Work Life Balance: AIM Breakfast

AIM Breakfast

Four
Seasons Hotel

Sydney



Thursday 11 May 2006

I hope you’re all enjoying your hot breakfasts and are
extremely grateful for them. For a couple of reasons:



First- you
didn’t have to cook them yourself, or, to be more precise, wash up all the
dirty frying pans yourself. This is because you are working and you don’t
have time to cook hot breakfasts for a particularly fussy group of consumers,
your family. While they don’t seem to mind eating exactly the same fish
and chips or Big Mac Happy Meal as the other kids when they’re out, it
seems unconditional love means they are entitled to ask you for exactly what
they want, and turn their noses up if it is not quite to their liking. No More
Hot Breakfasts, unless it is Sunday morning and you have all day.



But having
a hot breakfast when eating out is also a treat- it is cooked by someone else,
and you are consuming it in the company of other people who are also pleased to
be here and are not kicking the person next to them under the table or gagging
because the egg’s too runny. These occasions are the privileges of
working. It’s all part of networking and as we know is the only form of
legitimate social activity recognised in the world of work.

It seems to me
that the competing benefits and costs of work and home life, and the need to
balance the one against the other are well summed up in the increasing trend for
Australians to go out for hot breakfasts- even on weekends- but to get by with a
piece of toast or a bowl of cereal and instant coffee when at home. Eating out
is also a luxury of course; in the days of stay at home mums families or even
couples rarely dined in restaurants at night, occasionally at lunch-and
breakfasts were unheard of. The advent of the out-for-breakfast is still, to
me, incredibly decadent, although it would be nice if they started at 9.15
instead of 7.15 and it is still off the agenda for those with children under
five or over thirteen. The advent of two income families, while it undoubtedly
put the squeeze on home life, has certainly helped drive the development of
luxury services such as dining out. As the Prime Minister has often observed,
the entry of working wives to the workforce constitutes Australia’s single
biggest social change since the war and as economists observe they have also
been the greatest contributors to rising family living standards since the
1970s.

But there is no doubt that work life balance is a trade off, a
compromise and an issue of considerable debate. A barbecue stopper as the Prime
Minister has also been wont to say, as he moves around the country listening to
grandparents, middle aged children and parents all telling him how hard it is to
find time for both, or suitable child care or transport or working
arrangements.

The struggle for work-life balance is an epic struggle, where
we fight the great Tyrant of Time, the unrelenting demands of modern life, the
infinity of needs and the very definite limitations on our physical capacity.
So long as there are only 24 hours in a day and our lives are finite, Tyrant
Time will overshadow us.

There is no doubt that this modern struggle for
balance is the result of more of us working than ever before, despite our
considerable and deepening caring responsibilities. We are no longer struggling
for more work, as our grandparents did, but for more time. How ironic that in
the space of a life time, my life time, Australia could have gone from a country
without enough work to one with too much.

Certainly life was less stressed
when each family had a full time household CEO, carer for children, including
adult disabled, elderly parents, cook, cleaner, personal servant,dog walker and
tireless community worker. But life was also a lot poorer and, as researchers
have reminded us, in fact there were many so called happy housewives who were
bored, exploited, badly treated and survived by being stoned to the eyeballs on
Valium.

There are four aspects to achieving work-life balance apart from the
very personal considerations of temperament, health and ambitions.

These
other aspects are what makes work life balance a political question, a public
interest question.

They are all familiar to you;

• the expectations of men and women
• industrial arrangements
• government regulation and assistance
• national interest objectives.

Let me deal briefly with
each.

The expectations we have, and people themselves have, of the roles and
responsibilities of men and women are clearly major determinants of where we set
out equilibrium points between work and life, work and family. Women in
Australia do 70% of the unpaid caring work, men do 70% of the paid work. Even in
households where women are in full time employment and their men are unemployed,
she still does, on average, more housework than he does.

