Today’s unemployment figures (and the associated release of retail sales figures showing a tick up on the previous month’s) are intriguing from the political angle. Rob’s dealt with some of the questions raised in the post below this one, but it seems to me that they do reveal something very important about the politics of the crisis you have when you’re not so much having a crisis. That’s not to minimise the reality of an economic downturn, but it is to emphasise how important intangibles such as ‘confidence’ and the changing beliefs and behaviour patterns of all sorts of economic actors are. From where I sit in Brisbane, it’s hard to believe there’s a recession at all – it’s certainly a very different environment from that prevailing in the early 90s when vacant buildings and a rapidly falling cost of living both gave powerful testimony to tectonic shifts in the economy. For a lot of people, I think, the recession (if indeed there is one – there may have been growth in the quarter just gone) is more conceptual or imaginary than felt or lived.
It’s becoming clearer both that a strategy of sectoral and targeted stimulation is working to at least some considerable degree and that the opposition really has nothing to rely on but the hope things will get worse. It’s also very clear that the ‘jobs at all costs’ mantra is the right one for the political times. I made the point again and again during the 2007 election year that it was the ‘lived experience’ of the economy that was Rudd’s leverage point. It continues to be. The proverbial kitchen table really is at the heart of the government’s political messaging efforts. There’s a cynical way of looking at this, but I’d also point out, as a colleague mentioned on Facebook just before – what’s bad news for pundits and those in the increasingly risible prediction business (and for ideologues of various stripes trying to project their desires on economic reality) is good news indeed for the workforce and for citizens.
This recession may be different in that we see a lot of people working less hours (voluntarily and otherwise) rather than a lot of people losing their jobs and so working no hours at all. The casualisation of the workforce over the last 15 years may facilitate this. When your employees are casuals and part timers, it’s very easy just to cut their hours.
The lived experience will then be very large numbers of people with less income but not no income.
Of course unemployment will still go up, but maybe just to 8% rather than 12%.
Sam @ 1 – Not just casualisation either – there seems to be a wider acceptance this time around by both employers and unions of cutting working hours rather than cutting the workforce. Eg with Holden in Adelaide where they shrank from two shifts to one with half the workforce working one week and the other half the next week. In previous recessions they probably would have just laid off half the workforce.
Same drop in working hours, but very different effect on the unemployment rate.
“For a lot of people, I think, the recession (if indeed there is one – there may have been growth in the quarter just gone) is more conceptual or imaginary than felt or lived.”
I appreciate your thoughtful qualification there, Mark. Many ghouls of press and opposition have conveniently dropped the “r” word, not because they have not wished it, but because they would have just looked sillier and sillier. Maybe they learnt a lesson from the tedious, repetitious, discussion over the never ending Rudd honeymoon.
But it seems that the commentariat at this stage see these figures as a rogue result.
From Malcolm Maiden in The Age.
So who has got it wrong? Almost certainly, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has. Companies are still closing down and shedding jobs in this dowturn, no doubt.
As Morgan Stanley economist Gerard Minack said after the numbers came out:
”Know anyone unemployed who’s got a job lately? Heard of any firms adding to their workforce? In short, have you heard or seen a single good thing about the labour market over the past few months?”
The markets are beginning to believe that an end to the slump is in sight, but it’s still about a year away, and jobs are just about the last economic indicator to turn.
The April jobs numbers are wrong. The downturn has more to go, and the jobless rate is going to rise: expect the impossibly optimistic employment picture painted by today’s statistics to be revised in a month’s time.
It’s hard to ignore the extent to which the media is addicted to bad news and the latest shock horror crisis. Had today’s numbers been bad they would have been shouted from the rooftops.
Yet another reason why newspapers in particular are in decline
Recall that last month there was a huge jump in unemployment from 5.2% to 5.7%. That was probably exaggerated too.
Maiden’s probably right; the fall in unemployment may well be a statistical illusion. But there doesn’t seem to be any sense from any of the data that the sky is falling.
To further mangle a metaphor from Crikey, it’s like we’re in our own version of On The Beach except this time there might be a happy ending.
I was going to post the kink to Maiden and The Age, but Guido has beaten me to it.
More postmodern “journalism” from the business press.
If the facts are at odds with the narrative, then obviously its the facts that are wrong!
This is a perfect example of overinterpreting monthly movements in official data. The ABS cut the sample size of the labour force survey and so the margin of error has increased notably. The large increase last month overstated the deterioration and the fall this month is also a statistical illusion. Pay attention to the trend figures that the ABS publish that show a steady increase in trend unemployment since the middle of 2008. There is little doubt that the unemployment rate will increase significantly over the next 12 months because the economy has to grow at a pace between 2 and 3% (depending on what one assesses as the potential growth rate of the economy) just to keep the trend unemployment rate steady. Surveys of hiring intentions are extremely weak and firms are cutting back considerably on their investment plans. There will be much more bad news on the employment front over the coming months.
