Broke? Nearly Homeless? Unemployed? Cheer Up, At Least You'll Have More Time To Spend With The Kids

By Darryl Mason

How intense is the rage being felt by the hundreds of thousands of Australians who devoted much of their lives to work, and commuting, for the past decade now only to find themselves no better off, and in many cases far poorer, than they were before they started living to work?

The best cure for years of intense, life-dominating, work is not a two week holiday, it's being unemployed. A good few months off always reminds you just how much more life has to offer than 60 hours a week behind a desk, or a steering wheel. Of course, the money's absolutely shit.

And far too many in Australia will learn this is all so very true as the global re-ordering of economies, wealth, trade and financial systems continues to wreak its seemingly endless destruction.

The new poverty, the first blast of long-term unemployment millions of young Australians have ever experienced, will have to be marketed to us as something positive, an overdue fresh look at the 'Work/Life Balance :

With falls in consumer demand starting to affect jobs, the customary "how's work?" is now followed by "has anyone been sacked?" and detailed analyses of how unfair/random/scary it all is. However, to avoid retrenchments many companies are implementing four-day weeks, extending leave, and cutting hours. In a country crying out for work-life balance, those experiencing such alternatives may not want a return to unsustainable patterns of paid work.

Levels of work-life stress have reached epidemic levels, with 55 per cent of employees feeling constantly rushed, and 46 per cent perceiving inflexible working times (Skinner and Pocock 2008, Work, Life and Workplace Culture). Such mismatches between actual and desired work patterns illustrate how organisational cultures are simply outmoded.

Though Australians on average work long hours, professional services firms classically illustrate how workers are reduced to timesheets. Each billable hour increases revenue, and costs firms nothing if employees are salaried. Their logic, therefore, is to equate long hours with greater production, call this "productivity".

Physical and mental health problems become increasingly widespread, carers are denied 'real jobs' because they can't put in 50-hour weeks, while working parents increasingly miss out on the lives of their children.

We could continue this trend towards one-dimensional existence, or we could take a stand.

We know that money doesn't buy happiness, and that our "standard of living" transcends mere consumption. Amongst talk of reducing monetary excess, we have a rare chance to influence that most precious of resources - time.

If we choose to, we could jump off the treadmill of consumption and work. If we choose to, we could redefine our workplaces, homes and communities. If we choose to, we could stop running, and start living.

Living non-expensive lives, that is. Which is not hard when you find yourself unemployed. The less you have, the less you spend. The choice in what is happening to Australian workers now, however, is being made by someone else. It's not quite the same as saying, "Fuck this, I've had enough, I need to get rid of all this work if I'm ever going to learn what living is all about."

Forcing people to reassess their work/life balance by taking away their jobs is more like shock therapy.

Maybe that will be the new way to tell someone they've got the flick : "We've decided you need some time to reassess your work/life balance."

Those who have to sell us the upsides of losing homes and discovering long-term unemployment, to fight the rise in suicides, depression and domestic violence, need to come up with something better, something that sounds a lot more fun than "The Frugal Years" to describe the many dozen months of The New Recession We Simply Had No Choice To Have.

They need to make unexpected poverty and unemployment sound like some kind of fun.

Perhaps that's how the Rudd government can brand market all the unemployment - "It's Not A Bad Thing, It's A Good Thing!"

They could run nightly ads reminding you just how great it is that you now have so much more time to spend with the family, or complete those long overdue home repair and renovation projects, or to reassure you that you can go to the (discounted) afternoon cinema sessions, on a weekday, without feeling guilty.

Liberals Suddenly Very Interested In The Government Being Held To Account

The Rudd Government, That Is

Libs Helen Coonan and Christopher Pyne now believe that an Australian government should keep its promises, should be held to account for its actions and should face heat and intense scrutiny when it acts dishonestly. Nothing like being kicked out of power to make politicians champions of integrity, honesty and substance :

Helen Coonan : "It's very important...that the Rudd led Labor party is made to fulfil their promises to the electorate and be kept accountable."

Christopher Pyne : "....the one thing that counts, which is holding Kevin Rudd accountable for his promises and his frontbench accountable for their incompetencies."

Helen Coonan : "I think it is very important to hold Kevin Rudd accountable..." "Can I just say one thing about holding Kevin Rudd accountable...eventually somebody's going to have to actually implement what they say and we will be holding Labor accountable, I assure you."

Great. But what about holding the Liberal Party accountable for the past 11.5 years? Christopher Pyne explains how that works :

"...we have to forget about the past."

Well, you can have your dreams.

Former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, is all for forgetting the past as well :

"...what’s the point of going back over the last 12 months, we can't relive that. It's all over. We just, I think for the Liberal Party, it won't be doing itself much of a favour by a constant retrospective."

It's no wonder Downer, and the rest of the survivors, want to forget about the past year, and the past11.5 years, of Liberal/National government.

Tim Dunlop runs through some of the numerous ways the Howard government shafted the Australian people and ducked and weaved their way through some of the most outrageous and shocking events, boondoggles, double standards and outright fabrications of recent decades :

I can’t remember the number of times we were told that Mr Howard doesn’t lie and that even if he does, so what, all politicians lie; that “core promises” was a perfectly legitimate way of dealing with election commitments; that any government or prime ministerial fudging in regard to “children overboard” was a figment of the “Howard haters” vile imagination; that there were absolutely no problems with the government’s handling of AWB scandal; that the Haneef matter was dealt with strictly according to the law with no eye to political advantage; that David Hicks deserved everything he got and that the government were always perfectly upfront about their dealings with the Bush Administration on the issue; that we were told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the invasion of Iraq; that the subsequent change of position of why we were in Iraq and how long we were staying there was perfectly reasonable; that the former government did have a mandate for WorkChoices because they mentioned something about in passing on their website before the 2004 election; that the “fairness test” wasn’t a backflip contradicting their previous commitments to make no fundamental changes to the legislation; that the business union ads the previous government demanded were a completely honest assessment based on sound econometric research; that Mr Howard’s multi-billion dollar splurge on government advertising was justifiable down to the last cent and that the ads themselves never had any political intent...

Dunlop has more on all this here and makes this final, extremely valid point :

Thank you, Mr Howard. By running the most dishonest government in living memory you seem to have converted a generation of your own supporters to the cause of integrity in government and this is, apparently, going to be a key theme of the new Coalition Opposition...This is a good thing for the country, something some of us having been arguing for some time.

Indeed.