What explains trends in Australian working-time arrangements in the 2000s?

ABSTRACT

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a deterioration in working-time arrangements for employees in Australia, driven by globalisation, demographic and structural change and labour market deregulation. Yet, working-time arrangements in the first decade of the 2000s have either improved for employees or stayed relatively unchanged despite continued global pressures and further reforms of domestic labour law. Fewer employees are working long hours or at antisocial times, hours variability has fallen and employee control over working time has increased. This paper attempts to explain the apparent levelling out of previous downward working time trends using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Decomposition analysis shows that the improvement in working-time arrangements can be partly attributed to an increase in the skill level and earnings potential of the workforce and a general improvement in economic conditions. We show that the Fair Work industrial relations reforms of 2009 may have also contributed to the overall improvement in working-time arrangements, but this was partially offset by the negative effects of the global financial crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Fair Work Act
• hours of work
• job insecurity
• Work Choices Act
• Working time flexibility

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jane Dixon and Dan Woodman for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This paper uses data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (MIAESR). The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to DSS or MIAESR.

Notes

1. The Fair Work reforms arguably went in the opposite direction, strengthening regulation of working time in legislation and encouraging enterprise, rather than individual, bargaining.

2. Defining long hours as 45+ hours per week results in qualitatively similar results.

3. While not all casuals have variable work hours, unpublished data from the ABS Survey of Employment Arrangements, Superannuation and Retirement show that casuals are more likely than non-casuals to have working hours that vary from week-to-week (36% compared with 17%) and earnings that vary from week-to-week (48% compared with 17%). Casual employees are not legally guaranteed minimum hours of work, even if their usual work schedules are regular.

4. Data from 2001 are not used because of changes in some key variables between the first and second waves.

5. The analyses of each working-time arrangement are conducted separately, so those with missing values on flexible times are only excluded from the analysis of flexible times, not from the analysis of other working-time arrangements.

6. Re-estimating the decompositions excluding work experience from the list of explanatory variables has little impact on the results.

7. It is possible that working-time arrangements of multiple job holders’ second or third jobs deteriorated during the period examined, however the HILDA Survey only includes working time data for employees’ main job.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Venn

Danielle Venn is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. Her areas of interest are working arrangements, job quality, time use, labour market regulation and the interaction of work, family and health.

Gemma Carey

Gemma Carey is a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on policy implementation in social services and health sectors.

Lyndall Strazdins

Lyndall Strazdins is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow (FT110100686) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, the Australian National University. Her research focuses on contemporary predicaments of work and care and their health and gender equity consequences, and on time as a social determinant of health.

John Burgess

John Burgess is Professor in Human Resource Management, School of Management, Curtin University, Perth. His research interests include employment practices of multinational enterprises; employment arrangements in the resources sector and education to work transition in Asia.