08/05/2018
FOCUS EDITION: EMPLOYMENT IN A 21ST CENTURY AUSTRALIA
ARTICLES:
- Introduction: Jobs and Growth
- Reimagining Employment: Understanding the Relationships Between Work and Society
- Siren Servers and the ‘Gig Economy’: Creating the Monopolies of the 21st Century
- How Big is a Big Australia?
Introduction: Jobs and Growth
By Lloyd Hebert
‘Jobs and Growth!’
‘Jobs and Growth!’
What a pitiful way to talk about Australians’ future. This vacuous way of talking about our society represents a political class that has lost the plot. It has no idea what the life of average Australians is like, and it has no idea about how to run a country where every person is recognised, and every person has a chance. Federal and state governments go from funding one infrastructure project to the next, and signing one deal to the next with big business. They proudly trumpet the thousands of jobs created by such projects, and trot out employment figures, and meanwhile they completely ignore the growing number of Australians who are struggling on a daily basis.
This is a dire contradiction; whilst the economy is supposedly performing well, the squeeze is getting tighter for many. On the last census night, 116,000 people were experiencing homelessness,[1] and 10,813 university or TAFE students were homeless[2]. The public housing waiting list is more than 50,000 people in NSW[3], and runs up to 59,556 people in Victoria[4]. This is almost 110,000 people, in 2 states alone, struggling to find a place in this ‘well performing economy’. In response to Victoria’s 59,556 waiting list for public housing, the state government’s response is to build 6000 public housing units, a woefully inadequate response. And on declaring his budget, Treasurer Tim Pallas described a dazzling day for Victoria. As one of our articles this issue covers, much of what ‘dazzles’ is the surging housing market, which will contribute to around 30% of the state government’s tax income[5].
The government itself is caught up in riding the wave of the housing market, which is making housing more unaffordable, and contributing to homelessness. The solution obviously cannot be for the government to spend its way out of this problem, because to do this it must protect the housing market, and promote its growth with high immigration, leading to an ever-increasing problem.
Australians are doing it tough on other fronts, such as putting food on the table. The Foodbank’s April 2018 report ‘Rumbling Tummies: Child Hunger in Australia,’ found that more than one in five children, 22%, live in a food insecure household. Further, “Almost half of parents in Australia (47%) who have faced food insecurity in the last year, suggest their household runs out of food, without the ability to buy more, at least once a month.”[6] And whilst if pushed to it, federal and state governments will acknowledge that some are going hungry, that some are finding it tough, the first words out of their mouths at interviews, conferences and Q&A will be about Australia’s spectacular growth. They have become the salesmen and women of the economy; instead of setting the way forward for the economy, governments are desperately dependent on its growth to get themselves re-elected. All the while this feedback loop is putting the squeeze on everyday Australians, and is intensifying an already unsustainable and destructive relationship with our environment.
Considering this sick feedback loop, and the changes coming to work from automation and the ‘gig economy’, the political class and mainstream economists have, in our eyes, lost their legitimacy, and do not provide insight into work as it is now and into the future. We need to go beyond ‘Jobs and Growth!’, and as will be argued for in the article ‘Siren Servers and the ‘Gig Economy’’, we also need to go beyond the blind techno-optimism that surrounds the ‘gig economy’. Thus, we have put together this focus edition of A New Kind of Human, taking a look at work, its relationship to contemporary dynamics in Australia, its place as a dynamic relationship in society, and the near horizon of the changes coming to work.
