CASUAL workers and freelancers are even more likely to struggle with their rents than the unemployed. 

A study by RMIT housing researcher Sharon Parkinson has found that while unemployed households are 20 per cent more likely than those in permanent employment to default on rent or be forced to leave their rental home, casual and other non-permanent employees are 57 per cent more likely to struggle in the private rental market.   

For self-employed households, such as freelancers, housing security was even worse, Dr Parkinson found. They were almost three times more likely to struggle to pay their rents than those with permanent jobs.


The casualisation of the Australian workforce over the past two decades had made it increasingly difficult for low-to-moderate income workers to pay their rents, Dr Parkinson said, drawing on information from 1992 to 2007 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia surveys.

"It's given rise to the phenomenon of the working insecure household," Dr Parkinson said.

The welfare safety nets of Centrelink payments, rent assistance and social housing provision have not kept up with the needs of workers on fluctuating incomes, Dr Parkinson said.   

"It's much easier to prove you're unemployed and seek social housing, whereas if you're working, it's assumed you can be self reliant. We can't make those assumptions any more when the labour market doesn't always provide a living wage for people."   

Robyn Reynolds, 36, has been working as a casual relief teacher for the Victorian education department for 2 years and said she regularly struggles to pay her share of the rent in a suburban share house. Unable to secure a contract job for 2012, she spent the summer unemployed.

"I'm pretty good at budgeting but I've had to borrow money from friends to pay my rent," Ms Reynolds said. She has started a kinesiology business, but it's not established enough to live on, she said, while the rates paid to casual teachers didn't pay enough to cover the irregular demand and the 12 weeks of school holidays each year.

It's too easy for landlords to evict tenants who fall behind in their rent, said Tenants Union of Victoria spokesman Toby Archer, as agents are not compelled to consider hardship the way utilities companies must. Housing workers have seen a significant increase in the number of rooming house tenants with casual jobs, Mr Archer said.

"Truck drivers, food and hospitality workers, we would never have seen them in rooming houses 10 years ago, but two years ago we started seeing those people much more frequently."   

The national inquiry into insecure work, chaired by former deputy prime minister Brian Howe, begins public hearings in Brisbane today.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/casual-workers-facing-rent-battle-20120212-1t027.html#ixzz1mCKV39MI

blackadder wrote on Feb 13^th, 2012 at 6:05am:


I used to train goldfish how to swim. I had my hand out begging for a government grant and got $35,000 from the taxpayer.