Not only newspapers are addicted to bad news. The national broadcaster seems as much responsible for the economic downturn as any, if confidence, or lack thereof, is really the major driver. Just listening to Stephen Long or Fran Kelly is enough to frighten any small business owner into tightening up on staff or limiting purchase of forward supplies. They seem trained not to think rationally but in terms of headlines or a good gripping story. Certainly that’s the way they write, talk and present news. Isn’t it time someone embarked upon a serious study of the media and its impact on the swings and roundabouts of the economy and investment markets?
Just on the statistical issues, it may be to some degree an artefact of the method used, as might last month’s data. But Rob is right. Just as one should have looked at the trend on the retail figures rather than the negative one a few months back which resulted in ‘sky is falling’ claims. There’s also a gross need to over-interpret and analyse – we see something similar with the ‘will the Reserve cut rates’ and ‘how big will the budget deficit be’ media/economist fests that now seem to go on almost continually…
The points Sam and Chris made about the labour market and working hours are also well made. Labor Outsider – I’d be inclined to discount hiring intentions surveys to some degree at this time – because it seems to me they’re a measure of a very nervous ‘confidence’ index, perhaps, rather than what they claim to be measuring. To the degree that there is less of a rush to shed labour, concomitantly these figures may mean something different than they once did. Worth noting also that in the retail figures some sub-sectors grew well above trend and above retail as a whole
But, here again, I’d point out that I’m talking about the politics. Unemployment might be the most accurate indicator of real economic pain, but it matters an awful lot where that unemployment is and whom it effects as well as what the overall level is.
Sam and Chris, you may be correct, but I’ll point that *this* month’s figures showed a decrease in part-time employment by 21,800, and an increase in full-time employment by 49,100(!)
The monthly movements from March to April are clearly wrong…but, as Labor Outsider said, examine the trends…
It’s appears clear it was the *March* data that was out of kilter, indicating that while the rates are certainly not improving, they weren’t nearly as bad a month ago as the March data indicated (or has consequently affected the regressions).
Yes, Patricia WA, I agree that the ABC is one of the worst offenders, particularly its increasingly odious news bulletins. I usually miss the 7.00 TV news, but the updates are bad enough.
Sometimes I think the agenda is to make life as difficult as possible for the government, but it’s probably a particularly misdirected attempt to gain a larger audience.
More importantly, does this mean M. Turnbull will shut-up for five minutes?
I’m not sure I follow you there Mark. Also, are you lumping social democrats in with those providing metanarratives?
Mark, I doubt this is the impression you were trying to convey, but your remarks call to my mind John McCain’s comments in early 2008 that the USA was just experiencing a “mental recession”.
This sure feels like the real thing to me, albeit nowhere near as wrenching as Keating’s recession, or the tech wreck of 2000 (Unless one works in finance, of course). I have a feeling in my waters that this one will be fairly shallow and short-lived, but the recovery will be only a few shades lighter than the downturn.
Having recently returned from the USA, I can assure you that things are nowhere near as bad here as they are stateside. I was in downtown Manhattan a few weeks ago near Wall Street on a Tuesday afternoon, and the place was almost deserted. A few empty cabs, a few pedestrians, and that was about it. Just the tumbleweeds and I.
In Australia, we’re nowhere near as bad as that — of course, that doesn’t mean things are actually good, but still…
I think it’s also a reflection of a deep cynicism within the ranks of journos – another part of the ‘insider’ mentality appears to be thinking that disbelieving anything is a sort of macho sign of all knowingness. It’s very tedious. And Terry is right about the shift the facts to fit the narrative thing.
Part of the whole media debate is badly framed – it’s not that we’re not getting enough *news*. It’s that we get too much in some ways, and most of it is ill informed speculation, prediction, commentary or just rubbish. What we lack is *information* and that is the reason for declining levels of trust in media outlets – or at least an important one. The media may be increasingly ignored, but they rarely seem to question whether or not it might be the product not the consumer.
Merc @ 16 – I think it’s clear that things are far worse in the US. Again, this serves to bolster the government’s case on both fronts – (a) caused by world events, (b) protected by wise and decisive Ruddness. Neither is strictly speaking true (at best they’re simplifications of complex and partial truths), but they ring true.
Mark, on what evidence are you discounting the survey evidence on hiring intentions? Like any indicator they are not perfect predictors of what will happen on the employment front, but they convey useful information. And confidence is very important for employment because a lack of it is one of the factors that means that firms stop hiring people, which the evidence suggests makes a larger contribution to increases in the unemployment during recessions that firing people does. I think you should be very careful when you venture into interpreting data that is so far outside your expertise.