[1] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing: Estimating homelessness, 2016, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/mediareleasesbyCatalogue/0DB52D24450CC7ACCA257A7500148E4C?OpenDocument
[2] Homelessness Australia, Media Release Apr 2018, http://chp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/180413_uni-students-homeless_YHMD_HA.pdf
[3] Guide to Waiting times for social housing as at 30 June 2017, NSW Department of Family and Community Services, https://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/housing/help/applying-assistance/expected-waiting-times
[4] Victorian Housing Register transition report – March 2018, Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, http://housing.vic.gov.au/public-housing-waiting-list
[5] Victorian Budget 18/19, Statement of Finances, see page 141, https://www.dtf.vic.gov.au/state-budget/2018-19-state-budget
[6] Foodbank, ‘Rumbling Tummies: Child Hunger in Australia’ report Apr 2018, https://www.foodbank.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Rumbling-Tummies-Full-Report-2018.pdf
Reimagining Employment: Understanding the Relationships Between Work and Society
By Ryan Carolan
“When I have an idea I am greatly interested in transforming It into action, into actuality. In its realisation through my participation I want to find my own satisfaction. A purpose for which I shall be active must in some way be my purpose; I must thereby satisfy my own desires, even though it may have ever so many aspects which do not concern me. This is the infinite right of the individual to find itself satisfied in its activity and labour. If men are to be interested in anything they must have “their heart” in it. Their feelings of self-importance must be satisfied. But here a misunderstanding must be avoided. To say that an individual “has an interest” in something is justly regarded as a reproach of blame; we imply that he seeks only his private advantage. Indeed, the blame implies not only his disregard of the common interest, but his taking advantage of it and even his sacrificing it to his own interest. Yet, he who is active for a cause is not simply interested but “interested in it.” Language faithfully expresses this distinction. Nothing therefore happens, nothing is accomplished, unless those concerned with an issue find their own satisfaction in it.” – G.W.F. Hegel
There was a sense of excitement in the Melbourne Age today (2/5), which, in response to the Labour’s state budget, ran the headline Budget Bucks for the ‘Burbs. The ‘blockbuster budget’ sees the government ‘embark on a record-breaking spending spree’ to the sum of $13.7 billion. Treasurer Tim Pallas stated that he ‘can’t believe how well the Victorian economy is performing.’ This was all crammed into the first three paragraphs as if to say: ‘all we need is cash’, without any ability to distinguish where the cash is coming from. So Pallas has argued that 400,000 jobs have been created in Victoria and that unemployment is at its lowest level in 5 years, but what kind of jobs are they? And the Age also ran a cartoon depicting Premier Andrew Daniels (who noticed?) cooking a law and order (Matthew Mate) lobster with a big S salt (spending) on a surplus pot. The state government has represented itself as a dump truck, pouring cash into the gaps of the state’s infrastructure and saying: this is the only way to supress the demon that is law and order. Then, right at the end of the article: ‘And 690 million will go towards a new prison in Lara.’
Roads, public transports, training (in order to fulfil the demands of the market) and prisons were some of the big winners. Other areas that received ‘investment’ were those growing markets of family violence, the ‘overburdened mental health sector’ as well as six emergency department crisis hubs. All smiles for Victoria. Yet, while the budget papers reveal a ‘river of money’, more than $7billion or 30% of the state’s tax income,[1] stems from the housing market, and treasury has argued that Victoria’s ‘diverse tax-base’ will help contain volatility in the housing market. This is necessary as the housing market brings in so much money that can be used for society, and it is so important that society might even have to be scarified, or completely reorganised, in order to protect the housing market. Indeed, while this river of money has also come with an increase in population, there was no money to spare for the recycling crisis. Yet, we can legitimately ask: why should a tax-base protect the housing market if the housing market cannot protect society as a whole both now and in the future?
Furthermore, as Peter Martin points out, buried in the budget is the assumption that the housing market will grow at 5% percent in the next three years. Effectively, this means that, the more one works and is taxed, the more the state ‘splashes’ cash in order to promote the growth of the housing market, the less likely it is that an ordinary citizen will be able to purchase a house. This assumption is effectively built into the models used to orientate government spending, whether they are aware of it or not. Yet, one can ask: if the government cannot provide neither the work, nor the adequate housing for its citizens, what the hell is it doing? What is its job? Why is it talking of jobs and growth? Why do we need to grow? And who is winning out of this?
Ian McAuley points out that 5 years ago, Tony Abbott made a promise: if elected, he would ‘deliver a million new jobs over five years.’ His dream came true. The monthly data released by the Labour Force Survey revealed that 1,011,000 jobs had been created in 4.5 years. However, there are four problems with this: one, the population has grown, and 82% of those jobs simply reflect population growth; second, only half of these jobs have been full time; third, the end of the mining boom and the failure to recover from the 2008 financial crash means that this could be as good as it gets; and, on top of that, wages have stagnated, which has forced households into more debt in order to deal with the higher cost of living.[2] Furthermore, as Tim Colebatch argued in April 2017, of 474,000 full-time jobs created between 2008 and 2016, only 74,000 went to people born in Australia.[3] To make matters worse, Malcolm Turnbull wants to make Australia one of the world’s biggest arms dealers, hailing it as a ‘job-creating plan for local manufactures.’ It will generate ‘certainty of investment’ (the wars will not end) and ‘support high-end manufacturing.’
