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Home > Publications > Securing Quality Employment: Policy Options for Casual and Part-time Workers in Australia

Securing Quality Employment: Policy Options for Casual and Part-time Workers in Australia

Report prepared for the Chifley Research Centre - March 2004

Barbara Pocock, Labour Studies, University of Adelaide
John Buchanan, ACIRRT, University of Sydney
Iain Campbell, Centre for Applied Social Research, RMIT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Problem: The number of jobs with inferior rights and benefits has increased rapidly in Australia over the past twenty years. One in four Australians are now employed on casual terms. This proportion has grown quickly in recent years. Many employees who are employed casually are working for short periods in limited term jobs. However, many are long-term employees in ongoing jobs: the average tenure of casual employees is over two years. Casual employees miss out on important employment conditions with low hours and pay rates, limited job security, unpredictable earnings and hours, no paid sick or holiday leave, and limited access to other rights and forms of leave. The casual loading – where it is paid - compensates for a portion of these losses. Many have difficulty borrowing money, predicting childcare needs, and managing finances. Casual workers have less access to training, to internal career ladders, and often sit on the marginal sidelines of the workplace. Over time, an economy dependent upon a larger and larger slice of casual employees will face a deteriorating skills base, lower workforce stability and higher turnover costs. This is both inefficient and inequitable.

Why has casual employment grown? Casual work has grown in Australia as more women and students have entered the labour market looking for part-time work. More recently, casual work accounts for a growing share of jobs held by non-students, and prime-age and mature-age workers. For many part-timers, their only road to part-time work – where they seek it - has been on casual terms: most part-time jobs are casual. Permanent part-time work is under-developed in many workplaces. Many who seek work increasingly face a casualised labour market. The evasion of rights through extended employment on casual conditions, cuts employment costs at the expense of long established rights and contributes to inefficiencies in the labour market.

Solutions: The prevention of long-term, inappropriate employment on casual conditions relies upon a regulatory distinction between short-term, irregular employment and ongoing work. Many countries make this distinction so that long-term employment on casual conditions – which evades employee's rights – is not possible. A presumption of ongoing employment characterises labour markets in many industrialised countries.

In Australia some steps have been taken to improve the terms of casual employees. These have taken three forms: giving some long-term casual employees some of the rights available to ongoing employees (eg in relation to unpaid maternity leave and unfair dismissal); compensating casuals for some lost rights and conditions (eg through increases in the casual loading); and limitations on casual employment itself (eg through ratios, or limits on the time that a worker can be employed casually). The first two of these do not restrict casual employment to genuinely casual work (short term or irregular); they graft ongoing conditions onto casual jobs or take a compensatory approach. The third directly limits casual employment.

This report recommends action to restrict casual employment to 'true casual' work, building on the third approach, so that employees' rights are not evaded, especially those of weaker sections of the labour market including young people and workers with caring responsibilities. Ongoing part-time employment is preferable to casual part-time employment where the tasks are ongoing.

We recommend action that directly limits casual employment, containing it to short-term, irregular tasks. We recommend the use of long established mechanisms of industrial regulation in Australia to achieve this. Firstly, that secure employment be made an object of industrial law, except where work is truly short-term or irregular. Secondly, that the AIRC be appropriately empowered to ensure this, and to comprehensively regulate employment relationships, broadly defined, including new forms of employment. Thirdly, that awards be appropriately amended to achieve this (eg by insertion of time limits for casual employment before automatic conversion to ongoing conditions). Fourthly, that steps be taken to narrow the gap between the terms of casual and ongoing employment, by improving the conditions of casual employment (eg paid leave, termination and other rights and conditions) and/or by realistic compensation for lost conditions (eg through increases in the casual loading). Fifthly, current casual employees should not be disadvantaged. Finally, short-term, irregular casual work should be distinguished from ongoing part-time work and the report makes recommendations to improve the conditions of the latter so that they genuinely reflect, pro rata, all the circumstances of ongoing full-time jobs.

New initiatives to restrict inappropriate expansion of casual work and to improve the conditions of part-time work, need to be set within an overall policy commitment to provide quality employment for all, and they must be backed by effective enforcement.