How did we go from a country of workers to a nation of bludgers?
Advance Australia Fair had it right. This is a country built on toil and on the promise of wealth for toil – a promise that has deep roots in Western civilisation. But today’s work culture – especially within the public sector – is a whole different story.
Until 2000, Australian full-time employees worked, on average, slightly more hours per working day than Americans. And despite a greater number of holidays, there was little difference in average annual hours worked.
But since then a gap has opened up – and there are plenty of signs that it is growing.
Nor is that the only difference. In the US, about 20 per cent of private sector employees spend some time working from home and the proportion is not materially higher for those employed by government.
In Australia, however, 36 per cent of private sector employees regularly work from home, while the figure for the Australian Public Service is a breathtaking 61 per cent.
And of course, just how hard they work, and how effectively, is a matter of conjecture.
There is, in other words, a question of work effort – a question that was left entirely off the table at the government’s reform roundtable.
That question would have puzzled the visitors who came to Australia years ago. Yes, Australians loved sports, gambled voraciously and drank prodigiously. But if they played hard they also worked hard, with no one putting in more backbreaking effort than the settlers who tamed the bush and transformed the countryside.
Already in the 1880s, slacker was a widespread term of abuse for those who “don’t pull their weight”. By the 1890s, it was joined by bludger, whose derogatory meaning is apparent from its original use for a man who lives off the earnings of prostitutes.
Even the unions, as they sought higher wages and better conditions, promised to deliver “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” – a phrase that still appeared, as a warning of what an employer would expect, in job ads from the late 1950s.
Those attitudes were, in many ways, reflections of the Victorian work ethic, which was itself the deeply entrenched product of a long and complex history.
There had, in effect, always been an element of ambivalence in the West’s attitude to work. The Greeks frankly despised it, using the same word for work and for enslavement.
The Judeo-Christian approach was far more measured. On the one hand Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, were doomed to a life of perpetual toil, Adam tilling the ground and Eve bearing children in pain.
Yet labour was also a means of developing the spiritual life of an individual. Indeed, with the Hebrew word for work, abodah, being the same as that for “divine service”, to work for six days and then rest on the seventh was to act as God had in the creation, thus fulfilling the biblical precept that man was made in God’s image.
The theology of the late Middle Ages echoed that theme, emphasising that work was far more than a mere punishment for original sin. Productive activity was analogous to the work done by God, wrote St Thomas Aquinas, and just as “heaven and earth (are) brought into being by God, so is the handiwork produced by a craftsman”.
Both the Protestant Reformation and the reformed Catholicism that followed it pushed that further, not just by elevating work into a calling or vocation but also – in what was a truly dramatic break from the aristocratic ethos – by asserting that to work was a universal obligation.
“God has strictly commanded labour to all,” wrote Puritan theologian Richard Baxter; wealth may spare the rich “from some sordid sort of work” but they are “no more excused from service of work than the poorest of men”.
Exactly the same point was stressed by the Catholic Petrus Loycx, whose In Praise of Labour argued that because “everyone is noble in so far as every human being has been created in the image of God”, the aristocracy cannot claim any exemption from the duty to work.
It was from there a small but significant step to the characterisation of labour by the giants of the German Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant set the groundwork by stressing individual autonomy and human dignity, which were intimately associated with productive effort, as fundamental values.
But it was GWF Hegel who made the crucial advance. Just as the creation was God’s actualisation, Hegel argued, so work was a vital element in the actualisation – that is, the transformation of what is merely potential into what is actual – of our individual humanity.
Work, Hegel emphasised, did not only shape the world, it shaped the worker too. The discipline, concentrated thought and foresight it requires are forms of “moral education”, whose impact is every bit as great as that of sitting in a lecture theatre.
So too is the sociability, respect for others and capacity for mutual adjustment we learn through ongoing co-operative effort and by being constantly exposed to the gaze of those we work with and for.
Moreover, the very fact of designing, making or modifying things forces us to grapple with nature, helping to bridge the gap between our “subjectivity” and the constraints of reality. And last but certainly not least, the income productive activity brings and the assets it allows us to acquire provide not just sustenance but the independence and autonomy that are the substance of human dignity.