I’d also point out that the trend unemployment rate has increased by a percentage point, just in the first 4 months of the year!! Australia’s downturn has gotten under way a lot later than in the US. Mark, you may see relatively few signs of pain and stress now, but give it 12 months and I think you will be changing your tune…
Mark, you’re dead right about the misplaced cynicism of journos. Some of them seem to wear their hard-bitten jadedness on their sleeve. This is a trope of the same phenomenon that seeks to commentate on politics as thoiugh as it is a horse-race – applauding Labor this week, for instance, for its skill in splitting green groups on the revised upper target for the CPRS, without asking whether abandoning a pretty significant election promise on emissions trading will actually hurt Labor electrorally down the track.
LO, I do try to be. My point here is that the hiring intentions measure might be far more a function of swings and roundabouts in confidence than usual, and secondly that if it is the case that labour is being shed in many instances through hours rather than jobs, less relevant. I’m not suggesting it be ignored, but I think it needs to be treated as reflecting something other than an actual calculation of where employment will be in however many months. Here again, I think that there may have been a shift in confidence recently.
Anyway, I’d be interested in:
(a) whether the data can be or is disaggregated by sector and size of employer;
(b) whether anyone has tried to work out its worth as a predictive measure – ie what relationship exists between say where that measure was in January 2007 and where employment was in July 2007, etc.
@21, yep, Ben.
@20 – LO, well I hope I’m right and you’re wrong for the sake of all the people who might end up unemployed. I’ve been a Centrelink client and it’s not a fun place to be in any way whatsoever. I guess what I’m sceptical of at the moment is how inaccurate most extrapolations of current trends have been since this whole shindig started. I’ll repeat my argument that this suggests that psychological factors and expectations are a larger part of what’s going on than sometimes appreciated. If I had to make that argument at length, I’d want to complicate it, but I’ll put it forward anyway.
But you’ll have to excuse me – I have a lot to do tonight for one of the three jobs I have – I’m spreading my risk!
Mark
The dissagregation of the data depends on the survey. For example, from memory, the NAB survey has a question on hiring intentions and that data can be split by industry and size of employer.
The Reserve Bank also has a business liaison program, whereby represantives survey businesses about all aspects of their activity, including employment intentions. The RBA has published a few papers/articles assessing the information content in survey data, and you will find that the next Statement of Monetary policy will discuss what those survey based measures mean for employment over the coming months.
Given the noisiness of the survey data, I wouldn’t go as far as saying an x% change in the employment index suggests that a y% change in employment over a given period. I would merely say that all evidence (survey data, forecast economic growth, etc) are consistent with significant further increases in the unemployment rate over the next year or so.
Again, I would point out that you should emphaise labour shedding less than you do. Sure it gets the headlines, and it is painful for those that experience it. But the biggest problem in recessions is that employers simply stop hiring and thus stop absorbing new entrants to the labour force or those that leave jobs voluntarily (but aren’t layed off). The hours adjustment is certainly very important, but the flexibility that employers have to do that varies from sector to sector.
I agree Labor Outsider, the umemployment figures could be “outliers”. But the retail figures yesterday were nothing short of spectacular – a 13.2% jump in department store sales. Much of the “cash splash” hasn’t even made it to people’s pockets yet! It should finally put to rest all Turnbull’s twaddle that the stimulus money was “wasted”.
I can’t help tweaking you a bit though, Labor Outsider. What do you make of noises being made by Rudd that “all good things must come to an end” with the FHOG. Didn’t you say you weren’t confident about getting rid of this supposedly bad policy once the crisis was over? Well, it’s not even over yet. And what of the significant falls in housing prices in some categories? Doesn’t that back up my guess that Rudd’s FHOG for existing dwellings was meant to prop up prices in a crisis?
Could it be that someone with no training in economics was a little closer to the mark?
Ginja, you will never persuade me that adding further distortions to housing on the demand side are a good idea. I simply don’t agree that it was necessary to prop up prices during the crisis. Indeed, some falls in prices may be part of the necessary adjustment mechanism. We will see whether he gets rid of it, but he certainly has a problem because the impact of the policy, if temporary, will be to simply change the timing of purchasing decisions. So, if he gets rid of it, dwelling investment will probably take a hit in the second half of the year. If he retains it, the higher FHOG will simply be capitalised into existing house prices largely benefiting existing owners (who tend to be older and wealthier than the average person) at the expense of those wanting to purchase homes in the future. It is yet another inequitable inter-generational transfer.
The interesting thing about this downturn is that unemployment is still far lower than it was during the boom of the late 1980s. Throughout much of the 1980s, many people would have regarded today’s unemployment rate as an unattainable dream.
