More Australians are working multiple jobs as wages fail to pick up
August 1, 2019
Sydney Morning Herald
Australians are still struggling to get decent pay rises and increasingly turning to side gigs to make ends meet, with new data showing 600,000 workers have three or more jobs.
The Morrison government's forecast of a wages recovery appears to be at risk after wage increases in new enterprise agreements fell for the second quarter in a row, locking in stagnant wages for hundreds of thousands of workers for the next three years.
More Australians are working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
ANZ economist Catherine Birch said the reversal in the direction of wage growth revealed in data published by the Attorney General's department on Thursday "suggests that the gradual improvement we have seen in the wage price index could fade".
Separate data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics the same day showed a dramatic increase in the number of Australians holding multiple jobs, with a doubling of those working in four or more different positions in 2016-17.
Australia Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus said the expansion of "non-standard forms of work" had developed into a "crisis of insecure work".
"The fact that working more jobs means, on average, earning less shows that people forced into holding multiple jobs are doing it out of dire need," Ms McManus said.
Labor Senator Tony Sheldon used his maiden speech on Wednesday to rip into disruptor tech companies such as Uber for "pillaging" the Australian economy and harming worker rights.
The former Transport Workers Union secretary wants gig economy workers, who are often treated as independent contractors, to have employee rights to better pay and entitlements.
Average wage increases fell to 2.7 per cent in the March quarter, down by 0.1 per cent, making the Treasury forecast of wage growth hitting 3.25 per cent by 2020-21, then 3.5 per cent the following year, increasingly unlikely.
Public sector deals were the worst hit, with wage increases falling 0.3 per cent to just 2.4 per cent.
Federal Labor employment spokesman Brendan O'Connor seized on the ABS figures as evidence of "serious structural issues in the labour market" that were being exacerbated by government inaction to address "insecure work" and "soaring underemployment".
"Economic growth is slowing down, wages are stagnant and this government is pretending there is no problem," Mr O'Connor said.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday that his government had demonstrated that it was "on the side of the Australian people" through its tax policies.
"We've supported delivering tax cuts, tax relief for all working Australians, so they can keep more of what they earn," Mr Morrison said.
Jim Stanford, an economist at the Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work, said the soft wages data reflected an erosion of the power of unions to win bigger increases "in the face of ... a very hostile legal and regulatory environment".
"The government should be looking at ways of rebuilding collective bargaining as a key support for wages," Professor Stanford said. "It is incredibly ironic that the government's top labour policy priority seems to be to further hamstring unions."
The House of Representatives passed the government's union-busting Ensuring Integrity Bill on Wednesday after Labor MPs spent three days arguing against it.
The government, which has the numbers in the lower house, is set to pass another bill to curtail unions' use of interest earned on worker entitlement funds.
But it needs the support of crossbencher Senator Jacqui Lambie or one of Centre Alliance's two senators to get the bills through the Senate, where it will be debated after a Senate inquiry reports in late October.
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