Bloodline, sweat and tears: keeping it all in the family

There is a secret army of workers who receive no immediate recompense for their expertise and commitment. This is the story of Australia’s contributing (unpaid) family workers.

The industry with the highest proportion of the workforce comprised of contributing family workers is beef cattle farming, writes Bernard Salt. Picture: istock

There is a secret army of workers who receive no immediate recompense for their expertise and commitment. And yet forever onwards these workers toil away; their endeavours are captured once every five years by the census. This is the story of Australia’s contributing (unpaid) family workers.

To be clear, family businesses do indeed hire and remunerate their own, but some family members also contribute without receiving (or perhaps even seeking) any kind of immediate financial compensation.

A single question in the census provides a window into this world of unpaid worker contributions.

Perhaps family members see working in a family business as an investment into an asset that will be recouped via inheritance later in life.

Maybe this cohort of close to 170,000 workers in 2021 is dominated by a founding and now ageing patriarch who enjoys nothing more in retirement than pottering about making themselves useful in the family business.

The age profile of contributing family workers shows their number increases with age.

Of those Australians remaining in the workforce beyond the age of 80, around one-quarter describe their role as contributing family worker – these octogenarians are working for nothing! Although they may own part of, if not the whole of, the business they’re working in.

The industry with the highest proportion of the workforce comprised of contributing family workers is beef cattle farming, with 29 per cent of workers falling into this category.

This is followed by sheep farming (25 per cent), lobster and crab potting (22 per cent), sugar cane growing (19 per cent) and beekeeping (18 per cent), where it seems that business owners are predisposed to asking family members to “help out”.

Around Roma, in southwest Queensland, the contributing family worker tops 14 per cent of the workforce. Similar proportions apply around Queensland’s Monto (inland from Bundaberg) and around Parkes in western NSW.

Good grazing country as well as cane lands seem to bring out the best in multi-generational households running family properties where the kids, maybe a life partner and/or the supposedly retired all pitch in.

Unpaid family workers also contribute to the cafe and accommodation industries.

Basically any enterprise where the family lives adjacent to (or above, in the case of cafes) the conduct of business activities – like serving customers, like cleaning workspaces or attending to farming tasks – seems to have the effect of requiring all family members to do their bit.

In the case of beef cattle farming, maybe the cut and thrust of everyday work has been passed on to the next generation but older farmers and graziers appear to quite like remaining connected to a business that they established (or inherited) in their youth.

I imagine for those involved, such workaday activities aren’t regarded as work per se but rather as an opportunity to ensure safe passage of the property to the next generation.

The map of Australia with contributing family workers dominating the interior shows a clear division between the city and the regions on this issue. Yes, there is a contributing family worker cohort in Melbourne and Sydney, and in other capitals, too, but in all of these places non-family enterprises dominate.

The country, the regions, the remotest parts of Australia are revealed by the 2021 census as being held together by something far more binding than workplace regulations and entitlements.

Family businesses, family farms, a sense of intergenerational kinship blankets the grazing lands west of the Great Divide and neatly leapfrogs the Nullarbor to the wheatbelt beyond.

Here is the heart and soul of a rural and regional Australia that sits outside the gravitational pull of our largest capital cities. It operates by different metrics, by forces linked to family, to heritage, to an ideal of what it takes to live and to prosper in rural and regional Australia.

In these places, an elevated level of commitment is required to make a family business work across increasingly fickle seasons so that it might be passed on to younger generations that may be weighing other work and lifestyle options.

The contribution of (unpaid) family workers in regional cities rises and falls across the continent. In Byron Bay, 136 workers, or 2.5 per cent of a workforce of 5411, were counted as unpaid family members at the time of the 2021 census. Other coastal cities follow Byron’s lead: Port Lincoln (2.4 per cent), Ulladulla (2.3 per cent) and Esperance (2.2 per cent). In such lifestyle places, the family businesses concerned could well involve fishing, accommodation, cafes, real estate and retail.

More than one-third (34 per cent) of unpaid family workers at the 2021 census attained an educational level of year 10 and above (i.e. basically teenagers). Some 7 per cent had completed year 9 or less. It appears that school kids are expected to (or perhaps want to) help the family business.

Apart from English (130,208 workers), the most common language used at home by contributing family workers is Mandarin (8903), Vietnamese (2781) and Italian (2443). Immigrant families marshal all available resources to make their businesses succeed.

City-based immigrants and rural-based farmers are thus united by a common ideal: this is the notion of creating a business that can be either passed on or used as a stepping stone to greater success. Unpaid family work may be viewed by some as one of the sacrifices required to build a business that can be passed on.

However, net growth in the contributing family worker workforce over the five years to 2021 was 3695 or just 2 per cent. This compares with total workforce growth of 13 per cent.

The unpaid family worker lost ground between the censuses maybe due in part to the pandemic. But perhaps there is a bigger megatrend shaping the outlook not just for unpaid family workers but also for the family (agribusiness) businesses within which they work.

The drive for economies of scale forcing farm aggregation erodes the basis of family farming. Corporate farming at scale thus ensues leading to fewer people scattered across the farmlands and in the villages west of the Great Divide.

Plus the ageing of the livestock farmer (whose age profile now peaks at 66) means that by the end of the decade, unpaid family workers will diminish further.

For more than a century, the Australian continent has been galvanised by community, by farmlands, by soldier settlement, by bush blocks, by vast pastoral runs.

The evidence from the 2021 census suggests that while these communities are still holding together, the next generation, perhaps confronted with even tougher seasons and less stable markets, may make other life choices.

There is, indeed, an army of unpaid family workers doing what they can to ensure survival of a family business. And it may be underpinned by familial love and commitment. But it is also a model that isn’t maintaining market share.

That may be because expecting, or accepting, unpaid work, even if willingly offered, doesn’t align with the values of our times.

Maybe the next generation of patriarch and matriarch farmers could retire within the district, offer to volunteer in local communities and allow a new generation of corporate-styled agribusinesses to scale up, to machine up, to lean into agtech, to deliver output at scale.

The model of the family farm, of the kids and others pitching in, has served Australia well for more than a century. But maybe it’s time to reimagine the basis to agribusiness and how we can deliver even better outcomes for the times and for the markets that lay ahead.

There will be no diminution in demand for Australian agricultural output. Indeed, recent UN projections show global population rising from 8 billion today to a peak just above 10 billion by 2080.

Rightly or wrongly, the corporatisation of farming processes seems to be the direction in which agribusiness, and thus many of Australia’s family businesses, is headed in the 2020s and beyond.

Bernard Salt is founder and executive director of The Demographics group; data and research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.