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But other things are also different. The labour force has a far higher proportion of women than in the past. Every recession the proportion of men in full time work has declined. And in every recovery it has failed to return to its pre-recession level.
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And households are carrying a far greater amount of debt (as a proportion of disposable income) than in the past. Most of it is home mortgage debt.
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If things get worse, they will get worse in a different way than in previous recessions. For example, we can’t use the experience of the early 1990s to draw conclusions about what effect falls in employment will have on house prices.
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Mark’s point about confidence is interesting. So much seems to depend on people’s expectations that their incomes are secure — that they won’t have to take a fewer hours or a lower paying job. Unless people believed this, why would they be prepared to borrow so much?
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Linked to this is the expectation that house prices always rise over the medium to long term. The assumption is that if you get into trouble you can sell and escape with your deposit, the money you’ve paid off the principal and maybe even a nice capital gain as well. As long as you’re not forced to sell during a short term fall in prices, you can’t lose.
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But what if the spell breaks? What if these expectations change?
Let me tell you something I do know about, LO. I’ve worked in workforce planning as a consultant to large organisations. Who answers this survey? The easiest way to access data about projected employment levels would actually be to pull out a figure from the sort of documents I used to compile. But these figures are projections for different purposes and based on different assumptions and are not actually supposed to indicate “hiring intentions” at some point in the future. It gets much more complex than that.
I don’t have much confidence that the survey is measuring what it purports to measure if no one has bothered to assess the relationship between past predictions and past results. “Statistical noise” notwithstanding.
None of that is to say that you may not be right about future levels of employment, but I think the currency of economic prediction is – rightly – at near all time lows.
Alan Kohler on ABC TV news tonight said ~
the “trend line” still shows unemployment rising.
Mark, the fact that forecasters didn’t predict the financial crisis doesn’t mean that you are free to discount the usefulness of forward indicators without any underlying emprirical analysis whatsoever. What I said was that there have been plenty of studies investigating the empirical relationship between surveys and actual outcomes and that evidence suggests that they provide additional content beyond what is avaiable from other sources of information. There are obviously confidence intervals around those estimates and the relationship can of course change over time. Given that it was you that discounted the usefulness of that information without dranwing on any emprical support, I would suggest that it was up to you to look through the literature before discounting it in the way that you have. Economists pay a lot of attention to the design of each individual survey and hence place a higher weight on those surveys that have been reliable in the past and have superior methodologies for collecting data. Forecasting is highly imperfect, and there is even more uncertainty at the present time than usual. However, you really have to be in fantasy land if you don’t think that the unemployment rate will rise significantly over the coming 12 months. You should also be aware that the bias in forecasts during recessions is ALWAYS on the upside – forecasters are always too slow to recognise how weak the economy eventually gets, and how high unemployment eventually reaches. For unemployment not to rise significantly from here, the economy would have to return to trend growth by the second half of the year. If you think that is the most plausible outcome, then fair enough. I don’t.
It really is too early to tell what the full impacts of last year’s little stumble will be. I’m not sure whetehr it’s linked to the coming slump or Howard’s draconian welfare policies but there appears to be a daily increase in the number of homeless people in Melbourne.
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I did one forecast scenario in which things will appear to get better from around the middle of this year but we will be plagued by bear markets and recsessions for the coming decade. Of course there’s always heaps of predictions. One said the US dollar was due to collpase two months ago. Didn’t happen.
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Not sure of course. Be interesting to see what happens. If this does turn out to be anti-climatic then it will be something for the Keynsians to wack the Friendmanites over the head with for a about two decades.
That settles it then. No doubt he predicted a rise in the rate yesterday.
LO, I don’t think I’m under an obligation to dive into the literature, and I don’t have time to do so tonight.
The question I’m putting to you is really quite simple, in two related parts:
(a) Since we seem to be talking about ‘the end of the year’, what did the hiring intentions measure say 8 months before the current employment data and what is the relationship between any prediction and the actual picture;
(b) Who answers the survey?
I conduct surveys myself. If I wanted to pose a question such as “do you anticipate you will be hiring or shedding labour in six months’ time?” (bear with me, I wouldn’t phrase it like that but I’m trying to make the point clear) I would get a different answer from HR, from line managers, etc, etc.
In other words, among other things, the identity, knowledge and position of the respondent, and the basis on which they give an answer, would be something I would want to know.
Just on your other point, yes, there are implications for new entrants to the labour market – which the government has addressed with the ‘earn and learn’ stuff, among other things.
