Barbara Pocock

The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do about It

Review(s) of: The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do about It by Barbara Pocock, Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2003. pp. xi + 288.

Work-life ‘balance’ in Australia: Limited progress, dim prospects

39.95 paper.

Building ‘community’ for different stages of life: physical and social infrastructure in master planned communities

This article considers work-life balance in Australia and sets out the accumulating case in support of it, including the business, social, political and personal cases. The article reviews progress over the past year in the context of labour-market changes in the most recent decade, then considers recent responses, and finally weighs prospects for the future. The author is not optimistic of change in the short term, though labour-market tightening may drive some positive, if patchy, change. The increasing voice and traction of workers with caring responsibilities may be a force for greater change in the medium term, but by most measures the Australian work-life regime remains hostile to care and imposes significant costs. While many of these costs are privately experienced or visited upon those with weak voice (like women, children, and aged dependants), their effects are far from inconsequential or lacking political traction.

Conceptualizing Work, Family and Community: A Socio‐Ecological Systems Model, Taking Account of Power, Time, Space and Life Stage

As cities around the world struggle to cope with increasing populations, major new master planned housing developments are being undertaken to meet the demand for housing. Such urban developments are influencing workforce, household, and community relations, which in turn drive health and well-being outcomes, and affect social capital and labour market participation. This paper reports findings from the first phase of data collection for the Work, Home and Community Project. Fourteen focus groups were conducted with 68 men and women who live and/or work at newly developed master planned communities in South Australia and Victoria. Findings indicate that familiarity, availability, and the enabling of social bridges contribute to the development of community and social capital in these residential areas. For individuals at different stages of life these factors were facilitated or inhibited by specific physical and social infrastructures in the residential area and the workplace. At a time when concerns are being raised about the ability of people to combine work, home, and community these findings shed some light on the physical and social infrastructures that can enable or constrain the building of healthy communities.

Gender and Australian Industrial Relations Theory and Research Practice

A large body of empirical research now exists about ‘work and family’, much of it in agreement on critical issues. However, it is under‐conceptualized, it over‐researches professional and managerial workers and it under‐attends the larger terrain of work, family and community. This contribution argues the case for a stronger analytical framework around work, family and community and the ways in which they intersect, drawing on concepts commonly used in the field of employment relations. The article utilizes a body of empirical research about work, family and community in Australia to develop Voydanoffs ecological systems model of work, home and community, arguing that it is vital to unpack the ‘black box’ of ‘work’ in a multi‐layered way, to give appropriate weight to various sources of power, and to avoid an individualistic approach to the reconciliation of work, home and community life by locating analysis in a larger social and political context. The contribution proposes a ‘socio‐ecological systems’ model of work, home and community that delineates the four issues of power, time, space and life stage.

Work‐family and work‐life pressures in Australia: advancing gender equality in “good times”?

Abstract Gender is a significant—if understudied—theme in the field of Australian industrial relations. This paper reflects on some of the ways in which the theory of industrial relations—more precisely, its conceptual categories—and its research approaches, are constrained and perverted by the failure to treat gender effectively. The paper considers how the study of industrial relations is in many places in fact the study of men: that gender, though always present, is rarely pulled into focus. The field remains largely uninterested in naming men, or in studying women, and conflates ‘women’ with gender. In contrast, other related fields—and feminist theory in particular—have been vigorously unravelling the uses of gender categories within the social sciences. How can these opposing tendencies be usefully reconciled in ways which enrich industrial relations research?

Time, Money and Job Spillover: How Parents’ Jobs Affect Young People

Purpose – This paper aims to explore recent changes in Australias work‐family policies and programs and their implications for gender (in)equality.Design/methodology/approach – The authors critically assess a suite of new work/family‐related policies, including the introduction of a government‐funded national paid parental leave scheme, a limited right to request flexible working conditions, and the extension of state and federal anti‐discrimination legal protections for workers with family responsibilities.Findings – The analysis suggests a lack of coherence and integration between various work/family related policies and the need for a wider range of reforms, particularly in relation to domestic work and care. It is found that the gendered use of flexibility rights, like the new right to request, do not necessarily improve gender equality and may work to entrench it in the face of strong gendered workplace and societal norms and practices around work and care. As a consequence women workers and mothers...

Flexibility and Work-Life Interference in Australia

This paper examines the perspectives of young people about their parents’ paid and unpaid work, their preferences for time or money through more parental work, and their views about how their parents’ jobs affect them. It analyses qualitative empirical data collected in Australia in late 2003, by means of focus groups among 10-12 and 16-18- year-old males and females in urban and rural locations in two Australian states, in both high and low socioeconomic areas. It finds that more Australian children are looking for more time from parents than more money from more parental work, though this varies by income level, location and parental hours. This preference for ‘time over more money’ is consistent in single- and dual-earner couple households as well as sole parent/earner households. Children are acute observers of parents and their jobs. Both positive and negative spillovers are widely observed. Negative spillovers from long or unsocial hours are especially marked, reinforcing other findings in support of policy interventions to contain long or unsocial hours.

An Analysis of Workplace Representatives, Union Power and Democracy in Australia

This contribution examines the relationship between flexibility and work—life interference. It analyses requests for flexibility in Australia just prior to the enactment of a new ‘right to request’ such flexibility, utilizing a large employee survey that shows that around a fifth of employees requested flexibility, most requests were agreed, and work—life outcomes were much better amongst those whose requests were fully agreed. Women were twice as likely as men to have sought flexibility, with one in two mothers of preschoolers, one in three mothers of children under 16 and a quarter of women without children having made requests. Parenting made no difference to men’s rate of request-making. Findings suggest that the right may be particularly beneficial to the third of all workers who have not made requests for flexibility yet are not content with current arrangements. There is a case to extend the right beyond parents, and for stronger appeal rights.

The Price of Feminised Jobs: New Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap in Australia

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the views and experiences of workplace representatives in Australia in the context of falling union density, and to analyse factors that are most strongly associated with subjective union power at the workplace level, as perceived by delegates. The analysis relies on a large random survey of workplace delegates in eight significant Australian unions. The article describes the situation broadly facing delegates as shown by the survey and analyses a set of factors associated with the power of workers as perceived by delegates. We find that higher levels of reported activism among delegates are strongly associated with greater subjective union power. We also find that self-reported delegate confidence is also strongly associated with perceptions of higher union power, as is delegates clarity about their roles. The data also show a strong association between perceptions of democracy within the union and union power. Support for delegates from the union office and organizers is also associated with higher levels of union power at the local level. The analysis provides some support for union renewal strategies associated with the ‘organizing model’ as applied in Australia and some other Anglo-Saxon countries that aim to increase the activism of workplace delegates through education, the provision of support for workplace delegates and more democratic union structures.