Women are 93% of
custodial grandparents, 2/3 of them on pensions, the majority of child care
provided by grandparents is provided by grandmas and don’t forget that
grandparents provide 31% of all child care and 98% of that’s for free.
When it comes to looking after elderly parents, 91% of that care, when its still
at home, comes from daughters not sons, sisters and not their brothers.

And
of course, women do most of the child rearing.

Men, on the other hand, work
extraordinary hours, die seven younger, are twice as likely to die young as
women, rarely get their children after separation and are mostly represented in
the carer groups when it is caring for a disabled wife.

How much of that is
genetic and how much enculturated is unclear, suffice it to say there must be
some constrained choices in there.

These constraints show up in many
conflicts between couples- where who does what and his long working hours are
often blamed for marital conflict and under-achieving children.

Industrial
arrangements are also important. Low skilled, low paid people who are not in
great demand tend to manage their balance by choosing fewer hours or jobs at the
right time with lower remuneration than other-wise. More valued workers can and
do negotiate greater flexibilities like working from home, parental and
carer’s leave and flexible start and finish times but I notice it’s
much harder for them to get reduced hours. Usually working from home means you
work more total hours, not less. Some workers are able to negotiate part time
arrangements but this is much less likely at the professional and managerial
ends; almost all part time work is in retail and hospitality. So again,
striking the balance comes at a significant price for women. For men, my
consultations suggest they don’t even dare ask. Employers and managers
are not sympathetic to men who seek to reduce or modify their working
arrangements for the sake of their families and men fear not just that they
won’t be promoted but that they won’t keep their jobs.

Australian men are more likely to take bereavement leave than carer’s
leave.

Government benefits and taxation also interact to affect the
equilibrium point between work and family time. There are certainly work
disincentives for second earners, usually women, when there is a trade off
between working more and receiving smaller government benefits such as Family
Assistance, although this week’s Budget has improved some of these taper
rates.

The availability of child care subsidies and planning also affects
working decisions, as does the availability of public transport, time taken to
get to work on public roadways and so on.

The struggle between work and life,
a modern day equivalent of the Bhagavad-Gita, is not expected to ease. Remember
back in the eighties when we were so frightened of computers we started
inventing leisure courses so people would know how to fill in all their spare
time? What a misreading of human nature. In fact we have used computers to
create even more work and life has never been busier.

But the pressures on
people to care more, not less, are certainly emerging exactly at the same time
as there is pressure on people to work more, not less. See this week’s
Federal Budget.

The pressures to care more are not just about children who
don’t like runny eggs hanging around until they are in their thirties,
while they slave their way through university course after university course and
save for a house. I’d like to think that today’s teenagers not only
get to vote and drink on their 18^th birthdays but become responsible
adults fairly sharing the household tasks, but the evidence is strongly against
it.



But the roll on effect of inadequate or expensive child care is
grandparent care, with the result that work life balance is now faced by the
elderly as well as by prime age workers. Grandparents who frequently give up
paid work or reduce their hours if their jobs do not enable them to combine with
grandchildren care.

And this generation of grandparents may also have to
care for their own elderly parents, thanks to our ever increasing life
expectancy. We often describe these middle aged workers with children, or
perhaps grandchildren to care for as well as their parents, as the triple decker
sandwich generation. Most of these are women, but in an age of increasing only
children, you can soon make this an issue for men also.

A third reason is
globalisation and the incredible increase in competitive pressure brought about
by free trade. It has brought great prosperity to many, but always at a price.
People are expected to work longer and harder than ever before; trans national
corporations require meetings at all hours, turn-arounds at all hours and that
sense of pressure which comes from knowing your company is up against companies
around the world. Middle managers, both in the public and private sectors, work
ridiculous hours. Unless the world changes its mind about globalisation, I
can’t see this changing.

Almost a quarter of the workforce works an average of 50 hours a week or
more, and many of these workers are men with families.