Mark
Go to the RBA website and click on the Chartpack icon. Then, click on the link to labour market developments. You will get an indication of what I am talking about. The RBA has chosen to include two survey measures of vacancy rates – one from SEEK and one from ANZ. You can see very clearly from that graph that the vacany indexes peaked in 2008 have subsequently fallen off a cliff. The peak in vacancies coincided with the trough in unemployment and the peak in employment. The best correlation of survey measures (vacancies or hiring intentions) with employment outcomes is either contemporaneous, or leading by a month or two. They also have a timing advantage over official data (they are released faster). The surveys become decreasingly reliable when you get as far as 6 months out, because firms don’t really know what they will do that far out, and so give answers that are very similar to what the will do in the next month or so. However, with survey measures at a low level, and consistent with ongoing weakness and falls in employment, the unemployment rate must go up, because the labour force continues to grow. The reason I am confident that the unemployment rate will increase considerably, is that the near-term indicators of employment from the surveys suggest weakenss for the next few months, and it is very unlikely that the economy (by far the most important factor) will grow enough over the coming 6-9 months to generate enough employment growth to prevent the unemployment rate from increasing. You are of course correct that who answers the survey matters for how accurate the survey is likely to be – howevever, most of the noise associated with inaccurate answers simply adds to the noise in the series, unless their is a systematic bias in the responses to the surveys. As a forecaster, survey information would only ever be one variable in my equations, and it would mainly help refine my projections for the next quarter or so. Forecasting is a necessary evil – governments have to do it because it impacts their tax and spending plans. Central banks need to do it because monetary policy has to try and be forward looking. Private firms do it, because the evolution of the economy influences their internal planning. However, economies are complicated beasts. Not only is it nearly impossible to predict the timing of future shocks, even if it is identified as a risk, but the data that is available gives us only an imcomplete understanding of the structure of the economy and how it is evolving. Their is also a learning process – for example, one of the key lessons of the financial crisis is that the small role of financial variable in many forecasting equations made those equations highly incomplete. That is being partly rectfied in the new generation of models under development, but we are never going to be in a world where forecasts are accurate at long horizons. The best you can hope for is that they aren’t systematically biased.
Sam is right to say that this time around the slowing economy has tended to drive down hours worked rather than a rise in full unemployment. This probably reflects recent employer experience of the shortage in skilled workers as well as changing attitudes among employees and unions. It may also reflect a feeling among many employees that the hours they had been working had been absurd.
Two interesting questions. Does this mean that jobs are available to those trying to enter the workforce or are they being left out of a job or doing things that are not really adding to their CV? (One of the things commented on during the boom was that the experienced, energetic project engineers in their late 30′s were missing because engineers of this age were unable to get into the workforce when they graduated in the early 90′s.)
The second question is whether the government, employers and unions will think seriously about formalizing this informal worksharing to prevent unemloyment rising. “Earn or learn” is a start, however, too much learn and not enough relevant work can leave both the individual and the country unprepeared for a better future.
Thanks for that explanation, LO.
Re “forecasting is a necessary evil” – I think what I’m trying to highlight is the ludicrous misreprentation and misunderstanding of what’s going on and what various measures mean from both the media and pollies, and how some of this rubbish (a) distorts decision-making itself and (b) all approaches the condition of noise in the public mind and gets completely discounted.
There’s a real chicken crying wolf issue here – in particularly for the opposition.
Joe Hockey on the news tonight was an embarrassment in political communication terms – if an opposition spokesperson repeats “variance in the data” as a cut through line, they’re in really deep trouble. I doubt Hockey actually understands what it means, anyway, though he’s a nice enough bloke.
The other impact of all this discourse is that it works against long term policy making. Whether or not Labor is taking the sorts of measures that will have a good long term pay off, I’m not presently prepared to say, because one of the effects of the current economic climate is that I’m working much harder for the same amount of money and paying less attention! However, presentationally, Rudd and Gillard came across today as the calm in a middle of a media/political storm. They will be listened to, and the rest of the voices, including probably Alan Kohler and his graphs (many of which I think don’t say what he says they say) are completely filtered out. There’s an effect here that both the media and opposition are creating – the further the stuff they talk about *and* the way they say it gets from any connection with people’s everyday lived experience, the less notice is taken, and the louder and more shrilly they say it, etc.
Anyone paying minor attention can also spot huge apparent holes – the opposition still say “not a single job has been created by the stimulus package”. The stats say 39000 full time jobs have been created. Now, in a real way, the causal link between government measures and job creation is much less direct than either side of politics implies (as you, I think, would agree). But that doesn’t matter. The message communicated by the opposition is either lost, or transmits as a lie.
They’re also finding it very hard to get out of the box where they’d only cheer up if the rest of the country went to shit, though unlike the US Republicans, they’re minimally in touch with reality enough not to say that openly.
