Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The other members may have had more horse-and-cart driven experiences, I understand! However, I was a mere check-out chick at Coles at the time. The reality for young people at the time that I first experienced work was that it was a fairly manageable and a tremendously positive experience.

Now, of course, as we know, the nature of work is very deregulated. Working in the retail industry is a full weekend, and we heard from students who worked two eight-hour shifts, on Saturday and Sunday, on a weekend. Then there is the fast food industry. I remember the first KFC when I was a kid and what an extraordinary thing it was. It certainly was not open every night of the week. But now in the fast food industry there are multiple sites in every town which are open seven nights a week, often until midnight, and they are staffed by, by and large, school-age students.

What we are seeing is a significant increase in the number of young people engaged in part-time work while they are in school, but most importantly, and what we heard a great deal of from young people, was that the nature of that work is also different. We should acknowledge that it was the view of nearly everybody who submitted that public policy has in some ways been blind to this development in our society; that young people working is a very common Australian experience for whatever reason, perhaps because we do not have cheap entry level labour from neighbouring countries that comes here to work in the ways that perhaps America and parts of Europe experience. We have had a long tradition of relying on our young people under the age of 18-19 to fill those gaps in the workforce. I think both the economy and young people and their families have gained great benefits from that.

However, the expansion of, not only the number of hours, but also the hours at which young people are working is an issue that I think public policy now needs to pay attention to. Given that these young people are not legally adults—they are in transition to adulthood—we have a responsibility above and beyond what we have to normal employees and students, to make sure that they are treated well. That is what this report attempts to go to in addressing it.

Many speakers have talked about the variety of reasons that students gave us about why they work. It is important we understand why young people decide to work. Many of the media interviews I have done since we tabled the report contain a bit of a snide comment that young people are just a materialist generation—they all just want mobile phones and designer brand clothing. Well, to be honest with you, what has changed? Certainly, when I was young, I was not working primarily for the love of it, I was working for some independent money and I think that is a good thing. Young people decide that they want those additional things in their life. Many of them said, ‘I do not want to be constantly badgering mum and dad for the money for those additional items such as mobile phones or new clothing’ or, indeed, for their social life, to be constantly asking for money to go to the movies or whatever. They like the fact that they can support themselves in that way. I think that is commendable and we should recognise it and not in any way downgrade that aspiration.

We heard, clearly, parents saying to them to go out and get a job. The vast majority of parents reflect the fact that they like young people to be earning a bit of income, to be learning some responsibility and to be starting the transition to adulthood in the workplace. A lot of young people however did say that they thought their school was perhaps not quite as supportive, that the school tended to have a view that if work was a problem, give it up—the priority should be school. Many of the young people agreed that their education was the priority, however, work was very important to them.

We should also recognise that many young people said, ‘Yes, I am working for money, obviously; I am not out there doing it for the love of it’ but they were very able to identify lots of other benefits that they got from that experience of work. Many of them talked about the social networks, the employment networks, the importance of their CV when they go out to look for work after school, having had that work experience. We should acknowledge that opinion was expressed by young people who aspired to work after school and those who aspired to go on to further study. Many of them knew that when they left school and looked for a part-time job at 18 they were less attractive to employers compared to the 15-year-olds out there in the market. But if they were an existing employee—if they had already worked for that organisation for a couple of years while they were at school—they were more likely to be kept on. They were very canny, I have to say, in their assessment of the work market and the opportunities and the benefits they were getting from their casual jobs. As an example, there was a student at the forum in the Illawarra Senior College at Port Kembla and he said that he liked the workplace because it was like a second family.

Many students reflected that they really liked the fact that they were meeting adults and young people from outside their immediate school and family circle and that they were learning to interact with the broader population in a way that gave them skills. In fact many of them said that the part-time job was actually an escape, that they liked feeling competent and in charge in the job and able to do the tasks that were set them—perhaps compared to struggling through the academic studies of the senior years and trying to keep on top of all of that. They had a real sense of pride in what they were doing. It is important to understand that they really value their jobs, and that is reflected in the fact that many of them make other sacrifices in their lives to keep them. They may give up sport or even time with friends because they want to keep their job and they value the experience they get from it.

The important thing to take from the feedback from young people is that they had the view that it was a positive experience. They did not want government to take actions that would downgrade the value of what they were doing. We heard very strongly from them that they did not want us to regulate. Many students said to us, ‘If you limit the number of hours I can work I may well give up school to do the job, not the other way around.’ We tried to respect those views. The one area I suppose we did struggle with a little was the late hours. We heard of students working at fast food outlets where the shift was supposed to finish at 10 pm who had a rush of customers at the last minute, the outlet did not actually shut until 11 pm and then they had to clean up. Being a parent who has sat in a car outside one of those places I can well understand the frustration that causes. They get home at midnight and then try to do homework, get up early in the morning to do it or take a day off school the next day to try and catch up. So there are implications around that.

The committee took the view that the best way to progress this is to do what we can to get the community to engage in a conversation about this aspect of our young people’s life experiences and about our responsibilities as the parents, teachers and employers in their lives to make sure that there is a positive outcome. We put recommendations in place that are more educative than regulatory, in an attempt to get a broader consensus of responsibility in the community and to support these young people.

It is important to note—and the member for Swan highlighted this—that the number of young people we talked to who had no idea about their rights and protections in the workplace was quite shocking. We were particularly concerned that many of them reflected that they could not simply say no. They used terms like ‘guilt trip’ quite consistently. They would say that they had indicated to their employer that they were available to do one eight-hour shift each week, but someone else would not be available so they would get a phone call. Many of them take their mobiles to school and leave them on so that their employers can ring them to come in at the last minute. That is how they end up doing excessive hours, beyond what they should be doing. Regularly, over and over again, out of an overdeveloped sense of responsibility they said, ‘Oh, no—I can’t say no to the boss. They really rely on me’, and their capacity to say, ‘I appreciate your dilemma, but tonight I’ve got an assignment due. I cannot do an additional shift,’ was, sadly, not very commonly shown. We saw a lot of young people who because of their sense of responsibility could not say no—or, sadly, many of them reflected that if they say no they do not get any more shifts. That was a less common problem but it was still there.

We have endorsed things under Fair Work Australia such as the youth liaison officer and the toolkit that is being developed to provide young people with information. I would like to recommend to members of the chamber that they take the opportunity to look at this report and particularly to look at the words of the young people who have put in a lot of time on this. They deserve respect for the effort they also have put into the report.

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