The industrial reforms of the past fifteen years have enabled much of this.
The sclerotic, industrial system of awards and centralised wage fixing has
gradually been made more flexible by the addition of negotiated arrangements
such as enterprise agreements which have certainly fuelled Australia’s
economic growth over the past decade- and jobs with it.

But undoubtedly much of the productivity growth to come from this new
industrial flexibility was the result of people being prepared to work longer
hours, or less family friendly hours without penalty rates, or more uncertain
hours as casuals or contract workers. That was all traded away against more
money and, of course, more jobs.

Ah yes, the sanguine might say, but people adapt. Families adapt. This is
just an adjustment phase. This may be true although I cannot see how
relationship building, the development of love, trust and respect between family
members, can simply be sped up to accommodate the requirements of work. Love
takes time.

A further pressure will be the demographics of ageing.

How do we maintain,
let alone increase the current size of the Australian work force in a future of
low fertility and rapid ageing.

As you must know, in less than forty years
time one in four of us will be over sixty five. On present trends we will be
spending almost twice as much of our Gross Domestic Product on the old age
pension as we do on Defence. South Australia currently has more than its share
of aged people.

You might say that is no bad thing so try seeing it this way-
Federal Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, a calm and collected man not known for
panicking, has estimated that once you include health care, spending on aged
care by the year 2042 will require a GST of 24 cents in the
dollar.

It’s difficult to see Australia being able to pursue prosperity
with so much of its wealth tied up in funding retirement, essentially in
transfer benefits.

For this reason governments are keen to enable( using
carrots and sticks) more Australians to work for longer. Not only to ensure
their skills and training are retained for as long as possible in an era of
stagnating growth in the labour force, but also to reduce reliance on old age
pensions and state provided aged services.

We need to ensure older
Australians are willing and able to work. At present Australians over the age of
55 don’t participate as much in paid work as older workers in other
developed countries. This is especially true of women.

Only 40% of
Australian women between 55 and 64 are in paid work, much lower than most of
Europe and the US. Try Sweden where almost 80% of this age group works.

Much
of this low participation rate I believe can be explained by the extensive
caring responsibilities born by this group.

You could say this is the
mindset of a particular generation except that we are talking about women
leaving school in the swinging sixties, with expectations to match. I am part of
that generation.



For this group of older workers, retaining them will not
just be about superannuation benefits but about how well employers and society
can enable them to keep working while meeting at least some of these caring
responsibilities as well as their own changing personal and health needs.
Looking after elderly parents is an increasingly vexatious issue for middle-aged
children- workers. Every time an elderly parent is cared for by a family member,
there is less pressure on the public purse and on the family’s finances.
One way or another, the state ends up paying- either by providing the sorts of
flexibilities that enable children to do it themselves or by ripping more taxes
out of people to pay others to do the caring for them.

How do we persuade
employers they are worth keeping, despite their other responsibilities, that
there are possibilities other than full time retirement, how do we persuade
employees to stay? Call centre or factory workers, for example, are unlikely to
be bounding to work with unbridled enthusiasm day after day, year after
year.

Interestingly, many businesses tell me it is older male managers in
their sixties who are now as likely to seek part time work as young mothers.
The ANZ is leading the way with part time work programmes for older workers, men
and women, trying to hang on to all their skills and experience. Some want
shorter days, some want shorter weeks- the most popular type of part time work
for older workers is a shorter year- where they get to take 3 months or 6 months
a year off unpaid but with their salary averaged over the full twelve months.
Others want less responsibility and are prepared to drop pay- something many
organisations find difficult to deal with.

Retaining these workers means
providing working conditions that fit with their caring responsibilities as well
as their retirement dreams. It need not be about caring responsibilities; it is
always about life balance.

Of course much of our concern about funding aged
care would not be so agitated were it not for our low fertility- the low number
of future tax payers expected to support we baby boomers in our very lengthy old
age.