Furthermore, according to research done by 350.org, clean energy projects in Queensland are ‘on track’ to generate more work than the proposed Adani coalmine despite the coalmine subsidies costing the tax-payer 21 times more. The amount of subsidies for an individual coal miner would be $683,060, compared to a worker in the clear energy sector, which would equate to $32,191.[4] Despite this, and many other bizarre revelations which have emerged from the circus which is the Adani coalmine, including the argument of Westpac that the coalmine contradicts the effort to limit climate change to 2C by 2050, there appears to be bipartisan support for the project, with Bill Shorten arguing that ‘there is a role for coal’, in typically stylistic fashion. It appears that Senior Turnbull Ministers have also written to China in order to seek funding for the project, going beyond the market in order to have their way.[5]
Jobs are not simply neutral in the same way that money is not neutral. And it appears that the government, whether by design or not, has created an economy in which it is essentially impossible to feel proud of the work you do or to feel as though it is legitimately making a positive contribution to the community. The goal has been quantity over quality. The majority of new types of jobs are at the service of either capital or technology. McAuley rightly points out that ‘”Jobs and Growth” is not an economic policy; it is a vacuous three-word slogan.’ Yet both governments appear only concerned with maintaining their position of power as managers of an economy which they do not understand. Each therefore sticks to the logic of jobs and growth as though there were absolutely no other possibility. And each are producing decidedly negative outcomes for the country. Indeed, as Dierksmeier argues, management is a discipline, as it is currently taught, which denies the possibility of freedom and, consequently, ethics. As he points out:
Each firm must constantly enhance both the quality (sic) and quantity of its production, so corporations constantly reinvest their profits into improved technology, better logistics, and so on; and thus the race for increased efficiency drives all to maximise their profits, which, incidentally, through all-out competition, brings down the cost to socially optimal levels. As a consequence, managers cannot make any substantial investments into ethics, sustainability, or humanistic management – unless, that is, such measures prove directly profitable. Lest they weaken the firm’s competitive position and assist more ruthless competitors, even CEOs with strong moral convictions must abstain from ethical escapades… In Neo-classical economics, managerial freedom, it seems, can only be had at the price of rationality.[6]
All of the so-called ‘important’ work, the work of CEO and managers, where the big buck lies, is not only serving to undermine the conditions which it presupposes to emerge (civil society and a healthy environment), this conundrum is also portrayed as though it could be no other way. As Thomas Frank points out, referring to the transformation of the American media landscape by corporate elites who opposed the elitism of journalists, that is, the elitism of making judgements and framing public discourse, manager and CEOs derive their power from suspending judgement. Yet, he states: ‘oddly, in each city the changes have been described as ‘inevitable,’ as though the triumph of ‘the journalism of hope’ (suspending judgement) and Gannett’s peculiar market logic required no more explanation than that.’[7] Frank notes how public journalism solved this problem through the use of ‘focus groups, surveys and “trend watchers” to help newspapers conform more closely to the wishes of the public’[8] in order to allow the public, rather than the journalists, to decide. This generated the need for the mass accumulation of information, the likes of which spawned Facebook, Twitter and Cambridge Analytical. What is lost in this view is the possibility that new information and new arguments can change public perception. Effectively, the journalism of hope became a tool for elites to reflect the public back to themselves, allowing only positive messages to be portrayed rather than stark realities of political, economic, social, or in other words, semiotic corruption. Somehow this conception of corporate management has taken the place of democracy and it is producing humans unable to become citizens, as Wendy Brown has argued. Indeed, the number of people studying management today is insidious, as though all they want to do is not have to make a judgement.
Reflecting on the above quote from German philosopher Georg Hegel, written in Reason in History, we find a concept of reason vastly alien to our own time. In the age of unreason that we live in, Hegel’s claim necessitates more than mere reflection. It necessitates a reframing of the purpose of life. He argues that the individual human must find meaning in their activity, in their labour, and he argues that this is necessary for anything productive to be done. In this sense, feeling yourself as being connected to the products which you co-create in your daily activity impels a desire to protect those products. But that life could not be reduced down to labour alone. Further, he argued against the view that an individual’s interest could not harmonise with the common good of society because he took the good to be not the product of the community, but the ethical community itself, which produced products of all different kinds in order to maintain itself, represent itself, orientate itself and realise itself. The products were more complex as the culture became more complex. The products included institutions, such as universities, and concepts, such as education, which guide the development of the young upon the lines of the culture’s highest ideals. These highest ideals are the realisation of potentials through the developmental process. As Shannon Hoff writes, referring to Hegel’s theory of justice:
Human social and cultural life must take shape in such a way as to allow dynamic human beings to take up their futures with a sense of openness to possibility and transformation, of their irreducibility to the past and the present.[9]
Culture, then, and the cultivation of the human bonds and the communities that we participate in which unite us, even in argument, which constrain us and yet also free us and allow us to realise our full potential represent the objective conditions necessary to the real purpose of human life and we ought to be able to express that freedom in the work which we do, which is not only a representation of ourselves, but also a representation of the culture which we labour for.
