Did you know Australia ranks sixth among twenty-eight countries surveyed by the OECD in terms of average hours worked by full-timers? We’re meant to be the easygoing country, yet full-time workers in Australia work on average, per week, two hours longer than Germans, almost three more than the French and five more than most Nordic countries.
Australia is now a long way from the relaxed land of the long weekend and extended beach holiday. Many Australians are living in a ‘time bomb’: squeezed by the demands of work and care as we put together our jobs, home and community life in a changing society. Many Australians say they are fatigued, don’t get enough sleep, don’t take their holidays, and struggle to find the time for their relationships and families. Many feel they spend too much time commuting.
Australian men and women now live in complex regimes of working time and place. Managers, professional workers, women, carers and the sizeable proportion who work long hours or who lack control over their working time are most affected. Many jobs are now very intensive, and weaker boundaries around the time and space of work (fuelled by new technologies) mean that work spills out to affect our home time, leisure time and personal lives.
Julia Gillard reveres 'decent, hard-working' citizens, but how do we manage patterns of hard work that spin out of control? If we are all work and no play, how are our work and our larger life affected?
The time squeeze affects our ability to increase skills and qualifications. People who are tired and overcommitted struggle to learn new skills. This has implications for how Australians respond to new challenges like climate change. Time pressures work against simple environmental actions like sorting rubbish, walking to the shops or catching the bus to work. They also affect productivity and workplace management: tired people don’t make effective workers or good managers.
Many of the costs of workaholism or intensive job demands are hidden: in the health budget in the form of poor mental and physical health, in errors we make at work when we are tired, and in stretched relationships at home and at work.
How can we defuse the time bomb we are sitting on? When people have access to flexible working arrangements, and well-planned transport and sub/urban settings, then they find it easier to learn and to utilise their skills, improving productivity and workplace outcomes.
The notion of ‘work–life balance’ is pathetically inadequate to the task. Individuals can do only so much in the face of greedy workplaces, poorly planned transport or urban planning. The idea of work–life balance puts the clever, juggling individual at the centre of work–life success. It can mean a lot to workers to have the flexibility to juggle the two worlds of work and home, but – as many working carers know – this juggle and the workplace flexibility that enables it just create the right to perpetual exhaustion, as we dash from home to work, to care, to the shops, and back to the home computer late at night.
Moreover, many people are not ‘masters of their own universe’, controlling how things fit together in terms that allow the easy construction of well-articulated jobs, families and rich community relations. Some people are increasingly excluded by current arrangements and, in a rich first-world country like Australia, there are many things citizens, governments, employers, developers, unions and community service providers can do better. Taking control of the length of the working day, managing technologies and workloads better, increasing flexibility and providing more leave are good places to start.
Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner and Philippa Williams are authors of the new book Time Bomb: Work, rest and play in Australia today, published by NewSouth and launched by the Premier of South Australia on 12 February.