I don’t think anyone is saying that unemployment eon’t rise a great deal. For what it’s worth the Victorian government in its budget yesterday said that it would rise and peak at 7.75%. This is a big increase and will create a lot of hardship but it’s still a lot less than in previous recessions and considering this is the worst economic crisis for 80 years, not too bad.
John, this is anecdotal, but some of the (mainly) middle class students I teach are finding it harder to get casual jobs, or losing hours. Again, we’d need to look at much a more disaggregated data set, but while, say recent university graduates are finding professional positions less available, that doesn’t mean that some won’t nevertheless enter the workforce (or are already in the workforce), etc. I think the sectoral stimulation (retail, construction) is designed to keep employment up in some of the less skilled and blue collar trades and occupations, while ramping up training/education develops skills that will be needed later on.
As I was saying, I really haven’t had time to look at this stuff in any detail, but if the sort of numbers that were being tossed around as recently as two years ago about huge gaps between a diminishing supply of labour and future demand had any real meaning, then one would assume that the government figures the underlying shortage will reappear when economic conditions improve. If this is right, then the policy challenge is really picking/shaping which occupations and sectors both will and should be the focus for the eventual allocation of labour.
Labor Outsider, I didn’t say it was a good idea, just a defensible and probably necessary one. Like the stimulus payments, sometimes you have to do ugly in a crisis.
I want to see the FHOG for existing dwellings gone as much as you do. If it goes we can both dance on its grave together.
“Necessary adustment mechanism”(NAM) – maybe that could be the new acronym for the GFC.
Anyway, I’m in no mood to be snarky, and you’ve made some sensible points in this thread.
Which of course is how Keating saw the ‘recession we had to have’!
So this isn’t The End of Capitalism, then? Bummer.
If anyone had suggested on this site, a couple of years ago, that there might be any positive aspect to casualisation, they’d have been crucified upside-down.
I’m glad some people are beginning to realise that labour market flexibility is not a totally unmitigated evil.
working less hours != casualisation
Paulus, can’t be bothered hunting for a link, but I’m pretty sure I’ve always suggested that there’s nothing wrong with casual or part time work per se. It all depends on the balance of flexibility, if you like – which is a much broader concept than ‘flexibility for the employer’ which was the WorkChoices model.
Very few human arrangements are either an unmitigated evil or an unmitigated good. It’s what principles govern them and the degree of *genuine* choice and autonomy balanced against a collective good that determines whether workplace regulation and practices are used for good or for evil *on balance*…
It’s all a bit of a mixed bag, this life. Neither a purgatorial vale of tears nor a stairway to heaven most of the time. But in a society like this one, I don’t think we have a lot of collective evil, though it’s around in the world, to be sure.
Working fewer hours = correct grammar!
Im not sure anyone’s predicting the end of capitalism Paulus! (…well, maybe a few hardcore Trots dividing into factions in a phonebooth somewhere
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There are, however, strong signs of the end of neo-liberalism, as it has been known.
Actually, I think that’s true! I must have marked over 140 essays this week. And my writing has gone to shit in the process. And I have my writing class tomorrow morning! 1!111!!!!111!!!
That’s true, marking can really screw up your grammar and spelling – that used to be my excuse, anyway. Didn’t think it was you though Mark.
No, adrian, that was clear! I’ve just been noticing I’m having real difficulty with getting object subject agreement and stuff like that right today. Normally, it’s just my spelling that collapses in a heap when I’m tired! Oh well.
I’m not sure if this stuff gets more precarious as you get older, or if you just get tired more as you get older if you’re working like a demon.
Both!
Yeah! There’s a lot of good stuff that goes with growing older, but some aspects of it just ain’t fun at all!
Nice comment at #36 Mark.
Reasoned. Informed. Relevant.
As an aside I once worked out I had marked about 200 essays [or equivalent] per week for 40 odd weeks per year for 30 years.
But now I’m retired.
Sorry ’bout that!
adrian, if it was me (lol), then I apologise. I used what I thought was a common enough logical operator for “does not equal”, to quickly make a trite and somewhat unnecessary point
Thanks, hannah’s dad!
It’s actually relevant to this topic, because as Laura said at Stills’ Bend, it’s not that there aren’t jobs in teaching and academia, it’s just that they’ve been carved up into tiny little bits. It’s actually a classic case of deskilling and division of labour, masquerading as some sort of postmodern phenomenon. So – with marking for instance – it becomes something for which the majority of people who do it are rewarded directly – at about 33 bucks an hour – but then has to be done on top of everything else, and thus has to be either done by rote, or carelessly, or you just can’t fit it in if you do want to do it properly. I think it’s actually making a lot of people reflect in a different way – more personally – on how much longer these compromises can be made – particularly when the ‘apprenticeship’ model of academia is pretty much shattered. Here, I think there’ll be a real exodus of younger academics – full time and casual – to elsewhere which is building already. Most will never return.