What goods are we realising today? It is clear what the social institutions which organise our world take as being good, and those responsible for them simply assume that their good is good for all. Yet, it is clear that this good, while maintaining the conditions for their own community with its own notion of good, is destroying that conditions of the social community from which they derive their power, that is, the common good. Their enslavement to the object of money as an end in itself is not only undermining the conditions for ethical behaviour on the part of social actors concerned for the common good, it is also effectively destroying the legitimacy of the power which they wield, which is sure to generate a future power struggle much more serious that the pseudo struggles we see today. There is a sense here that we have stumbled completely onto the wrong path and, consequently, all the arguments that are being made are false from the get-go.
My supervisor once suggested to me that we reward those who exist most abstracted from the reality of things. Why is this so? Why do we listen to those who are furthest disconnected from what life is really like? Is this the world which we want to create?
Hegel’s theory is an ideal which he imagined, and his imagination, at its peak in the first quarter of the 19th century, helped generate and maintain a vision of the world in stark contrast to the realities of the industrial revolution. This period of great amounts of production also lead to great levels of fragmentation and produced extreme levels of social dislocation, well described in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The work was demeaning, rather than meaningful, for the labour was reduced to the level of a cog in a machine, which could be easily replaced by the mounds of unemployed wandering from town to town to try to find work. In fact, with the closure of the commons, most ended up as beggars in big cities. Churches, the welfare system of the time, were inundated with desperate people that they had no means to help. And figures like Karl Marx, inspired by Hegel’s work, emerged in this period further clarifying his vision and helped to orientate people towards the creation of a more ethical and healthy civilization. While his vision failed, he was on the right track. Polanyi identified the problem as the dis-embedding of markets from communities, which effectively subjected communities to decisions which they had no control or input over. The emergence of Siren Servers is an in evolution in form of this same problem.
And while this orientation has been lost, the world of tomorrow being represented today is also an ideal. Yet it is an ideal with no possibility of being realised. Concrete realities such as limits to recourses and a vision of the future based on the infinite need to grow cannot co-exist. Talk of the gig economy freeing humanity and nature, talk of block-chain breaking big corporations, talk of a globally connected civilization creating the required conditions for the emergence of democracy are efforts to make these mutually exclusive visions co-exist, yet they are all delusional in the sense that people discussing these ideas cannot separate the ideal from the real. They think the vision they imagine is inevitable, so they cram social responsibility into their vision in order to make it look good. Whereas what I am arguing is that they are a slave to our civilization’s collective narrative and vision which is defective from the beginning. Indeed, it represents a complete misreading of history.
Meanwhile we all find ourselves subjected to the forces of empty claims propagated by people who have bought the narrative that the ultimate ends of life are not relations to human and natural life, and the great products of human culture, but an object, money. The imposition of constraints on capital accumulation after world war two, largely a product of the school of though deriving from Hegel, have been removed, and, since the 1970s, the pattern of the industrial revolution has reoccurred, in a much more refined way, on a global scale. By refined, I mean that, through public relations and advertising, the transformation of the media and the transformation of learning, the public has become confused, disorientated, fragmented, and accepted that all elements of life must be measured though their ability to produce a profit for their managers. This unifying logic serves only to destroy the conditions which predicate it.
If we are serious about facing up to the realities of climate change, this requires a far broader appreciation of what humans are and what we require in order to achieve our full potential. Amongst other things, it requires appreciating that man is not fundamentally economic man, but rather a social creature and forms his identity through the communities he partakes in as well as the culture which the community exists within. At present, this culture, driven by a decadent and meaningless consumerism, is destroying the conditions communities need to provide the conditions required to transcend this object-obsession and revive the real meaning of live: the participation in purposeful, ethical communities organised towards achieving self-realisation through their work and their action. Much is standing in the way of this, no less the glut of managers waiting in the wings of power, seeking to continue civilization on the path of destruction by making decision about the future by effectively ceasing judgement.
