Ready for the robots: how they’ll change our lives
Our leaders are slow to look at how robots will change our lives. Worse still, there are plenty of immediate challenges they would rather not confront.
Be afraid; the robots are coming and they will eat our jobs. Oft-quoted research suggesting that advances in technology will wipe out millions of jobs continue to distort discourse about the future of work.
But increasingly, clear-eyed labour market experts are cautioning that extreme scenarios predicting the death of up to 40 per cent of existing jobs are unlikely to eventuate. Jobs will go, especially those requiring low-skill repetitive tasks, but work will also evolve and be replaced by new jobs.
Of more immediate concern is the fact that recent negative trends in work show little sign of improving. Flat wages growth is no longer just the new black of workplace relations, it risks becoming normalised. As Reserve Bank Governor Phillip Lowe said recently, Australia’s sense of shared prosperity is diminished by sustained low wages growth.
Then there’s the rapid rise in insecure employment. Research by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work found less than half of Australian workers are now in a permanent full-time paid job with leave entitlements. Rather than prompting a considered discussion, the release of the research saw another outbreak of tedious point-scoring and denials from the usual employer suspects that job insecurity is an issue. It is.
Beyond bromides, the government seems little interested in a serious public conversation about the challenges facing the workforce. Most of its energy in workplace relations is spent belting Bill Shorten and unions, while the ACTU’s campaign to “change the rules” is overly reliant on Labor winning office and based on the questionable premise that giving unions more legal rights will magically translate into higher pay and conditions.
The world of work is changing. But the pace of change is likely to be evolutionary not revolutionary. Some emerging trends will become fixtures, others will fade. Here are some ways that work could keep changing – and not always for the better.
Hunger games
As more Australians opt to tap a phone screen over taking a short drive to a local food outlet, scrutiny of the sub-standard pay and conditions endured by food delivery workers will increase. The next time you consume food delivered to your door, think about this: drivers and riders need to do three, even four, deliveries an hour, often in driving rain at night, to be paid more an hour than the lowest-paid, award-reliant casual employee elsewhere. They are engaged as independent contractors, must obtain an Australian Business Number, and need to send invoices just to get paid. As contractors, they do not receive the minimum pay and entitlements they would be entitled to if they were employees. These practices will now be scrutinised by the courts after the federal workplace regulator launched a test case alleging Foodora engaged in sham contracting by misrepresenting to three workers that they were independent contractors when in fact they were employees. (Foodora will close its local operations this month.)
The case has implications for rival companies operating in the gig economy, particularly Deliveroo and Uber Eats, which engage food delivery riders and drivers as independent contractors. “Where employees are incorrectly classified as independent contractors, it has the potential to not only affect the worker but also unfairly disadvantage other businesses applying award rates and conditions,” says former Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James. “Disruption of existing markets is only legitimate if it is lawful.” The NSW Labor Party recently promised, if elected, to change state law to allow the setting of minimum rates of pay and conditions for gig economy workers. Pressure for more regulation across the country is likely to intensify.
The three-day weekend
Fancy working four days a week and getting paid for five? If you’re thinking “my boss would never agree to that”, take a look at the recent experience of a New Zealand firm that trialled a shorter working week. Employees at Perpetual Guardian, a company managing wills and trusts, worked four days but were paid for five.
Critical to the success of the six-week trial was employees designing in advance ways to work more productively. They subsequently reported that the reduced hours allowed them to be motivated for longer and encouraged a willingness to help each other out. University of Auckland Business School’s Helen Delaney, who analysed the trial, says staff told her that reduced hours were only viable if employees met or exceeded agreed productivity measures.
Three days away from work provided obvious personal benefits, and employees said they had more time to participate in family life and accomplish personal tasks. But the compressed working week did present challenges.
Some felt increased stress and pressure to complete work within a shorter time. Others did not work fewer overall hours, working 10 hours each day for four days. Managers found it difficult to reduce their time at work. “The work just doesn’t stop,” one said.
Delaney says not all workers were content with the extra time off. One employee complained she was a “bit bored” and would have rather come to work to see colleagues. Another struggled to figure out what to do with the day off but ultimately “learnt to spend some time with herself, which was quite an important thing to learn how to do”.
Do Australian companies have the courage to carry out similar trials? University of Adelaide Professor Andrew Stewart says it would hard to see how workers could shift long-time employment habits so “any sustained attempt to move away from long working hours, or reduce the size of the working week for a significant number of people, is not going to be easy.
