The persistence, and now the widening, of the gap between men’s and women’s pay is one of the continuing scandals of Australian public life. Despite the fact that unequal pay for work of equal value has been illegal since the Whitlam era, what ought to be a major issue is typically surrounded by obfuscation, if not ignored entirely. In today’s Crikey, Eva Cox has published a useful corrective to many of the myths which serve to excuse, obscure and justify what is a continuing disgrace: Continue reading ‘Unequal pay for work of equal value’
Tag Archive for 'sociology of work'
Andrew Norton has posted on some interesting findings from Roy Morgan’s employment perceptions survey. Basically, there’s something of a disjunction – with 70% of respondents believing unemployment will rise over the next year (the highest since the last recession, and the third highest since the survey began in 1975) while 80% think their own job is secure (the same number as last year’s survey). 63% believe they could easily find another job.
These sorts of surveys demonstrate one of the weaknesses of opinion polling – we’re left to speculate on the reasons. It really would be extremely helpful if polling groups were to supplement such research with qualitative forms of enquiry such as focus groups, or qualitative aspects to the survey instrument.
But since we have to speculate, my guess would be that one or more of the following factors might be in operation:
MB writes: Lost, it would appear, in the government’s focus on productivity as the ruling motif of the workplace is any consideration of the human costs of work in the new economy. I had hoped that Julia Gillard might bring a focus on industrial democracy and the quality of working life to her role as Industrial Relations Minister, but, to date, that’s a hope that appears a futile one. Nevertheless, I agree with David Coats that we need to politicise “bad work”, as I’ve suggested before, and that may well be a contribution largely to be made by civil society. Anyway, when I read this post at The Global Sociology Blog, I thought it cohered well with this effort, and so I asked SocProf if we could post it at LP, and I’m delighted that she agreed.
Dominic Huez, an MD specialized in questions of labor-related medical conditions, has a book out, Souffrir au Travail: Comprendre Pour Agir, that connects illness and suffering to management practices. He recently had a chat hosted by Le Monde. Here is the digest version of what was discussed.
Rejecting “stress” as the proper concept to define his subject, Huez prefers to use “suffering at work” as the correct one that can be caused by a lack of recognition by one’s peers or bosses. In a very Durkheimian fashion, he explains that the dynamics of recognition are essential to one’s identity-at-work and to one’s health.
For Huez, there are two main mechanisms at the root of psychopathologies at work (in both senses):
Continue reading ‘Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain’
As noted here and here, I attended the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event in Brisbane yesterday. Courtesy of the lovely folks at the ABC, the sessions were all recorded and will be viewable online, so that absolves me from the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a session in which I was a panelist after the fact. So what I wanted to do in this post is thank the organisers of the day – particularly Jonathan Este of the MEAA – and of my session – particularly Cristen Tilley from the ABC as Chair and my co-panelists Axel Bruns from QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and blogger/journalist Marian Edmunds – for what I found was a stimulating and enjoyable experience. I also wanted to note some reflections which were prompted by many of the discussions.
The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.
That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)
As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.
I noticed yesterday that Griffith Uni has provided a plasma screen in the library window for students and staff to watch the Olympics, but when I questioned both my Griffith students and later on my ACU students, most said they were too busy with things like paid work, study and parental responsibilities to be following the Olympics closely. That’s obviously an unscientific sample, but it does (I think) go to show that not everyone immerses themselves in the Olympics coverage. I don’t necessarily object to a bit of it – I had some fun watching some of the Sydney Olympics on a trip to Melbourne (as you do!), but I’m too busy to pay any attention this time around – because of paid work and study (looming deadline for second draft of PhD thesis). I did notice that Stephanie Rice had won another gold medal, but I think only because she’d been the subject of discussion here around privacy issues.
But I imagine that consulting ratings figures would demonstrate that a lot of people do watch a lot of the Olympics, and that criticism of Yahoo!7’s online coverage probably implies that some people want to watch some from the office. In that vein, it was interesting to see an article in the Fin last week about various large organisations more or less agreeing with Bob Hawke and his comments on the Americas Cup – that “anyone who sacks an employee for checking results on the intertubes or for taking a sickie after staying up late during the Olympics is a mug”. Managers of various companies were quoted saying they didn’t have a problem with employees looking at online coverage provided they managed their own workload. That raises the broader question of policing internet access at work. My view on that is that if someone spends all day looking at websites, there’s probably either a problem with workflow or they’re not a terribly motivated employee after all. My feeling is that most employees exercise a fair degree of self-discipline in achieving work goals, and that’s backed up by a lot of studies of working from home. One anecdote I have is of the Queensland Public Service in 2000, when I was doing a consultancy in house for a few weeks. One day I was in the office was the American presidential election – and I suppose because a lot of public servants are political junkies, a whole open office was full of people hitting refresh on CNN. Most of these people were doing project or research work, and not required to do customer service as such, and I didn’t hear that any deadlines had been missed – folks were just making up the time later, or building that desire to obsess over election results into their work planning.
The future of journalism – or its vanishing present
As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.