current affairs | Linda Jaivin

CASUAL OBSERVATION

“I have spoken to some people about your work.” The Little Boss, in charge of hiring and firing at the lower levels of a large Australian media organisation, smirked. He’d asked ‘K’ to stay back when her shift ended at 9 p.m. Then he kept her waiting for half-an-hour, only to deliver bad news. “Everyone has a problem with it,” he stated. “We have to let you go.”
    K was gobsmacked. She’d been working on a casual basis as a subeditor for five-and-a-half months. In two weeks, she was due to move into a permanent position. Until then, she’d had nothing but good feedback for her work. Her goal was eventually to move up to writing and reporting. “What kind of problem?”
    “I can’t tell you anything more,” the Little Boss shrugged. When she pressed him, he admitted, “I’ve never seen your work.” On the other hand, he said that everyone had told him it was substandard.
    “Everyone? Like who?”
    He wouldn’t say. But when she named the editors she’d worked under, he confirmed several as having complained.
He informed K that she had a choice: she could either work her two remaining shifts for the week, or finish up then and there. In shock, feeling utterly humiliated, she quit on the spot.
    The next few days were miserable for K. She tried to work out where she’d gone wrong, and how she could have been so deluded about her own competence. She knew she needed to look for work, but her confidence was on the floor. She went to Centrelink and registered for the dole to hold her over until she got a new job. There, she was told that because losing this last job had been her own fault (it said on the paperwork that her performance had been unsatisfactory), they would dock $70 a week from the fortnightly allowance of $464.
    K summoned the courage to contact the people she used to work for, those who’d complimented her work to her face but apparently not behind her back. Two emailed her to say that they’d told Little Boss she was a fine worker and, in fact, superior. A third person had only taken over the section where she worked two days earlier and had never even seen her work.
    A little detective work revealed that higher management (representing shareholders) wanted to cut costs. Jobs had to go. It was easiest to chop casuals, and if they’d waited two weeks, she’d have become permanent staff, with all the pesky entitlements that would entail. It turned out the company had numerous strategies for avoiding that particular disaster, including forcing casuals to take a week’s holiday or changing their job description slightly so that, technically speaking, they hadn’t been in the same job for six months, and thus had no right to a permanent position.
    “Hold on,” I said to K’s friend, the woman who was telling me this story. “Can’t she take this to some tribunal, or ombudsman?”
    Silly me. Casuals, even those as steadily employed as K had been, have no access to any tribunal or ombudsman or any redress at all. I thought it was just freelancers like myself who had to fly through the air without safety nets.
    “What about those people who thought she was a good worker? Can’t they help?”
    “Everyone’s scared for their jobs,” my friend shrugged. “There aren’t many media outlets in Australia. Even she doesn’t dare complain about it openly, as she wants to get back into that kind of work some day, in the same organisation if possible.”
    Soon after she’d lost her job, another media outlet where K once worked heard she was free. They contacted her and offered her a job. So, at least she’s off the dole and back in employment.
    K emailed the Little Boss to say how disappointed she was with the deception which he’d resorted to in order to fire her. He replied by email, “There is nothing else I can tell you. I wish you well.”
    In July the Treasurer said he’d be open to the idea of exempting firms with over one hundred employees from unfair dismissal laws in the future. K might have kept her job then – after all, in that scenario, the Little Boss could have fired her for no good reason even after she’d been confirmed in a permanent position.
    The proportion of casual workers in the workforce is growing; more than one quarter of the workforce are casuals. That’s almost two million people working without annual leave, penalty rates, sick pay, or guaranteed regular hours already. Sue Richardson, Professor of Economics at Flinders University, is just one who has warned of the disastrous effects job insecurity is already having on family life and the wellbeing of children in particular.
    And yet Prime Minister John Howard has told the Sydney Institute that casual employment “reflects the contemporary needs of many employers and employees alike”. The Little Big Boss had special advice for casual workers: “To those who bemoan this trend I say this: you of all people should be interested in getting rid of bad laws that hinder the creation of permanent jobs. Either way you look at it, the cost of the existing unfair dismissal laws falls most heavily on firms and individuals who can least afford it.”
    Maybe. But it doesn’t appear that the proposed IR ‘reforms’, which would give some permanent positions all the security of a casual job, would have helped K or people like her. There are other ways of adding up costs which depend on who’s footing the bill.
    On the same day as my friend told me K’s story, the following letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Signed “Henry Partridge, Lindfield”, the letter read: “The unfair dismissal law has had a big impact on our small company. It encouraged us to work together with under-performing employees to increase their skills and production. They are now highly valuable to us and our team. Leave the present law alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Linda Jaivin is a freelance writer and translator. Her new novel, The Infernal Optimist, will be published in May 2006 by Fourth Estate.

Overland 181–summer 2005, p.16

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