Gillard, work and welfare

A sense of malaise and uncertainty pervades the Australian political scene, with both major parties derided as bereft of ideas.

This was not always so: in the 1900s, prior to the advent of the two-party system, Australia was perceived as a testing-ground for experimental, egalitarian policies. As the historian John Rickard wrote in his biography of Justice Henry Higgins, the first President of the Arbitration Court, social experiments such as arbitration, the eight-hour day and old age pensions led to Australasia being dubbed 'the social laboratory of the world'.

Of course, this egalitarian vision had appalling flaws, including its exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and Asian migrants. It should be noted, though, that the benefits of the Protectionist Deakin Government's reformist legislation went beyond the tangible; it spoke to the deeper needs of human beings within the capitalist system.

The 1907 Harvester decision exemplified this ideal: Higgins interpreted the expression 'fair and reasonable wage' to mean 'the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community'.

Although in rejecting John Howard's Work Choices regime at the 2007 election the nation reaffirmed its commitment to the rights of employees, Australia now seems a laboratory of a very different kind: there is a bipartisan commitment to the testing out of punitive welfare policies, particularly on Indigenous people. Sociologist Eva Cox has been a trenchant critic of the income management policies of the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, characterising 'the whole Northern Territory' as an 'experiment'.

The persistence of the emphasis on work from both sides of politics is also striking. Tony Abbott's language — including suggestions that long-term unemployed people be compelled to move to areas where unskilled work is available — seems a continuation of the rhetoric of the Howard and Costello era. It is Julia Gillard's approach that has attracted more commentary, precisely because it seems inconsistent with aspects of her party's history.

The journalist Brian Toohey noted that 'in emphasising hard work, Gillard never gives any hint that she values the labour movement's contribution to reducing working hours, starting with the eight-hour-day campaign in the 1850s'. Toohey further noted that despite the nominal 38 hour week, in July 2010 men in full-time jobs worked an average of 41 hours a week and women almost 36 hours, and that around 1.5 million people now work 50 or more hours a week.

The difficulty of combining work with family and other commitments has been addressed in limited fashion with the parental leave scheme but Howard's famous 'barbeque stopper' remains unsolved.

At the 2007 Federal election, Labor successfully asserted the primacy of familial life over 'workplace flexibility'. The omnipresent 'working families' slogan evoked Kevin Rudd's 2006 Monthly essays, where he argued that 'the impact of neo-liberalism cannot be effectively quarantined from its effect on the family'. Although many grew weary of its repetition, the slogan implied that we have an essential value beyond our labour — we are members of families and communities and our conditions of work must address our human needs as well as our employers' profit margins.

There was hope, then, that this government would take a more holistic view of the place of work in Australians' increasingly crowded lives and translate that view into innovative policy.

In her 2008 Quarterly Essay 'Love and Money', public intellectual Anne Manne persuasively critiqued what she termed the 'Get to Work neo-liberal program'. The essay catalogued market capitalism's destructive impacts on families and championed an ethic of care distinct from 'the work ethic', with its focus on a narrowly construed 'productivity'.

Manne suggested that Australian society found itself 'at an historic turning point in the relation between family and work', and found 'common ground' with 'Rudd's sense that we must create the social and economic foundations on which we can fulfil our responsibilities to others'.

The writer May Lam was more dubious, musing: 'I'd love to know how far Kevin 24/7 acknowledges the need for his staff and public servants to spend time with their families'. Given Gillard's fulsome praise of those who 'set their alarm clocks early' — not to spend time with their families, friends or neighbours but to increase the nation's productivity — Lam's scepticism seems well-founded.

Gillard's speech at the inaugural Whitlam oration was noted for her bald statements that 'we have moved beyond the days of big government and big welfare' and that Labor was 'the party of work not welfare'. These simplistic phrases are problematic — in the context of a globalised system with little regard for societal harmony, the national welfare state needs defenders. As the late historian Tony Judt wrote:

Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

Parties of the centre left are often reluctant to laud this legacy, as can be seen from Gillard's adoption of the language of the right. There are dangers in this timidity, as the achievements Judt mentions are always contingent and cannot be taken for granted. Praise for the dignity of work may also be taken to imply a corollary: that those who are not in paid employment — who care for children or relatives, who undertake volunteer work or who are incapable of working — cannot possess dignity.

The implication that all work is inherently rewarding also overlooks the role of social class in the modern economy. A journalist or politician may derive great status, satisfaction and meaning from his or work; a person who slaughters cattle in an abattoir may not. Those who romanticise the dignity of labour in the abstract often do so at a great distance from the less appealing specifics.

Further, as Overland editor Jeff Sparrow observed recently, 'too often, work's discussed simply as an end in itself, as if the main thing was to keep us all busy, irrespective of the purpose to which all that frantic activity is directed'. This focus elides the 'uncomfortable truth that not all production is actually productive'. Sparrow suggested: 'You can create as much work building nuclear missiles as by planting wheat, even though the world undeniably needs less of one and more of the other'.

Capitalism is above all amoral, demanding ever greater production and consumption without bothering overmuch about the nature of the goods or their societal impacts.

As the party of social democracy, it has historically been Labor's mission to moderate capitalism's impact on workers, and Gillard's 'alarm clock' rhetoric does not negate her government's support for workers' rights. As Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations in the Rudd Government, Gillard was instrumental in overturning Work Choices and replacing it with the Fair Work Act 2009. The Coalition's attacks on the FWA have been somewhat muted due to its appreciation of the continuing unpopularity of Work Choices — a policy which Abbott has declared 'dead, buried, cremated'.

However, as journalist Bernard Keane noted recently, the 'labour market deregulationistas' in the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Australian Industry Group and the commentariat have stubbornly continued to demand greater workplace 'flexibility' despite low unemployment rates and modest wage increases.

A campaign is building: journalist Geoff Kitney has suggested that Abbott's recent appeal to the mining industry to become 'political activists' is part of a 'broader strategy to create a powerful anti-Labor alliance between the conservative parties and the business community on a scale similar to that which worked to bring down the Whitlam Government in the early 1970s'.

Opponents of workplace regulation are well-resourced and powerful. In order to meet them head-on, the Government must do more than invoke the value of hard work, which tends to play into the hands of those who seek 'workplace flexibility'. After all, if work automatically confers great dignity, what does it matter that conditions are unsatisfactory? Surely work of any kind — no matter what the circumstances — is preferable to the shame of welfare?

The British literary theorist Terry Eagleton is rightly critical of the contemporary mindset that sees politics and morality as separate, with the former 'the technical business of public administration' and the latter merely 'a private matter'. The notion that politics belongs to the boardroom and morality to the bedroom has, Eagleton suggests, 'led to a lot of immoral boardrooms'.

In defending its reforms, the ALP will need convincingly to assert the innate value of human beings beyond their labour, both as individuals and as members of families and communities. In so doing, it must remind the electorate that working conditions, like the supports offered by the welfare state, are not solely a political or economic matter — they raise deeper moral questions about the state of the nation.