In a few years’ time, the house of cards will collapse because the people actually doing the work that supports research professors, inflated bureaucracies, etc, etc, won’t be there, or won’t be able to do it any more to the standard at which it can be done.
It’s an object lesson in the pathologies of a certain approach to casualisation and work organisation.
Ps – what keeps me going, hannah’s dad, is that I love teaching itself. But I’m actively reconsidering whether I can continue with it. Academia’s a dismal place mostly these days.
If tonight’s Q&A is any indication the combination of falling unemployment and rising retail sales are going to leave the opposition flailing around for a narrative. Labor will be about to paint the debt scare for what it is – a scare. Over the past few days the Government has been pushing the message (as Mark Habib did tonight) that compared to other counties, especially in Europe, Australia is doing comparatively well. If they can cut through on this Malcolm and company are neutered, on that argument, at least. Sharman Stone was forced to admit the Opposition, if in Government, would have had to go into a deficit. She made a brief but desperate attempt to call up the bogey of thoudands of Pakistanis/Afghans/ etc descending upon our undefended shores, but got nowhere. Basically, it was a microcosm of Opposition tactics, the one’s that don’t seem to be working.
Part of the Opposition’s problem may be, of course, that having governed by fear one way or another for eleven years, they’ve become incapable of operating any other way. Labor, meanwhile, treats each improvement with very, very measured caution, so, up or down, they’ll come out smeling like roses.
Mark at 54.
That rings bells. Been there, did that.
What can I say?
I stuck it out, more or less.
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, sometimes I’m glad I did.
After 30 years of teaching and loving it, ‘they’ offered me a golden handshake and because ‘they’ had so spoiled the show in the last 5-10 years to the extent that the last thing teaching was about was learning, I took the money and ran and never looked back.
Convenient having a high earning wife tho’.
Have a holiday and a think.
If only I could afford a holiday, hannah’s dad!
I shouldn’t sidetrack my own thread, but the excellent discussion of some of this stuff I referred to earlier is over here:
http://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-only-positions.html
sorry adrian, completely misread you back there
SallyR, hey that’s OK, misreading is my speciality.
Mark, I have a close friend who has been in academia for the past 20 years or so, and he tells me it’s far worse than it’s ever been and completely dispiriting.
Speaking of Q&A, I tought Guy Rundle was impressive last night and a good counterpoint to the increasingly comic Greg Sheriden.
“Working fewer hours = correct grammar!”
Er, no.
Working fewer hours = correct usage.
There’s nowt wrong grammatically with ‘working less hours’. Or syntactically, come to that.
Not wanting to go completely off topic, but don’t know where you got that idea from Hal9000.
I could probably post a hundred links, but this will have to do: The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years.
I would have thought having interest rates as low as they are, is a pretty huge buffer in terms of business and consumer confidence, compared to the 90′s.
There is opportunity in this ‘recession’ that didn’t seem to be there before..at least that’s how it feels to me.
I spend most of my time with people who’s incomes are well below the average, and who are fairly debt adverse, mostly working in environmental/community sector, as well as a lot of people who live simply and are happy to earn ‘lifestyle incomes’ from cottage-type industries. For people like us, cheaper petrol, cheaper produce, easier access to labour, less manic greed…etc etc, it’s all been welcome.
I know this might sound callous to those who have found themselves unemployed but this recession has been good for pretty much everyone I know, we are mostly in our 30′s, we were school leavers during the last recession. The generation that followed us, my nieces and nephews, have never known hardship..those people are now 20-somethings and they seem to feel bulletproof..which I think also accounts for why confidence is also higher than might be expected..I also think it’s a reason why it might crash badly, if the ‘recession’ really does bite and becomes protracted.
The poor quality of the data is a real issue. Poor old ABS trying to their job while being ho tied by the government whic is eagerly throwing money away while cutting them back.
Wow, that’s a perspicacious comment Razor! Why can’t I remember you making it when the ABS figures showed a sharp jump in unemployment in March?
Paulus: get back to work! We’ll have none of this slacking off a LP. We’re 24-7, work-till-you-drop, happily de-unionized, contented workers here at the Wal-Mart-topia that is LP.
We’ve been too soft for too long. How can you afford electricity and an internet service? Wages are obviously too high. I bet you had the weekend off too. Bring back Work Choices, I say. Crush the unions! Bring back coal mining jobs for the kiddies.
…….I’ll lie down now.
….abolish the minimum wage, no more toilet breaks, we all refer to our boss as “Dear Leader”, swap Labor Day for Flexible Sycophant’s Day (but no public holidays!), abolish families – they get in the way of the efficent workplace of the future.
