In a country where our households are giving more time to paid work, the issue of how we spend our time – and the amount we give to work and with what effect – is of growing significance.
This is what we found when, after five years of asking Australians about their working lives, my co-authors and I sat down to write a book. The issue of time jumped off the page – the time we give to work; the way that time sends us home; our time for rest, sleep and holidays; the way teenagers spend their time; the time we have to change our environmental behaviours and; the time we have (or lack) for education, contemplation and fun.
The experience of working time is very different for men and women. While a large portion of Australian women work part-time (many more than in most OECD countries), most men work full-time and a growing proportion work much more than full-time. Far from the land of the laid-back worker and the long weekend, Australia ranks sixth out of 28 countries in terms of the average hours worked by full-timers.
Australian full-timers work shorter hours on average than South Korea and Turkey, but two hours a week longer than Germans, almost three more than the French and five more than most Nordic countries.
Almost a third of Australian workers are working 45 hours of more – among them, half of fathers of preschoolers. We want fathers to play a greater role in the care of their children and households (and many want to do this), and long hours are an important part of the story about why this isn’t happening.
Most of those who work long hours would like to work less, even after taking account of what this would do to their pay packets. Over the past 20 or so years, the long hours genii has jumped out of the bottle and international studies tell us that this is likely to be having an effect on our public health and safety bill, and the costs of our health system.
But, the work-and-time story is not just about the hours we work. It’s also about whether we can take a holiday; the level of flexibility we have at work; the growing length of our commute; the impact on the care we can give our children and aging friends and relatives; and the time squeeze affecting our ability to participate in education and training.
Many Australian workers don’t take their annual leave in the year that they accumulate it, for instance, some because they are saving it up for a longer break but many because the pressures of work mean they struggle to take leave.
Others – like many of the one-in-four employees who are now casual workers – don’t have an entitlement to a paid holidays even though they work all year round because their casual leave loading doesn’t stretch to a holiday. Or, they can’t afford to refuse shifts to take a break.
So the idea of Australia as a laidback nation of beach dwellers and BBQ aficionados no longer stacks up. Instead, our leaders exhort us to work harder, to give more to the workplace and to stay at work longer over the life-cycle – well into what used to be retirement.
Once, we worked to live and work was the means to a sustainable existence rather than an end in itself – not any more.
With almost half of our labour force now made up of women (and not much change in the gendered pattern of domestic work, with women, on average, doing twice as much as men), the effect of working hard on our households is very different to when the male breadwinner/female carer household was the dominate type.
With two people heading out to work in the morning, and growth in sole mother-workers, there’s a real time squeeze for those putting together two kinds of time: the predictable clock of the workplace with the unpredictable demands of natural time – the clock of care, nurturing, the body and the household.
These clocks of work and care don’t keep the same time. And the flexibility revolution, which can help with the clock wrangle, has barely touched many workplaces.
In other cases, it has meant the flexibility to turn on the laptop at night when the kids are in bed. New technologies can help put together conflicting clocks, but they also enable greedy jobs to spill out into care time, squeezing sleep, rest and recreation.
The notion of work-life balance is an inadequate metaphor for this complex world of conflicting times. The idea of the clever, organised individual, who holds it all together, ignores the social and structural factors that truly shape whether balance is achievable.
Australia needs good labour law and effective management to control runaway hours where they occur, and to ensure employees get enough sleep and holidays so that our workplaces are productive and safe, and our households healthy and sustainable.
Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner & Philippa Williams' new book, Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today was launched on Monday by the South Australian Premier. It can be ordered here.
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Comments (14)
Donncha Redmond
Software Developer (logged in via email @donncha.com)
People work so long because houses are so bloody expensive that they have no choice in the matter.
When I first came to Oz in '99, one of the most refreshing things I noticed was that people generally worked roughly an 8hr day and headed home by 5.30. That rarely seems to happen anymore. People work as many hours as possible, and in many cases kids are dumped into childcare as soon as possible because the mother needs to get back to work.
Aussies have got sucked into the 'live to work' vortex in the last decade
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Most of the accusations that men don’t do enough housework are rather baseless, because there is not a standard that says how much housework is necessary.
If someone is spending long hours at doing housework, it means their productivity at doing housework could be very low, and they should be thinking of ways to speed up their housework or eliminate unnecessary tasks (such as ironing the bath towels or cooking 3 hot meals each day)
Without a standard to measure housework, any surveys relating to housework are meaningless.
So how many hours of housework are necessary to run a household of 2 people, 3 people, 4 people etc.
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
There are a couple of issues I'd love to have the authors comment more upon:
Firstly the idea of mean defining themselves by their career and achievements in said same.
Secondly the increased affluence of families/Australians and the stigma of keeping up with the Jones'.
