Pay and conditions gap widening within the Australian workforce
There's a growing gap between sectors with rising pay and conditions and those that rely on minimum benchmarks. Labour experts say those in traditional workplaces vastly under-estimate the value of things like holiday and sick leave, benefits that aren't on offer to growing numbers of workers in insecure employment in the gig economy.
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TVTranscript
00:00We're very good at counting and measuring wages and as a result we get extremely concerned
00:06about wage growth.
00:08But something that is on the mind of labour economists is what they call the conditions
00:11gap which is the growing gap between people in full time work and others in contracting,
00:18labour hire or without that tenure and the conditions that they don't get.
00:22So to give you an example, casuals in Australia get a 25% leave loading on top of their hourly
00:28rate.
00:29That loading essentially is meant to compensate for all the things that they don't get, things
00:33like sick leave and holiday pay.
00:35But local labour experts and UK research have looked at more than 90 occupations says that
00:40the gap, the value of those conditions is more like 33% and in fact could be vastly
00:46more where there are jobs linked to higher levels of education.
00:49What that means is that people who aren't in full time work aren't being compensated
00:53as well as they should be for the value of those conditions.
00:57The gap is also being exacerbated by really large union agreements that are being struck
01:02for big workplaces and also the rise of knowledge and creative work that's exacerbating the
01:07gap between those workers and service level workers in the economy.
01:12So this conditions gap is growing, it is something that is on the minds of economists but it's
01:17something that's being lived out by people who are in contracting and labour hire arrangements
01:22who don't have access to their compensation.
01:25New laws from the federal government have expanded the rights of all paid employees
01:29to things like family violence leave and a right to disconnect from work and new protections
01:33are coming for the gig economy which will change things there.
01:37So this is a fluid space where there is a lot of change but at the moment we're seeing
01:41that conditions gap widening.