Casual Lies
The ACTU's deceitful campaign to portray casual workers as exploited is fooling nobody, least of all the workers themselves. By John Slater.
The union movement has crunched the numbers and found a new category of workers being brazenly exploited by employers: casuals.
The figures are alarming. Casuals are meant to receive 25 per cent more than their colleagues as compensation for lack of other benefits such as job security and holiday pay.
But according to the ACTU’s research paper, Myth of the Casual Wage Premium, the gap between casuals and other employees is only 4 per cent to 5 per cent.
ACTU boss Sally McManus is in no doubt about what is going on here: “Big business has been rorting our system, (paying) some casuals even less than permanent workers doing the same job.”
Regardless of what the ACTU says, some people prefer casual work because it suits them at the time.
She may like to look a bit deeper at the figures. Far from proving there’s a conspiracy against casuals, McManus only exposes the union movement’s anti-business prejudice and lack of basic knowledge about the modern workforce.
As with the gender pay gap, broadbrush comparisons that ignore workers’ individual circumstances are a recipe for distorted findings and flawed conclusions.
The union movement’s research compares the average hourly wage of casuals and permanent employees across 10 categories, including sales, hospitality, retail and personal assistants. Wholly ignored are differences in levels of experience, qualifications and seniority within the workplace.
In other words, McManus turns a blind eye to the three factors with the biggest bearing on a person’s take-home pay.
A cursory glance at the data shows that casuals and permanent workers are usually starkly different people. Casual workers are overwhelmingly young, parents or caregivers who aren’t their household’s sole breadwinners and work less than full-time hours.
Indeed, four in 10 casual workers are below the age of 25 and about one in three lives with their parents. With youth tends to come inexperience and, in turn, lower earning potential. Indeed, workers aged 21 to 24 earn an average of $2900 less a month than workers in their mid-40s to early 50s.
It would be strange if those decades of experience weren’t borne out in younger, casually employed workers earning a more modest wage than their older and more senior counterparts. For example, non-managerial workers employed in retail and hospitality — two occupations in which casual underpayment is allegedly rife — can earn a difference of $7 to $8 an hour, depending on how they’re classified under the award.
Apart from the crucial factors of age and experience, casual workers are typically relatively new to their jobs. Less time in a workplace means less time to rise up the ranks and secure a better-paid position.
A further distortion is that the occupations that form the subject of the ACTU’s comparisons are entire industries encompassing up to dozens of different jobs. A casual dishwasher doing two nights a week at a local bistro is classified in the same group as a full-time waitress in a fine-dining restaurant. Both work in hospitality but they certainly aren’t doing the same job.
Contrary to the ACTU’s findings, the pay gap between the average casual worker and the average permanent employee reflects the iron laws of a competitive job market.
Casuals themselves seem to understand the innately diverse nature of the workforce better than McManus. According to the Melbourne Institute’s respected Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, casuals rate their satisfaction with their wages at 7.2 out of 10 – higher than permanent employees.
So what is motivating the ACTU? At a time when union membership is in a downward spiral, this “rort” conveniently reinforces a perception that the ACTU is the noble guardian against exploitation of workers. If only it were true.