[1] Victorian Budget 18/19, Statement of Finances, see page 141, https://www.dtf.vic.gov.au/state-budget/2018-19-state-budget
[2] Strong employment growth, until you look behind the numbers
[3] Inside story, Yes there is such a thing as too much migration
[4] The Guardian, ‘Carmichael mine jobs need ’21 times the subsidies’ of renewables, says lobby group’, 8/2/17
[5] The Guardian, ‘Australian ministers write to china to confirm approval of Carmichael mine’, 26/10/17
[6] Claus Dierksmeier, Reframing Economic Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Humanistic Management, p. 25
[7] Thomas Frank, One Market Under God, p. 324
[8] Ibid, p. 332
[9] Shannon Hoff, The Laws of the Spirit, p9
Siren Servers and the ‘Gig Economy’: Creating the Monopolies of the 21st Century
By Lloyd Hebert
Saeed was working, driving for Uber, when he was beaten—so badly that he was hospitalised—and had his car stolen whilst stopping to pick up passengers in Melbourne in January. In response, Uber confidentially offered him a one-off payment of $1900, and said that the company was unable to provide any assistance over this amount, and that it was not obligated to do so by law.[1] In an interview with the 7:30 Report, General Manager of Uber in Australia David Rohrsheim said, “If there is an assault in a vehicle, that, again, that would be an unfortunate incident. What you have there is quite similar to an assault on the street. If there is an incident between two individuals, that’ll be a matter for the courts.” How can this be, that someone who was working, putting themselves out there for the benefit of a business, has a serious incident at work, and is then left out in the cold? Uber justifies this by arguing that all the drivers working through the platform are not employees, but are independent contractors. As such, the drivers have no guarantee of employment, no conditions of employment such as sick leave or annual leave, and no compensation entitlements or insurance coverage. This loss of security is reflected through many other areas of the ‘gig economy.’
Airtasker is an app platform that links job posters who need some task to be done with airtaskers, or workers, who come and complete the task. Job posters will set a payment amount that is a rough estimation of what they think is fair, and airtaskers—blind bidding against each other—will volunteer for the jobs with their own offer of payment. Airtasker takes a 15% cut. The platform sees itself as a linking platform; the ‘winning’ of the task forms a separate contract that does not include Airtasker.[2] Once again, all the people doing the work are independent contractors. This is also the case with many app platforms focused on food delivery. Whilst flexibility is often one of the advertised benefits of working in the ‘gig economy’, it is not so much a benefit a worker can enjoy so much as a necessity demanded by the platform apps. And it is demanded because these platform apps are mass integrated systems which work with matching fluid elements so as to accrue a maximum benefit to themselves.
The networking technology that has made the ‘gig economy’ possible has taken on the form of what philosopher and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has termed Siren Servers. Siren Servers are powerful, efficient servers (connected computers) that collect and process vast amounts of data and information, to establish an unprecedented amount of knowledge of the system in which they are located.[3] Information being an increasingly critical part of economic exchange, these servers consolidate this information in their hands, creating an information asymmetry within their local system that benefits their position.
An example Lanier gives is that of Walmart, which networked vast amounts of logistical information about “what could be made where and when; what could be moved where and when; who would buy what, and when and for how much.” Having created this information asymmetry, where Walmart was the most informed actor in the market, it exercised this new power to gradually enthral the other economic actors by buying from them at prices that offered the barest of margins, and running the leanest transport and delivery logistics to further cut into others margins. Using the power of data gathering and extrapolative algorithms, Walmart reordered its environment to suit itself, sucking all the energy and blood from the sector and accumulating it for its own benefit. Siren Servers grow very much like tumours, accumulating advantage towards themselves and radiating risk and costs away to the system.
This is how the platform apps such as Uber, Airtasker, Foodora, etc, operate. Uber uses algorithms to determine the rate of pay for certain fares as well as ‘surge’ charges to best match drivers to riders. But it does so in a manner that serves it best; data and algorithms tweak the driver experience to manipulate them to drive when it is best for Uber. There are no public holiday rates, over-time pay or loadings to recognise that drivers are going out of their way, committing a not insignificant sacrifice, to drive on Friday and Saturday nights, or to drive in the early hours of the morning. The pay and the chance of getting a fare do increase, but this doesn’t reflect the stability that loadings or other work place conditions seek to establish. The same can be seen with Airtasker, which has implemented a blind bidding system to encourage workers to compete against each other, and to prevent them from establishing agreed ‘set rates’ for certain tasks. Both of these platforms in particular reflect the logic of Siren Servers in how they radiate risk and costs away from themselves—and this is key to their business models.