And frankly I think part of our low fertility is a response to poor
work-life balance. While it might be true that most of us find partners at
work, it’s also true that work keeps us apart, that working hours
frequently discourage intimacy and that the demands of work, and young women
believing their work choices will not support their family choices, increasingly
choosing to delay having children. Amongst high achievers and tertiary educated
women, this problem is significant- and of course it is no accident that these
are also sought after workers who work long hours. Surely if work-life balance
were an acceptable, talked about and embraced life-objective, this choice need
not be so stark. And it is not just an issue of childlessness, but of
decreasing family size. Remember as from Tuesday night a family of three
children is classified as large. Because when child care is expensive or
non-existent, when working hours are long and unrelenting, why would women,
having had one child and struggled, ever do it again. Perhaps that is why, in
the space of a generation from 1980 to 2000, the number of only-child families
has gone from one in five to one in three of all families and, if the
demographers are right, you can make that one in two families living in our
major cities.

Again, international evidence as well as some interstate
demographic comparisons suggest that places which support women to work flexibly
with children, financially support their working motherhood with benefits like
paid maternity leave, have experienced improved fertility rates. Traditional
countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany, on the other hand, have
some of the lowest birth rates in the developed world. Where you force women to
choose between work OR children, but not to have both, a significant number will
choose work and no children.



Canberra, which has a very high percentage
of women in work on the other hand, has a higher fertility rate than Melbourne
and Sydney, arguably because public service flexibilities, short commuting times
and reasonable child care make combining work and family much easier.



Let
me finish by reflecting on my national project, Striking the Balance, women,
men, work and family.

It is now in the final stages of being written. It is
a big, comprehensive look at Australian family life and the impact of our paid
but also unpaid responsibilities on that life. It finds, I believe, Australia
at a cross roads. A wealthy country with jobs to burn and high living standards
but increasingly stretched for time that money can’t buy but time that is
priceless. The time we devote to our friends and our families. Now maybe Gen Y
will work this out better and it will take care of itself, although every survey
I have seen of young men and women confirms that young men, at least, believe
they will continue to the bulk of the paid work and the caring will be their
female partner’s responsibilities.

But our wealth, our education, our
security and openness give us a great opportunity to rethink the work-life
balance equation, because we can actually afford to. And what is more, our
prosperity might even depend upon it. Prosperity requires work and workers. For
Australia this means greater participation. Yet in order to increase the
workforce without increasing the number of dependents, and in order to make
better use of prime age skilled workers such as women who are currently lost in
large numbers through motherhood, it will be necessary to develop a
life-friendly work culture that not only attracts Australian women back to work,
but attracts those from interstate and arguably from overseas. There is a world
competition for skilled young workers who speak English and Australia will need
to compete- by ensuring young women can do both and that older workers can also
work flexibly.

Which brings us to the relationship between social
sustainability and prosperity.

Social sustainability means peaceable, law
abiding communities where people look out for and after one another, voluntarily
and unpaid. It makes economic prosperity possible and also sustainable.
Otherwise we spend the hard won gains of technological and economic change
maintaining law and order, policing one another to protect people from the price
of difference, keeping our families together only by frequent interventions from
teachers, counsellors and an army of social workers.

But social
sustainability takes time. It means parents joining school associations and
raising funds, it means adult children with time to look after their parents and
it means children being able to spend enough time with their families to grow up
loved, guided and secure. It means the state investing in programmes and
regulating in ways that aren’t always obviously connected to economic
prosperity. It means recognising that prosperity is a balancing act. That you
can’t have prosperity without respect and acknowledgement of the rights of
men and women, young and old, of those of different races and creeds. That you
can’t have prosperity without support for family life as well as good
roads, education systems and first class research establishments.

And it
means any community debate about work-life balance never losing sight of its
ultimate goal, which is not, ultimately prosperity, fertility and global
competitivenss, but the happiness and contentment of
Australians.