It would take too long to trace how those ideas, often expressed in highly abstract terms, percolated into public opinion and daily life. But there is no doubt that the quest for individual dignity and independence merged, in the course of the 19th century, with the search for respectability: that is, not just for the subjective feeling of self-worth but for the respect of others.
Nowhere was that desire for respectability stronger than in Australia; and nowhere was it more directly linked to productive effort. This was, said the words to Advance Australia Fair, a land that offered “golden soil and wealth for toil”; the pledge it demanded was to “toil with hearts and hands/To make this Commonwealth of ours/Renowned of all the lands”.
Society’s crime was not that it forced people to work; the crime was when there wasn’t work for all.
There were, for sure, critics. For the Marxists, work under capitalism was alienating and exploitative; only under socialism, and even more so when socialism evolved into communism, would work become truly satisfying, eventually changing to the point where it was indistinguishable from leisure. That the Soviet Union and China proved to be the modern world’s most labour-repressive societies – including by being the first where it was a criminal offence to be unemployed – did nothing to dim the ardour of that illusion’s true believers.
Yet the most devastating blow to the Judeo-Christian work ethic did not come from Marxism. It came from the combination of the 1960s “counterculture”, which ridiculed the conventional workplace, with the “rights revolution”, which transformed the wishes and dreams of the 60s into legislated rights and enforceable entitlements.
The resulting attitude combined two elements. The first was the antinomian notion, pithily expressed by Bob Black in his 1985 manifesto, The Abolition of Work, that “work, with its insistence on discipline and self-control, is the source of all the misery in the world”.
The second, and arguably more significant, was the “radical progressive” view, equally pithily articulated by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. The conventional workplace was, according to that view, nothing but “a dictatorship”.
In it, wrote Anderson, “orders may be arbitrary and can change at any time, without prior notice or opportunity to appeal”, while “superiors are unaccountable, as they are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors”.
And to make things worse, in the workplaces of the information age, “everyone lives under surveillance, to ensure that they are complying with orders”.
The remedy had to lie in vastly strengthening the rights of employees, thus drastically limiting the power and authority of the “bosses” and their lackeys.
That is precisely the direction in which we have headed – arguably further and faster than any other country. Employees must be treated like snowflakes, with anything else being bullying or (just as often) some variant of sexual harassment. Almost all employees have a “right to disconnect” – a right that can be removed only by consent.
As for working from home, it is becoming a right too, which, as Peter Dutton discovered, is politically untouchable to boot.
It is undoubtedly the public sector that has been most thoroughly permeated and reshaped by the elevation into absolutes of those rights and entitlements. But with the public service and the other activities that are primarily publicly funded now accounting for somewhere between two-thirds and 80 per cent of all employment creation, the need to match the conditions those jobs offer has spread to ever greater swathes of the economy.
The result, as those rights become part of everyday expectations, is a workplace culture that is increasingly adversarial and increasingly litigious. Boosting that process is the fact that the returns to litigating have soared.
Unfair dismissal awards used to be modest, but this year Antoinette Lattouf was awarded $70,000 for being deprived of two days’ casual work. The trends are no less stark in sexual harassment cases, where the amounts awarded to plaintiffs have, over the past decade, risen from around $15,000 to well over $100,000. And workers compensation funds are paying out ever greater amounts for bullying and psychological injury.
It is consequently unsurprising that the number of complaints has soared too.
Is it really plausible that Australia now has one of the world’s highest rates of workplace sexual harassment, comfortably exceeding those in Europe and the US? And is it plausible that we are in the midst of a dreadful epidemic of workplace bullying, as the increase in the proportion of employees who claim they have been bullied – from around 10 per cent a decade ago to 40 per cent today – implies? Or are these just the symptoms of a society that has lost its sense of the nature, meaning and value of work?
Advance Australia Fair had it right. This is a country built on toil and on the promise of wealth for toil – a promise that has deep roots in Western civilisation.
Yes, we need to work smarter. But to work smarter one must first of all work: and as anyone who knows the world of work well knows, working smarter is, and has always been, truly hard work.
That is what the reform summit should have looked at. That is what it should have had the moral and political courage to address. Its abject silence speaks louder than words.
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