners and losers. Only a very small number of people now, middle-class romantics most of them, would wish to forgo the very real benefits that industrialisation and modern market capitalism have brought to the lives of the masses, though it took a 150 years, two world wars and indescribable slaughter and suffering for those benefits to become widely distributed.
Not long before the first of those world wars, the novelist E.M. Forster placed a two-word epigraph at the beginning of his novel Howard's End: "Only connect."
That epigraph is worth bearing in mind now, for a number of reasons.
In the first place, there are clear and important connections to be made between the condition of those on the very lowest rung of Australian society's "ladder of opportunity", and those on the rungs immediately above them. Many of the stresses and strains experienced by families in the lower-middle-income group – Mark Latham's "aspirationals" – are a product of the same economic and social transformation that has consigned those on the bottom to life in a permanent netherworld.
A couple of years ago, I spent several weeks talking to families in new housing estates in the south-western suburbs of Sydney about their hopes and aspirations. Most were happy to have made the leap into a middle-class ambience, often from "fibro-belt" suburbs with decaying infrastructure and poorly resourced public schools. Most of them worked in the service sector; it's where the majority of the new jobs have been created in Australia broadly, and in the outer suburbs of our cities in particular.
The longer we talked, however, the more evident the hidden costs of this transition became. Again and again, I heard stories of couples with young children moving into new houses on the estate, only to break up several months later. Again and again, the reasons cited were the same: financial stress, husbands working long hours to meet mortgage payments, wives struggling to balance part-time work with caring for young children. Pretty soon, everyone's lives are fraying around the edges.
Perhaps it really is necessary here to repeat the bleeding obvious one more time: if you are lower-middle-class parents with children in Australia and you want to prevent your family from sliding back into poverty, let alone have any aspirations to join the middle class, both of you will need to work. On the whole, your household will consist of a man in full-time work, almost certainly working longer than the standard 38.5 hours a week, and a woman in part-time work. It is simply impossible to escape this ineluctable economic law.
It's a law, however, of which the Federal Treasurer appears sublimely ignorant. On Budget night 2004, Peter Costello urged parents to have three children, one for mum, one for dad and one for the country. He has said many times that he favours further workplace deregulation, so that Australians will have the freedom to work longer hours in order to achieve their economic aspirations. That next wave of deregulation is about to become a reality and it promises a range of additional freedoms: the freedom to bargain away sick leave, carer's leave (where it exists) and a number of other entitlements that make it possible for people to carry out their responsibilities as parents while earning a living.
Only connect what's happening in the workplace and what's happening in the home, and the outcome is likely to be pretty clear: more and more of the stories I heard on the housing estates around Campbelltown and the surrounding suburbs; more and more fractured families; more and more women with children riding the down-escalator into poverty; and more and more humiliated, angry men.
A sceptic might retort that Australian political culture has shown itself remarkably capable of absorbing economic strain and social fragmentation without any signs of serious challenge to the status quo. After all, it's already absorbed 600,000 jobless families. There's no need for Costello to give up his daydreams of life in the Lodge just because a few aspirationals here and there are losing their dream homes and their 4WDs. And the same sceptic might add that the ALP has maintained a deafening silence about the condition of families on the lowest rung and seems sublimely indifferent to the "work-life collision". There are some notable exceptions: Lindsay Tanner has argued, in his book Crowded Lives (Pluto, 2003), that balancing family relationships with work obligations is "emerging as one of the central issues of twenty-first-century politics". But Tanner is a lonely voice in a party still dominated by hard men. It is these men, not Tanner, who are out of touch with the social realities of contemporary Australia.
IF THAT'S NOT CLEAR ALREADY, LET'S MAKE ONE FINAL SET OF CONNECTIONS. In the late 1990s, The Sydney Morning Herald published the results of a survey that asked young women between eighteen and 22 to describe what their lives would be like at the age of 35. More than 60 per cent imagined they would be working full-time and married with one or two children. On the whole, they had an optimistic view of their futures: they saw the balancing of work and family commitments as something manageable, negotiable with both partners and employers.
As Summers shows in The End of Equality, these young women are likely to be in for a rude shock when they begin to partner and have children. There is already a gulf between what the next generation of Australian parents says they actually want and what the workplace is offering them, and that gulf is set to widen even further.
Summers argues convincingly that Australian politicians and political institutions have abandoned the commitment to gender equality that was first forged in the 1970s and became a national goal for a couple of decades – the decades during which the young women interviewed by the Herald were growing up.
However, there's something missing from both the Herald survey and from the bleak portrait Summers paints: men. The newspaper did not consider it necessary to question young men about how they saw themselves in their mid-thirties, or about their attitudes to work and children. In all the 300 pages of The End of Equality, and especially in its final chapter on "Restoring Equality", there is scarcely a cursory mention of men, other than as pillars of patriarchy, and certainly no glimmer of any suggestion that men might be part of the solution as well as the problem.
I think this is misguided. In my view, the sorts of social and economic changes that Summers, Edgar and other authors mentioned above believe are necessary will only occur once men themselves begin advocating them. Only when the "work-family balance" is seen as an issue of equal concern to men and women will there be actual change in the workplace and in the political and institutional structures that define the rights of employees and the responsibilities of employers in the workplace.
Many feminists are sceptical about the likelihood of this happening. Why should men voluntarily give up the privileges they've enjoyed at work and at home, they argue? What's in it for them? There's plenty of good empirical research, moreover, carried out by Michael Bittman and others, which shows pretty convincingly that, measured in hours and minutes, men are doing only a little more of the caring for children and no more of the housework within families than they were 20 years ago.
I think it is not too glib to reply that many men working 50 or 60 hours a week as taxi drivers, shiftworkers or tradesmen would not regard their long working hours as a privilege. The Electrical Trades Union in Victoria ran a successful industrial campaign over several years to persuade their members – predominantly blue-collar, working-class men – that they should seek a ban on overtime beyond 48 hours a week, and then struck enforceable agreements with employers which entrenched that limit. The union talked to its members about the impact of long working hours on their family lives, and the members made shorter working hours an industrial demand.
This is only one example. But it points to what I believe is a larger and more potent reality. Many men already play active roles in caring for their children and many more would like to do so, if the strictures of long working hours were loosened and the culture of the workplace redesigned in the ways suggested by commentators like Edgar. Men and women have a shared interest in creating a new "Australian settlement" – one that recognises, as Edgar says, "the legitimate value of private, emotional involvement through the partnerships and responsibilities of family life, and the value of wider community engagement in both democratic decision-making and management of the common good". There is no reason why these should not become national goals in early-twenty-first-century Australia, but they will only become so if men start to agitate for them.
Ten years ago, the United Nations defined the family as "the world's smallest democracy". It would be fair to say that that definition remains an aspiration, rather than a lived reality. But it is a definition with a profoundly radical and emancipatory potential. As Eric Hobsbawm argues in a recent essay in the London Review of Books, the last third of the twentieth century saw "the most rapid and radical global change in ... gender and generational relations" in human history. This change has been driven primarily by women, but now men too have been drawn into the "everyday social experiments", to use Anthony Giddens' phrase, which those changes have brought with them, and in which women and men are engaged every day in Australian families. Within those everyday social experiments lie the seeds of a new politics and the genesis of a more just, equal and decent society. ♦