Forget the productivity challenge, it’s the green-left vibe that counts

Business leaders says Tony Burke’s workplace changes will harm productivity and not create a single job. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The storm over the right of ­workers to disconnect is a classic example of the gesture politics of the Greens and the folly of “vibenomics”.

It’s a cheap gift from a vote-needy Labor in the Senate to the party of meaningless motion; it sounds and feels like progress to the put-upon, but adds flab to workplace statutes when the nation needs more flexibility and co-operation to lift our performance.

Early in the pandemic, former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe said the eventual recovery offered a chance to build on the co-operative spirit of the crisis to push forward with reforms.

“A strong focus on making Australia a great place for businesses to expand, invest, innovate and hire people is the best way of extending the recovery into a new period of strong and sustainable growth and rising living standards for all Australians,” Lowe said almost four years ago.

We should judge Labor’s workplace policies on whether they do just that.

Certainly the new “do not call” edict cuts through in a culture with flighty attention spans and addiction to devices.

But it won’t make us richer and distracts us from the main game of reviving an enterprise culture and working smarter, not longer. At best, the right to disconnect is a gimmick; at worst, another regulatory nuisance for businesses.

The post-Covid era is a time of rapid social and economic change amid a living-cost crisis.

While employers have been easing “command and control” for decades, the pandemic and technology have accelerated changes on working from home for many, not all, service and knowledge workers.

The latest iteration of the authoritative HILDA survey, published on Monday and covering 2021, shows working from home during the pandemic helped to ease the tension workers, especially fathers, felt between their home and work duties.

Millennials and Gen Z now dominate the workforce and are progressing their careers and rearing children in different ways to their parents.

The modern workplace, certainly far from perfect, is a give and take enterprise, less work to rule than it was in the heyday of unionism but also less secure.

It needs this flexibility to be able to adapt quickly – not only to harness the power of scarce capital, but to keep pushing our performance and adopt new ideas to stay in touch with the globe’s best companies.

Again, as RBA chief Michele Bullock has been saying over the past week, productivity growth must recover from its dismal ­performance this past decade to its long-term average; otherwise the surge in unit labour costs in the post-Covid recovery will reignite inflation and incur a necessarily harsh monetary response.

Bullock told a parliamentary committee that productivity growth was important “not just for the ability of people to get wage rises but also for the growth of the economy”.

“There are two ways of looking at it,” the RBA governor said on Friday. “Either producing the same amount of output with fewer inputs or, for the same amount of input, you get more output. That’s how we grow the economy.”

Disconnecting at the weekend, however you define it these days, won’t up-end our $2.5 trillion economy.

But these pointless distractions, frankly, will slow Australia’s transition to be a modern plucky country, which makes the most of its wonderful endowments.