“This is a classic example of market failure,” he says. “We can’t expect the market to deliver sensible outcomes. What we can expect market forces to do is to encourage businesses to take the short-term view and to prioritise shareholder return by getting people to work harder and longer.
“If we are going to address that, it needs to be something that’s led either by government or business at a high level. Or by a popular groundswell of support from within the community. Right now I can’t see any of those things happening in Australia,s but even if it’s only a few firms here and there giving it a go, that’s worthwhile.”
Employee surveillance
Monitoring of workers will only get more sophisticated and intrusive as surveillance becomes cheaper for employers. Companies are also able to access an extraordinary amount of information about their employees through sophisticated computer programs. Beyond issues such as an employee’s age, time in each job, performance rating, amount of sick leave taken, time with current manager and the period until their contract expires, computer programs allow employers to consider whether a worker has a second passport, how many stock options they have and their marital status. Jim Stanford of the Centre for Future Work says the impact of surveillance at work is a “real sleeper issue”.
“I believe the falling cost of electronic monitoring and the lack of limitations on employers’ use of it for discipline is one of the reasons for wage stagnation,” he says. “They no longer have to pay someone to be your supervisor to look over your shoulder all the time. They have a closed circuit, or a GPS chip or monitoring software, to do that job. I see this in all kinds of workplaces you would not expect, including offices and healthcare facilities. In many ways it violates the privacy and dignity of work. I think it has an economic effect, because it means employers are more willing to use that negative sanction as a motivator rather than the positive inducement of higher wages. With cheap, ubiquitous surveillance options, the balance has shifted to using ‘stick’ such as negative sanctions, up to and including discharge.”
Body implants
Body implants in workers could be acceptable by 2030, according to Jon Williams, joint global leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers people and organisations division. A PwC survey of 10,000 workers across major economies last year found 70 per cent would consider using treatments to enhance their brain and body if this improved their employment prospects.
PwC surveyed 10,029 workers in China, Germany, India, Britain and the US. While Australians were not interviewed, Williams says he sees no reason there would not be a similar level of willingness to consider treatments at work. He cited the example of employees at the Swedish firm Epicentre, who have had microchips implanted into their hands to allow them to open doors and operate office technology.
“At the moment, I suspect people [who answered the survey] were thinking, ‘I’ll take a drug that will improve my ability to concentrate, or to stay awake for longer, or to perform a manual task more times because it supports my body’,” he says. “In 10 or 15 years’ time, we may get to implants.”
Williams notes the case of the Sydney man who had an Opal card chip inserted into his left hand to make catching public transport easier. “So [implants at work] are already possible and happening, and people will use it socially to pay for things and to get on to buses and public transport,’’ he says. “Why would they not 10 years later go, sure, put one in my brain to make me think harder or for longer? It’s just natural progression. Things that we think now are out there and science fiction will become relatively accepted in five, 10 years’ time.”
Known unknowns
Adelaide University’s Professor Andrew Stewart says government should be able to operate at two speeds: engage in a political debate against their opponents while doing important policy work in the background in an attempt to future-proof the labour market.
But he says neither Labor nor Coalition governments have shown a commitment to doing research into the labour market.
“How can we take a look at the future of work when we don’t know what’s going on at the moment? How can we talk about the challenges of the gig economy when we don’t know how many people are working in it? We don’t know anything beyond a few small case studies about what’s happening in that part of the labour market.”
“We have the government de-funding the ABS [Australian Bureau of Statistics], and not conducting or funding general research into the labour market; we are operating blind. This not a partisan point; it has been true of both govern-ments. Whoever wins the next election, there is an urgent need to put time and effort into finding out more about what’s going on and then thinking through how best to meet those challenges.
“It may be that regulation is not the answer. It may be that what’s going on in the gig economy, working hours, the balance between working at home and at a defined workplace, and the gender pay gap are best addressed by not regulating and leaving things to the market. I would be very, very sceptical of that view, but it may be that’s the right thing to do. But what really isn’t right is for a government of any persuasion to simply operate in the dark.”
Ewin Hannan is The Australian’s workplace editor
Add your comment to this story
‘There are too many charities not doing the right thing’
Investor Natalie Cooney says philanthropy has the power to change the world, if only the ‘naughty kids in the classroom’ would get out of the way first.
Adopt the Six Step path to create workplace happiness
The Australian Best Places to Work, powered by WorkL, recognises the very best organisations in Australia.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout