Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Under this coalition government, working people have less control over their lives than ever before, but the problems have been around for a while. The last time I introduced a version of this bill to give people more control over the hours and arrangements of their working lives, back in 2012, the Labor Party refused to support it even though we were in a position where we could have got it through the minority parliament. Now, six years later, we still have the same problems and some of them are getting worse. Take unemployment, for example. Just last week, unemployment ticked up to 5.6 per cent—the last time it was under five per cent was in November 2008. In 2012, when I last introduced this bill, it was 5.3 per cent, but now it looks like it could reach six per cent.

In my previous speech in 2012, I noted that Australians performed $72 billion of unpaid overtime each year. Now, it's estimated to be $130 billion. In 2012, according to the ABS, our underutilisation rate was 12.7 per cent, but now it's 13.9 per cent. It's the same story with the underemployment ratio, which has gone up from 7.8 to 8.9 per cent. To move away from percentages—this is a huge number of people. The amount of underemployed people in this country was around 872,000 in 2012, when I last stood here on this matter, and is now over 1.1 million people.

In my last speech, I said that 'if people want to work different hours or work from home so that their life is better, then the law should allow it and society should encourage it, provided it does not unduly impact on their employer.

The ironic reality of how trickle-down economics or neoliberalism is twisting workers is painfully borne out by the data, which shows why we need this reform. In Australia people are both overworked and underworked simultaneously. According to research conducted by the Australia Institute in November last year, 27 per cent of full-time workers said they would prefer to work fewer hours. In contrast, part-time and casual workers work far fewer and more uncertain hours, and they want to work more. In fact, 45 per cent of part-time workers and 60 per cent of casuals said they want to work more. The Australia Institute's report Excessive hours, unpaid overtime and the future of work: an update puts it best:

At the same time as we're rightly worried about the effect of technology and automation on the workforce, it also becomes clear how, if we had control over it, it could actually be beneficial. It could provide workers with more flexibility—not just the flexibility to work from home but the flexibility to reduce their hours as well. Technology could help create more jobs, but only if the community has control over how that technology is used and implemented in our workplace and if people as workers have control of it, so it's used not to displace workers but to make work better.

We need the law to keep pace with changes in society and technology. Our job in this place is to examine society to identify problems—and then to work as hard as we can to correct them. It's not our job to just sit back in this chamber and allow markets, big corporations and those that have power to wield it with no consequences. One of the fundamental reasons we have government is to intervene when the system is no longer working in the best interests of the people that it's meant to serve, and right now, with so many people clamouring for more work and so many others saying, 'Hang on; we're actually being overworked,' it's clear that the law is not serving people.

We need this reform and we need it urgently. Right now there too many people who are not in a job that matches their circumstances. The trends identified by the Australia Institute match the ABS data, which shows that 23½ per cent of 20-to-24-year-olds want more hours in their main job, but meanwhile, if you go to the other end of the spectrum, a staggering 20.1 per cent of 55-to-59-year-olds want less. Overall almost three out of 10 employees are dissatisfied with the number of hours they work in their main job. We have a national crisis when it comes to young people. When you add together the number of young people who are unemployed and the number of young people who want more work—that is, those who are underemployed—about one in three young people in this country either doesn't have a job or doesn't have enough hours of work. And it's got worse since the GFC, not better.

We are on the verge on condemning a whole generation of young people to never having decent jobs and income. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum there are people who are saying, 'I'd be happy to work less, in fact, I want to work less,' but our law does not allow for them to have an enforceable right to do it. In this respect, we are behind other countries. If we gave people more control over their working lives and an enforceable right to ask for different working arrangements, we could share available work around more fairly, and we could relieve the pressure on people, on young and older workers, especially those who are juggling work and caring responsibilities. Right now under Labor's Fair Work Act, all you have got in law is a right to have a conversation with your employer. If the boss says no, you've got nowhere to go. It's not an enforceable right, and we need to make it enforceable.

This bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Better Work/Life Balance) Bill, gives people that enforceable right to request different hours and arrangements for work, especially if they have caring responsibilities. Employees would have the right to ask that their working hours be decreased or increased, which the employer could refuse only on reasonable business grounds, and the Fair Work Commission would be empowered to decide whether the employer's refusal was reasonable. Employees with caring responsibilities would have greater rights, with employers only able to refuse on serious countervailing business grounds. I think most people in this place would agree that caring—caring for kids or caring for your parents as they get older—is work. It is work. Increasingly, it is becoming difficult to balance that with work responsibilities. So many people are saying, 'We are being overworked,' at the same time as many people on the other side of the spectrum are saying, 'We are being underworked.' We are doing a very bad job in this country of matching the hours people actually work with the hours that they want to work. Unless we tackle it, we not only condemn a generation of young people to underemployment and unemployment for a very, very long time but condemn other people to having unfulfilling family and personal lives, because their employer is able to dictate what counts as flexibility. For too long, flexibility has been a one-way street. It's been something employers have been able to demand, but when employees want it, when employees want a bit more control over their life, a bit more certainty over how many hours they're going to work—a bit more or a bit less—they're unable to get it. It seems the flexibility only ever works from the top down. And in a country like Australia, especially as we see rising unemployment and underemployment, we should be able to tackle this. We're going to need to change the rules and accept, as the Greens have been arguing since 2012, that the Fair Work Act is broken, that it tilts the balance in favour of big corporations and that it does not give people the rights to control their own working environment. So the stakes are high. If we keep going as we are, we condemn a generation of young people to not having enough work and to not having good enough incomes. And we also know that, at the other end of the spectrum, we are impacting on people's health.

A recent study conducted by Indiana University's Kelley School of Business found that those who work in high-stress jobs with little control over their arrangements at work are more likely to die sooner than those who have more control over and balance in their work. That stands to reason. It stands to reason that, if you don't have control over the hours that you're able to work—whether it's a bit more or a bit less—and it impacts on your life outside because your life is too insecure or you're balancing too many responsibilities, that causes stress and that makes people less happy and less healthy. Workers who are happier and healthier are more motivated and are more likely to stay in a workplace longer. Changing the law and giving workers this right is not an attack on business. This should make business better. And, in other countries where they have made the right enforceable, there hasn't been an outbreak of litigation. You end up with a few decisions from the tribunal that sets the ground rules and then people adjust accordingly. This reform is long overdue. The Greens have been pushing for action on it since 2012. We will keep pushing for action, and I hope that others support it.

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