Not just any job
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Miriam Lyons
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Miriam Lyons' biography and other articles by this writer
It is either the best of times or the worst of times to be a young worker in Australia. For the lucky ones with skills to sell and the confidence and experience to negotiate a high price for their labour, there are rich pickings in the Australian job market. For the under-educated and underemployed, for those who don't know their rights or need a job too much to assert them, these are frightening times.
Each of these groups has provided poster children in the campaigns for and against the Howard Government's WorkChoices Bill. With 688 pages of legislation already in action, the stage is set for the next phase of the debate. The government will defend itself against the siege of public opinion, and the union movement will reclaim some of its lost momentum by turning that opinion into action. But behind the struggle over the rights of workers lies a more subtle contest for the right to define what a worker is. The outcome of this contest could determine the future of our working lives.
On the eve of his tenth anniversary in power, Prime Minister John Howard was asked by ABC's Radio National to comment on his popularity among younger voters (41 per cent voted for him in the last election, only a third voted for Mark Latham)."I've found over the last ten years that the approaches of the government that has most appealed to the young are those that involve change and those that involve a greater emphasis on individual choice ... I call them the great options society ... Take something like industrial relations. I find talking to young people that there's quite strong support for the notion of choice in the workplace."
Defending WorkChoices in a speech to the Sydney Institute last year, he spoke of a "new breed" of workers who wanted the "independence and flexibility of working for themselves ... There is no more important economic development in Australia in the last two decades than the rise of the ‘enterprise worker'."
Enterprise. Worker. The simple act of taking those two words and splicing them together may go down as one of Howard's greatest linguistic sleights of hand. The term bundles complex web of changes together in the one attractive package – and gives us the credit for creating it. Australian Workplace Agreements, labour hire, contracting, freelancing, outsourcing, downsizing, the fall of the unions, the rise of the temp agency – the enterprise worker is responsible for it all.
Conflict of interest between the enterprise and the worker? Nonsense! You are not working for a business – you are a business. All's fair in love and free enterprise.
Prime ministers no longer have the luxury of voicing untested opinions. If Howard talks about enterprise workers, then the chances are that somehow, somewhere, numbers have been crunched to demonstrate that this notion will appeal to voters.
At last year's Fair Go conference in New South Wales, Helen Trinca, editor of Boss magazine, said: "The Prime Minister's comments invite Australians to construct a new identity for themselves. They are encouraged to see themselves as having a level of personal power that they could never have imagined when they operated in the command and control organisation."
Howard's invitation to construct an "independent" identity not only appeals to those who already work for themselves or think of themselves as "entrepreneurs". It may also appeal to workers who survived the traumatic restructuring of the 1980s – reluctant to latch their sense of self to such an unreliable mast as the modern corporation. And it probably resonates with anyone young enough to have grown up expecting an uncertain future – particularly if they are one of the lucky ones with parents or education to fall back on if something goes wrong.
It may even attract those who oppose WorkChoices, Prime Minister Howard and everything he stands for.
SARAH-JANE WHOULAHAN HAS JUST FINISHED MAKING a video clip for a Living End song called Long Live the Weekend.
"It's about working for the man. We did this video with a graph measuring happiness versus productivity, and scenes with punks smashing up office equipment."
At twenty-eight, Whoulahan has never worked in an office. "I haven't even seen many offices in my life. They're just these fictional things that exist in sitcoms. I imagine there are cubicles. And water coolers." But after seven years of running a small film production company with business partner Sean Gilligan, Whoulahan has finally heard the call of the water cooler. The paint is drying on the walls of a new office for Squareyed Films in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley. It's the first time she and Gilligan have had a space to work in outside their respective homes.
Before starting Squareyed, Whoulahan taught teenagers at the Australian Acting Academy, while Gilligan marked time at Movieworld. "We were both completely over it," she says. The pair decided to quit their jobs, go on the dole and start making music videos. "We wanted to be creative, to make our own movies all the time, and be given the funds to do that. Making music videos was the only avenue we could see that wasn't advertising or corporate videos."
The big attraction, she says, was autonomy. "I wanted to be able to control my day, say when and where I'd work, and to be my own boss. I actually have a huge problem with earning an hourly wage – [it's like] saying that, to give up being me, my value is this much per hour. That really disgusts me."
As a part-time activist who is about to spend a month working without pay on ABC TV's The Chaser's War on Everything, Whoulahan finds her own attitudes to work confusing. "The ideal for me is individuals interacting and negotiating. That sounds like John Howard, doesn't it?"