Essentially, the business models of Uber and Airtasker, and other ‘gig economy apps’, are based on disempowering and impoverishing workers. As opposed to a traditional employer who has to bear part of the risk that their employees face in work, the platforms radiate the risk away from themselves, and onto the workers, by classifying them as independent contractors, stripping them of any compensation rights or insurance coverage. (Airtasker only provides insurance for the job poster, not the person doing the job.) The cost associated with employing staff is also radiated away, by removing the entitlements and conditions of the workers, such as sick leave, award wages and protection from unfair dismissal, once again through classifying the workers as independent contractors. Uber has even managed to transfer away from itself most of the cost of capital by making car ownership a concern of the drivers, not Uber itself. Where Siren Servers don’t exist in complex systems where they can create vast, job-shedding efficiencies, they instead capture the market, and coordinate the market whilst providing the most meagre of returns to the people who do all the work. The success of the ‘gig economy’ is essentially predicated on undoing the 20th century history of labour struggles which led to the establishment of strong communities, stable families and civil society. The ‘gig economy’ is not creating anything new; taxi drivers and handy men and women already exist. Rather the success of these up and coming platforms comes from shrinking markets and looting the current, hard-fought-for, socio-economic standards of our country.
That’s not to say that the technology is evil. Networking capabilities applied to an odd jobs’ market is not immoral. But Airtasker doesn’t actually do anything. It has imposed itself as a middleman, taking a 15% cut of every task, by capturing the market through advertising. There is no reason that the platforms of Airtasker, or Uber, or Deliveroo, could not be owned and operated by the drivers, delivery people and taskers. The benefits of the platform would then be shared by all. But this is what Siren Servers do; they establish an information asymmetry to exercise power, and in the case of the gig economy they take a cut of all the work done, whilst radiating all costs and risks associated to all the other actors in their sector. They greedily horde the new systems, and create a supreme position of power, assuming a parasitic position in the economy.
This is why conservatives should support regulation of the ‘gig economy’. Progressives who have caught on to its negative effects tend to be in favour of regulation. As much as they love bashing on unions, conservatives should see that what the unions are trying to defend is something that conservative politics holds dear—stable, secure work; which is a condition for community, stable families and civil society. A new underclass, the ‘precariat’, is being created. Once the costs of fuel, vehicle maintenance and depreciation are taken into account, Uber drivers are estimated to be earning less than half the award wage for transport workers.[4] Airtaskers are commonly earning below the respective award wage for certain tasks such as data entry, cleaning and sales.[5] The guarantee of a stable job is non-existent, with Uber drivers being ‘deactivated’ for unknown reasons and unable to appeal the decision, and a Foodora delivery courier was sacked for refusing Foodora’s request that he cease communications with other couriers in a private group chat.[6] These working conditions are unconducive and corrosive to stable personal relationships, personal development and establishing families.
Perhaps the right’s most heinous sin is to continuously overlook and brush aside the disadvantaged, so long as they are of a different skin colour, women, or generally few in number. But in this age, is it not true that what can be automated does become automated? Have mass connective systems such as Google, Amazon, and ‘gig economy’ apps not grown rapidly? It is perfectly conceivable that tasks such as accounting, software maintenance, and other jobs could be ‘disrupted’, and the possibilities exist to use network technologies to outsource this work overseas. Do we really want to face the potential of increasing numbers of white collar workers going from ‘gig’ to ‘gig’, and competing in a globally networked workplace? What has captured the public’s attention about the ‘gig economy’ represents the surface level changes we can see. We should not be so complacent as to think it is impossible for many jobs and sectors to be ‘disrupted’ and hollowed out, and a vast ‘precariat’ class being created. By asserting the values of social and economic stability in regular and secure work, by supporting the Unions’ efforts to have the ‘gig economy’ regulated[7], we take the side of community, ensuring that future generations will have the stability in their lives required to have families, build communities and support civil society.
