Thursday, January 11, 2007
Queenslanders workin' too hard
A survey by travel company Expedia has revealed that Queenslanders take the least annual leave in Australia – just 16 days per year. As a whole, Australians, take 17 days. Internationally, this is the second lowest, after the US, whose workers take just 14 days holiday per year.

In contrast, Germans take 27 days, Brits 24 and Canadians 26. Not surprisingly, the French topped the charts with a whopping 39 days. In August, the nations puts up a sign saying “Closed, back in September”.

I personally know people who work like dogs: six or seven days a week, as self-employed or small business ‘tradies’. No doubt they are earning huge amounts of money, hopeful of setting themselves up for some mythical future date, when they can slow down and enjoy their amassed wealth.

Others I know work long, long hours because they are effectively ‘owned’ by their employers. As sponsored workers, their continued residence in Australia is dependent on their ‘satisfactory’ employment at that firm. This provides excellent incentive to work longer and harder, when tapped on the shoulder.

The pressure of not being able to leave work and the deregulation (de-unionisation) of the workforce are undoubtedly big factors in the survey findings. Few people profess to wanting to work longer and do so only through compulsion, feelings of guilt or fear of being singled out by their boss as the ‘wimp in the workplace’ who can’t hack the long hours.

Even when people are on leave, work life intrudes. 75% of Australian respondents reported being asked to perform tasks or come into the work while on leave.

But it’s different for others. I like my job, but some people are utterly enthralled by theirs. For them, the long hours and lack of holiday is barely noticed. Their work is their life. The salary is merely a bonus.

And for others, particularly men, they no doubt secretly prefer the longer hours, regardless of the nature of their work. It gets them away from the domestic, the mundane and the stressful.

Personally, I would prefer to be sat at my desk at 8am and leave the frenetic morning activity at home to someone else. Ensuring two young boys are fed, dressed, have school bags and two prepared lunches ready and are waiting at the bus stop by 8am is infinitely more stressful than meandering through your morning’s emails over coffee. But to leave all that to one’s partner - who also works – is inherently lazy.

But other ‘structural’ factors are probably equally important in forcing this trend to longer hours, but are rarely explored in main stream media. Worse, they are insidious and self-perpetuating.

Tourism and Transport Forum spokeswoman Joyce DiMascio touched on it when – commenting on the survey - she said: "People are very busy. They are very tired, so they are spending their money on creating a cocoon at home so they can enjoy that with the flat screen TV, the wonderful sofa and the colour co-ordinated cushions."

Yes, people really would prefer a new tele to more time at home or on leave with family and friends out in the city or country.

The consumption mania which drives us to own bigger homes, flatter TVs and more cushions than your neighbours is permitting employers to stretch their workforce. They become more willing to bargain away holidays and work longer hours. Logically, employers leverege this ‘demand’ for working harder, encouraging them to offer poorer conditions as the market dictates, to the detriment of the entire work force.

If we gauged our wealth in purely absolute terms, there would be some salvation; at least some opportunity to step aside from the fray. But this is the big lie that our consumer culture spins – overwhelmingly we are conditioned by advertisers to gauge our wealth in comparison to others. We can therefore never be content, as wealth turns out be a zero-sum game after all. Your neighbour’s assent of the ladder can only come at your expense. By analogy, it is not really a ‘ladder of opportunity’ – more a human pyramid.

Of course, the employers offering us longer hours are the same employers that directly benefit from our preoccupation with our neighbour’s plasma screen TV.

A sanguine view of this working life survey could suggest long hours are merely a reflection of the freedom to work harder and longer Australians now enjoy, emancipated from a regulated industrial relations regime, mistakenly promoted by trades unions for the last 100 years. This is the rhetoric behind John Howard’s WorkChoices legislation: workers should not be forced to accept twenty days leave per year: they should be treated with maturity and given the option to swap it for money instead.

And swapping it for money is exactly what they are doing. How sad.

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