Public ideas
A union boss and a corporate boss get together to solve a problem
When we think of the gig economy we think of rideshare and food delivery services. During the worst of the pandemic millions of Australians enjoyed the benefits of people bringing food to their front door. Many people in the gig economy were at work and interacting, well before a vaccine was developed.
Legally these people are contractors, rather than employees, but unlike true freelancers they generally have a close and ongoing relationship of dependence on one firm. And because the fast food and rideshare markets are intensely competitive, workers have not enjoyed the returns that would allow them to finance absences when sick or saving for superannuation. Also that same intense competition has put them under intense pressure for performance, leading to risk-taking behaviour: in 2020, 7 food delivery drivers lost their lives on the job.
On RN Breakfast, in a 14-minute discussion with Patricia Karvelas, Dom Taylor, General Manager of Uber Australia and New Zealand, and Michael Kaine, National Secretary of the Transport Workers' Union, describe how they have come together to work out a way to develop a financial safety net for workers in this industry, without compromising the benefits of flexibility. Both agree that in Australia we have an archaic labour relations system that makes a clear dichotomy between “contractors” and “employees”, and that assumes that there is a necessary trade-off between flexibility and the benefits and protections built into employees’ awards. It doesn’t have to be that way. If we can bring decent conditions to these industries we may have to pay a little more for our pizzas and curries, but surely most Australians do not want to be unintentionally complicit in supporting exploitative and dangerous employment conditions.
Taylor and Kaine have agreement on what they plan to achieve and on the minimum standards that should apply – enough to take to the government and to the Fair Work Commission to work out the details for these industries. On the following day’s Breakfast program Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and the Arts, Tony Burke, lends his support to their agreement, and is enthusiastic about developing models for other parts of the gig economy, including aged and disability care. (17 minutes)
To anyone familiar with the labour relations climate engendered by the Hawke government, this cooperation simply looks like an application of common sense. But in the intervening years there has been a reversion to more combative labour relations. The idea shouldn’t be novel, but it is.
The US Supreme Court and its relevance for Australia
Any detached observer of the United States is in wonder at the Supreme Court’s ability to hand down two decisions within a few days, one defending the right to life of unborn children, the other defending the right of people to carry deadly weapons in public. The other inconsistency is that the decision on abortion hands power back to the states, while the decision on carrying firearms deprives states of their rights.
Writing in The Conversation Morgan Marietta of the University of Massachusetts explains the Court’s reasoning in its interpretation of gun laws, and de facto, its reasoning in relation to abortion. The court will uphold those rights explicitly defined in the Constitution, such as the right to bear arms, but not those rights that have come to be assumed such as abortion, privacy and same-sex marriage.
Adam Server, writing in The Atlantic, presents the court’s decisions in their political context: The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is, an interpretation confirmed by an even more recent Court decision to thwart the Biden Administration’s plans to phase out fossil-fuel plants.
On the ABC’s Religion and Ethics program of June 29, there are two segments on the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion. In the first segment Katherine Stewart, author of The power of worshippers: inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism, explains how the right-wing forces have co-opted religious movements to support their right-wing agenda, believing, with some confirmation, that on matters to do with sexual behaviour and reproduction the churches’ stances are so strong that they will go along with, or ignore, the right’s other behaviours that do not align with Christian morality. Some of these beliefs and behaviours, such as support for racial segregation in schools, are distant from what we would consider to be Christian social teaching, but as Katherine Stewart explains in The Guardian, there is enough common ground between hard right anti-liberal anti-communist Republicans and believers to form a solid bloc.
Stewart’s segment on Religion and Ethics is followed by an interview with Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who points out that the US situation has little legal relevance for Australia, because we have never seen abortion as a constitutional matter: it has been up for the states to legislate, which is where the latest Supreme Court now places the US. Coleridge shows no support for the politically-embedded US anti-abortion movement, or the US “Christian right”. On the contrary he is distressed at the politicization of human life, which he sees as a tragedy. That politicization will only worsen the polarization of public life. The Catholic Church should not yield on its opposition to abortion, but activists should avoid being co-opted into ideological warfare. (The rest of his 14-minute interview is about the churches deal with other issues.)
But it’s only a fortunate accident of history that we are not being torn apart in the same way as the US is fragmenting. The Roe v Wade decision was in 1973. Around the same time Australian state laws, which had up to then prohibited abortion, were being tested in the courts, and abortion effectively became legal in all states by 1986, even though to this day it remains on the Western Australian criminal code. Maani Truu, writing on the ABC website, explains how the Australian situation compares with America’s: ours has been “bottom up”, in small steps in case law, while theirs has been “top down” from the land’s highest court.
If instead of having six states with generally the same social norms and political leanings, we had some significant states with deeply conservative politics – think Texas, Louisiana and Florida – abortion could be just as divisive an issue here as in the US. Writing in The Atlantic – America is growing apart, possibly for good – Ronald Brownstein describes a “great divergence” in that country, a divergence resulting in part from the weights in Senate representation and more recently the Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court.[1] There’s a “blue nation” of people with liberal values, high education, and high productivity, and a “red nation” being left behind. To a large extent the pre-Civil War divisions are re-emerging.
Confirming Brownstein’s general observation, Peter Sainsbury draws our attention to an article in the British Medical Journal, which compares life expectancies in Republican and Democrat voting counties: Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population-based cross-sectional analysis. At the beginning of this century there was hardly any difference in the age-adjusted mortality rates (AAMR) between red and blue counties, but by 2019 the gap had risen substantially “driven primarily by changes in deaths due to heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory tract diseases, unintentional injuries, and suicide”. Over this century so far the AAMR has fallen by 22 percent in blue counties but only by 11 percent in red counties. In red counties the AAMR has almost flatlined since 2007.
This is a reminder that we have institutions and conventions that protect us from the extent of disparities that have arisen in the US. We have revenue-sharing, advised by the Grants Commission, designed to provide states with fiscal equality, considering their needs for public expenditure and their revenue-raising capacity. We have national age pensions, unemployment benefits, income taxes and consumption taxes. We have a national mechanism for setting minimum wages. It’s too easy to take these institutions and conventions for granted, but they are fragile. When the Morrison government deliberately undermined the 82-year old revenue-sharing arrangements (see the Public policy section in this roundup) there was little complaint except from those with intimate knowledge of Commonwealth-state relations.
1. Although our Senate is modelled on the US Senate, with equal representation from each state, the numbers work out very differently. Our greatest population imbalance is between Tasmania (0.5 million) and New South Wales (8.2 million). Theirs is between California (39.6 million) and Wyoming (0.6 million), and there are another 5 US states with populations less than 1.0 million. Also, because we elect 6 Senators at each election, our states come closer to a “left”/”right” balance, while US states elect only 1 Senator at a time, consistently Republican or Democrat. ↩