The choice is stark; either we remain inactive due to complacency or due to being bewitched by free market ideology, or we realise that what this wave of innovation and ‘disruption’ represents is the shrinking of markets, the consolidation of wealth, and the hollowing out of the social and economic security of our society. If we don’t regulate the ‘gig economy’, if we don’t ensure standards of safety, security and stability for workers, more people will face situations like Saeed’s. If we continue recklessly in this direction, we will be pushing the dream of starting a family out of reach for many. A healthy society is one that renews itself, which provides a bright future for the next generation. We can begin by regulating the ‘gig economy’ to provide stable and secure work for ‘gig’ workers. And then we can continue by creating open, collaborative and collectively owned app platforms to strip the power from those who would seek to create new monopolies.
[1] 7:30 Report, ‘Uber drivers earning less than half the minimum wage’, 6 Mar 2018
[2] Airtasker (2016), Airtasker user Agreement, accessed 11 July 2016, from: https://www. airtasker.com/terms/
[3] Jaron Lanier, ‘Who Owns the Future’, 2013
[4] Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute, Jim Stanford, ‘Subsidising Billionaires: Simulating the Net Incomes of UberX Drivers in Australia, https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/theausinstitute/pages/2692/attachments/original/1519989285/Subsidizing_Billionaires_Final.pdf?1519989285
[5] Unions NSW, ‘Innovation or Exploitation: Busting the Airtasker myth’, https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/unionsnsw/pages/3135/attachments/original/1474529110/Unions_NSW_Report_into_Airtasker.pdf?1474529110
[6] Financial Review, http://www.afr.com/news/policy/industrial-relations/foodora-fires-courier-for-refusing-to-quit-workers-chat-group-20180314-h0xg33
[7] ACTU, Change the Rules Campaign, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/20/actu-to-demand-equal-rights-for-casuals-gig-economy-and-labour-hire-workers
How Big is a Big Australia?
By Ryan Carolan
Australia’s preparing itself for a huge increase in population, and it appears that the vast majority are on board. Indeed, news has come out that business groups and the unions – supposed natural enemies – have come to an agreement on this issue. Yet, the discussion surrounding what is a huge issue has been reductive and positivistic[1] as though a big Australia is simply an inevitable and necessary by-product of Australia’s need to remain competitive in a globalized world, with little regard for the future this will inevitably create.
Should we be celebrating the ability of labour and business to agree on what is, in reality, a defining moment for Australia’s future? Or should we take the insights of Thomas Frank seriously when he states: ‘consensus sometimes deserves to be just as rudely debunked as conflict’? I am on Frank’s side with this particular debate, and indeed all debates that generate bipartisanship, as any good journalist should be, not to be cynical, but to seek to be as thoughtful as possible. What is being missed?
This makes the claims made by Peter Cook, cited below, all the more appalling and, at the same time, alluring. Indeed, within our most trusted of institutions, not only in terms of the media, but also in relation to democracy, the ABC, we find what appear to be efforts to dance around the big questions which naturally follows from discussion around population growth: environmental problems and the nature of work. The Guardian has revealed that the State Government was alerted in 2015 that the continual logging of Victoria’s central highlands will threaten Melbourne’s water supply.[2] Combine that with projections that Melbourne will, in the next few decades should all things remain the same, reach 8 million people and it is clear that it is not only impossible for things to remain as they are, this it is not even desirable. So, why is it that the idea of a big Australia is continually referred to as inevitable? Moreover, what is the relationship between this inevitable future state and Australia’s democracy? Indeed, does not democracy mean that we have some say in our future?
People inside the ABC, for example John Faine, have been highly critical of Australian democracy, which Frank is also critical of in his text ‘One Market Under God’, written in 2001. My focus, however, is not democracy as such, but the issue of a big Australia. Although, I believe it is essential to keep the notion of democracy in the background of our thought because we have a dangerous tendency to assume we already know what democracy is. Yet, democracy is rarely thought of as an ideal, but rather a tool. This is a deep flaw which needs to be rectified. Democracy merely means ‘rule by the people’. Who the people are is, in a sense, up to us. Indeed, the emergence of this paper represents an effort to revive this fact, and along with it public agency, which was argued in the previous edition. So that issue should always be at the back of the readers mind when reading this. Let us look at a quote to bring this point to life.