I think both of these play a huge role in why we work more, we want more stuff and men have a gender identity at stake.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Tim Scanlon,
I think you could reflect upon your comments, by knowing that there has actually been minimal research conducted into men in Australia country, and almost everything said about men is based on stories that have been made up (or basically gossip).
A large amount of money has been spent on social science over the decades, to achieve very little of anything of any reliability.
Social science has minimal baselines, minimal standards and carries out some of the weakest research ever undertaken, and while many theories are developed by social scientists, they are seldom ever proven.
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
Hence the reason for the authors to comment. They may know of solid research that has been done for these points. At the moment I know them to be annecdotal and would like either confirmation through evidence or denial through evidence.
I agree that social sciences are right up their with nutrition in terms of their poorly supported theories. Especially when it comes to causation, often mistaking correlation for causation.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Tim,
I would think that making some type of accusation about a gender, and then waiting for someone to deny the accusation, is very much a discriminatory practice.
The author seems to be suggesting that men work less paid time and more unpaid time.
But the author gives no figures regards what are acceptable paid and unpaid hours of work for men or women, or what paid and unpaid hours they actually want to work.
Like nearly everything else in social science, the article is meaningless.
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
The data I saw most recently was from the UN:
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=working&d=GenderStat&f=inID:118&c=1,2,3,4,5,6&s=crEngName:asc,sgvEngName:asc,timeEngName:desc&v=1
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=working&d=GenderStat&f=inID:119&c=1,2,3,4,5,6&s=crEngName:asc,sgvEngName:asc,timeEngName:desc&v=1
The basic breakdown for Australia was that 61.5% of men were working +40hrs/wk, whilst only 31.6% of women. We were nowhere outside of the norm and our average hours worked was 34.5hrs/wk. This was low compared to most countries (USA and Canada being the exceptions).
I'm not convinced we are working much longer hours, but my look at data related to this seems to indicate some sectors do have longer hours and the idea of chasing afluence and status.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Tim
You are once again making some type of negative remarks about males, such as they are "chasing affluence and status".
Such negative type remarks about males are very common, but whether they are true or not is another matter.
Unfortunately, due to the levels of subjectivity and bias in social science, I would regard social science as having 0 use in determining what is true, and what is not.
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
Your argument has an absense of evidence Dale. I have cited my statistics for which I want further input from commenters here and the authors. Instead of dismissing everything, how about citing counter stats or dig through the UN's methodology to show the flaws.
So far you have just acted to dismiss everything as flawed without actually using any examples or data. If you wish to continue this discourse you will need to show some actual evidence, as I have.
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Tim,
You have found a set of figures that are different to the authors, and you have formed some type of hypothesis based on those figures. I could also show you several sets of figures regards work hours produced by social scientists that are different again.
That is the nature of social science. The figures produced depend on the bias of the social scientist.
But at the end of it all, there is nothing produced by social science that anyone in the public can rely upon, and from that viewpoint, public funding for social science should be withdrawn, as it has become a complete waste of taxpayer’s money.
If the author wants to keep writing about work hours and housework and child caring time, the author can put forward what are acceptable hours that should be spent on those tasks or duties, or write nothing at all.
Matt Stevens
Senior Research Fellow/Statistician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Dale, please settle down and as i said in your posts on an article just the other day, the light at the end of the tunnel does not have to be a train.
However, that said I find the following quote very ordinary:
"With almost half of our labour force now made up of women (and not much change in the gendered pattern of domestic work, with women, on average, doing twice as much as men), the effect of working hard on our households is very different to when the male breadwinner/female carer household…
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Matt Stevens
Senior Research Fellow/Statistician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
oops, that should have said chores, not choirs!
Dale Bloom
Laboratory analyst (logged in via email @mail.com)
Matt
If you want figures regards work hours you can look here,
Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey
http://melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/
It is a database of figures, and a social scientist can draw out whatever figures they want to suit their bias, and then develop a theory based on those figures.
Of course 10 other social scientists can do the same, and eventually there are 10 sets of figures and 10 theories.
The public is left with not one set of dependable figures, and left with 10 theories, none of which has ever been proven.
The system keeps social scientists employed, but the public receives 0 value for money, and social science has as much use as astrology.
In fact, taxpayer funding could be taken away from social science and spent on astrology, and it would have just as much use.
Caroline Cameron
(logged in via LinkedIn)
It's a classic case of 'be careful what you wish for'. With better, faster technology, increased mobility, flexi work arrangements and blurring of work/life boundaries we've dug ourselves into a hole. The number of hours in each day hasn't actually changed but rather than having more time, we seem to have less.
On the upside we have more control and choice about how we live than ever before. Once we understand specifically what work and all the parts of our lives give us and what we need from each, we can make informed decisions about how we use our time, based on what's most important for each of us.
Caroline Cameron
Author of The Great Life Redesign - change how you work, live how you dream and make it happen today.