……honestly, I’ll lie down now.
…I misspelt Labour Day – dock my pay! I’m not worthy! In fact, let’s return to non-monetary forms of employee remuneration – rations.
I’m a worthless worm. I lay awake at night wondering if I’ll ever be flexible enough for my Dear Leader.
….seriously, time for a lie down.
I love my Dear Leader and all our other capitalist overlords.
Your Dear Leader is probably noting that you at least waited ’til knock off time before hitting the schnapps.
Sorry Sally – Working less hours does not automatically equal casual. There is no fundemental reason why shorter hours cannot be done using some permenant arrangement instead of casual. During a recession it makes sense to make changes that make it easier for annual hours to be reduced as well as putting pressure on companies to reduce maximum annual working hours.
I was unemployed for 12 months during the 1993 recession, and, even though I was not under financial stress, it was not one of my better experiences. I would prefer to see us all take a 5% pay cut in return for 2.5 extra weeks holidays or equivalent if the alternative is unemployment going up by 5%
I too hope we see more cases of hours being cut rather than layoffs. But its not easily as straightforward as that for employers as they have do have some fixed costs for employees that don’t reduce proportionally if people work less hours (eg HR and often office space costs). And there are have been some employees complaining about less hours as it can be hard to adjust to (eg childcare costs may not reduce, but pay will) and others want to get redundancy payouts as they are close to retirement anyway.
I think the point is that many casuals have already been stripped of any loading for sickness, holiday and severance pay. They often work “at call” and never know from fortnight to fortnight how much they will earn.
Consequently they hang on to Centrelink payments, even when they receive a very small part or nothing of the dole, because they might get caught with nil in another term. This means that they do get the benefits of a health care card but are required to run through the hoops of jobnetwork as if they were still totally unemployed.(“employed” for ABS stats but not Centrelink, incidentally)
Paulus may well be correct about the wonders of casualisation for those who can afford it. If you are in demand, higher up on the income scale, and can negotiate a good deal it may be a dream come true. For the majority it has become insecure work on an hourly rate, free of any of extras, at the employers whim.
Sadly, with workchoices and Kennett mean time it has mostly become ‘flexibility for the employer’ as Mark suggests.
Knock off time! Knock off time! There’s no knock off time in the modern, flexible workplace.
Working FEWER hours for f**cks sake!!!!
Perhaps the childcare subsidies should be lowered so that those who do have something else to be productive with (raising their own kids) are the ones who leave their jobs behind.
John D, see my (not quite so embarassing now!) explanatory note @ 52.
My boss worked out a flexible workplace arrangement whereby he runs the company into the ground, pockets a performance bonus (after all, he is only being paid 10,000 times what the average worker at the company is being paid, well, 20 million if you include offshore operations), and we get a 15% wage cut. And we did it all without the interference of one of those un-Australian socialist unions – my boss just worked out the details for us and we all signed on the dotted line.
Such wise men our corporate betters. Look at the wonders they’re doing for the world economy. I particularly like the way they didn’t get in over their heads and borrow huge sums to pay for unproductive mergers – that would have left us vulnerable in a financial crisis and workers would have to pay the cost. I also like that our wise corporate statesmen didn’t borrow too much to build up personal stock portfolios. If they had they might have been vulnerable to margin calls that would make a financial crisis much worse.
I use my scrip at the company store to buy flour and sugar.
According to The Hun yesterday there’s good news. Page 6 of course.
Ginja, first you have to load sixteen tons.
Too true Dave!
From the news limtied website:
“THE nation’s statistician will make changes to its labour market survey, a week after critics accused it of coming up with a “rogue number” for Australia’s jobless rate.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has received an additional $15 million in Government funding for the next financial year, allowing it to reinstate the number of respondents it previously used to calculate unemployment.
The decision will also improve the accuracy of its retail trade survey, which has also been the subject of criticism.
“In the current economic climate, the value of good statistics for decision making cannot be underestimated,” the Australian Statistician Brian Pink said.”
So, how inaccurate were the last few numbers?
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics has received an additional $15 million in Government funding for the next financial year, allowing it to reinstate the number of respondents it previously used to calculate unemployment.”
Yikes, it costs $15 million extra to ring up a few extra people and ask them if they worked for at least one (paid) hour in the previous week, were actively seeking work and were able to accept a job in the next week if it were available. All that money to get a slightly less crappy measurement, that is World’s Best Practice, of those out of work. Jesus wept!
Incidetally, the best way to almost totally eliminate unemployment would be to additionally ask those phoned if they are currently playing the merimba with a banana on their head and make that an extra requirement to be registered as unemployed.