We’ve seen a sharp decline in our living standards in the past five to ten years. Unaffordable housing, overdevelopment, low wage growth, increase in traffic congestion and pollution, and overcrowded schools, hospitals and public transport are now part of life in Sydney and Melbourne, and our other cities will soon be the same. Australians aren’t stupid. They realise that the root cause is our rapid population growth driven by the highest immigration rate in the developed world, currently at over 200,000 per year, and that the main advocates of this unsustainable immigration are corporate and political elites who love being able to boost their profits and brag about GDP growth via and ever-increasing consumer base. Do you think our politicians understand how angry Australians are about our mass immigration program?
This was a question asked by Matt Bradley on Q&A on the 12th of March 2018. The bold section was removed by an ABC producer although Bradley still proceeded to read out the original question.[3] Why is it that the ABC felt the need to remove this section? It is so that we are in the realm of speculation and yet my speculations only allow me to draw negative conclusions. It may be so that brevity was sought, but surely 20 seconds could have been saved somewhere else in the program rather than where perhaps the most forceful two sentences of the whole program were to be found. And, as Cook points out in his editorial, the ABC made almost no effort to represent dissident voice connecting environmental problems and population growth.[4] This is despite four video questions being sent in via online submission on the issue during that particular episode. Moreover, the tendency is to conflate hostility towards immigration and xenophobia, which seems to be the norm with less thoughtful big Australia proponents including Shen Narayanasamy, who ‘tried to argue that public concern about the latter has nothing to do with population numbers but is really just a way to victimize refugee claimants and immigrants.’[5] These claims are not only disorienting civil society, they are effectively disallowing the country to have a productive, collective and open discussion on the issue of population growth not blinded by private interest or one-sided perspectives.
Consequently, the issue is high-jacked by proponents of Big Australia and big problems, such as wage growth and jobs, are simply claimed to be a product of increases in population as well as tax cuts to big business, precisely what is being promoted at the moment – something that suits the mega-rich. The outcome, however, is the opposite: the job market is flooded, leading to higher unemployment and the undercutting of wages. A double win for big business and those who grovel at its feet. Furthermore, the tendency has been towards automation meaning that tax-cuts are spent on technological innovation which only creates jobs which require less skill, rather than more. Man becomes further subservient to machines, she finds less meaning in her work, and also finds less sympathetic ears in the public sphere, as the rich consider lass a human and more a cog in their wealth production. Thus, democracy is also undercut in the process. Reinvesting in the TAFE system can only be understood from this perspective, as an effort to skill people as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to build the infrastructure of Australia’s future, a future which is already determined. The effort to produce citizens is apparently a thing of the past. But a necessary question follows from this besides the raft of environmental questions that are quite obvious. What are the quality of these infrastructure products likely to be, the products of which our next generation will have to organise around? Indeed, if the quality is low, and they constantly need to be updated, as is the case in the present, is this not going to create even more environmental, social and economic problems? In short, will it not exacerbate the global ecological crisis? Why are these first-order concerns simply not being discussed?
So why is it that the ABC sought to block the negative views associated with its vision of a big Australia, especially those connected to environmental issues and the nature of work? How is it that they seek to remain ‘progressive’ and ‘reliable’ while at the same time ignoring the most urgent of issues? Could it be that a positive argument can be made, along environmental lines, that not only challenges the need for a big Australia, but necessarily extends this critique to big business and its domination of the political system and the media, and is not premised on a hostility towards migration, but only migration which is used as a tool to serve the interests of big business and big money? As already argued, it is this which helps to undermine our democracy by forcing citizens to compete against each other for the right to survive, denying the possibility of thinking constructively about the possible futures we can co-create which are not premised on destructive tendencies.
While social and political ‘elites’ remain engaged in pseudo-arguments about a future which is not possible to create, they grovel at the feet of big business and the economy, thus denying themselves the possibility to change the course of Australian society for the better. We should be talking about the future and we should not be afraid to be big in our thinking. At present, we are thinking small, which means we are not sufficiently grasping the forces undermining the stability of social life. If we are to do this, it means that we must face up to the ultimate crisis of our time, the environmental crisis, and rethink everything, including the nature of work and the media, from this perspective.
[1] See Peter G Cook, Editorial complaint to the ABC regarding programs about a Big Australia, see http://www.peakdecisions.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PeterCook_ABC_complaint_18March2018.pdf
[2] Calla Wahlquist, Melbourne’s water supply at risk due to ‘collapse’ of forests caused by logging, Published May 1st, 2018, accessed May 1st, 2018
[3] Peter Cook, p. 11 – 12.
[4] Cook touches on this in his third criticism.
[5] Ibid, p. 10.
A New Kind of Human 