One factor I did not mention in the post - it’s a post in itself - is that workers are much more likely to believe that they might be sacked than the objective statistics warrant. For example, at the end of 2003 20% of the workforce in Morgan’s poll thought they might be sacked, but in the following year less than 3% of workers were in fact sacked. Double that because some workers may have felt they had no choice but to quit, and we are still way short of the subjective concerns. Rather than Australians having, as you suggest, a propensity not to worry, in this instance they worry too much.

Respectfully, you either struggle with analysis or are quite clever in conflating unrelated issues. You assume a correlation between casualisation and job security, but there is no causative link. It is a much more tenable argument to suggest that perception of job security is a function of perceptions of the economic situation (and probably the levels of micro-economic reform). The economy has been going well for a long time and micro economic reform virtually stopped with the election of the Howard Government, providing a higher sense of job security. The (slow) casualisation of the workforce is unlikely to be a factor at all in this outcome, but you assume it to be central.

You make a similar error when noting that just under half of all employees ‘don’t worry about losing their job’. This is statistically open to interpretation, and given the figures and the recent history of employment, it is probably more a statement regarding Australians and their propensity not to worry, rather than your interpretation that these people feel secure in their job. Either way, a statisitcally inconclusive outcome appears to have been ’spun’. An alternative reading of those statistics is the scary proposition that more than half of all workers are worried about job security, and the really frightening thing is that regualr employees are just as uncertain in their employment future as casuals.

Then start to analyse that a lot of casual employment is undertaken by people who have no intention of having a ‘career’ in that field and are just working their way through uni, acting, whatever, and they really don’t give two hoots about job security.

You are then left with the original statistics, which are interesting, your cherry picking a few which starts to look like damned statistics, and your analysis, which just looks like ’spin’.

Nice try though. A lot of people might buy it.

Jobs tend to be insecure, and vulnerable to poor management. There was a time from the late 1940s to the early 1980s where government and other large organisations ran labour-intensive staffing policies that encouraged managers to shift troublesome employees sideways rather than punt them into the chill winds of unemployment. Not everyone in the workforce then enjoyed these conditions, but many did. That time has passed, and not only was Tanya P not in the workforce then, but it is notable that she is not explicitly promising the employees of Australia a return to the school-to-retirement job under a future Labor Government of which she may be part.

Is the position of a worker who is acutely aware that his/her ongoing employment, career and economic security depends on the employer’s efficiency and market performance any less/more secure than that of a person blithely indifferent to such matters, who assumes that they will drift onward and upward without too much effort on their part?

Watch what happens when the economy tanks in a couple of years as the commodities boom busts. The workforce law changes have been, pure and simple, crafted with an eye to making sure the big employers in Australia are allowed to quickly shunt off their workforces when things are tight. Great for the employer, not so great if you just got shunted off.

All we really see now is the creation of marginal utility jobs that are much more tenuous than they currently appear. Add to that the incredible reliance of the Australian population on social security payments (a trend accelerated by the conflicted and increasingly shifty federal government) and you have a double disaster in the making: a population that can’t survive by work alone with a government that can’t afford to pay the welfare subsidies it has created. The irony? The welfare subsidies (family payments, childcare subsidies etc) exist because companies haven’t created full time jobs that pay enough for a family to survive.

Rajat - I agree, there could be self-selection going on.