Category: Employment & work

The end of WorkChoices

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Today the Coalition’s Shadow Cabinet officially declared WorkChoices dead. With coincidental but good timing, my Policy article on the ugly WorkChoices polling went online this morning.

Polling published since I wrote the article confirms the findings I report. In the Weekend Australian last Saturday, George Megalogenis cited surveys by left-leaning pollster Essential Media Communications that anti-WorkChoices opinion was stable across 2006 and 2007. The huge sums of money spent by both sides on WorkChoices propaganda had little if any net effect on the basic yes/no question.

My reading is that the anti-WorkChoices campaign was able to tap into set public opinion that labour market institutions should protect low-paid and vulnerable workers, and so it all it had to do was convince people that WorkChoices was contrary to their beliefs. That was accomplished by the time polling started in mid-2005.

What we still can’t be entirely clear on is whether the Coalition’s backdown on AWAs and the introduction of a ‘fairness’ test – a major watering down of WorkChoices on a key aspect of public concern, rather than just an advertising campaign – made any difference to the basic yes/no question (Megalogenis’s article doesn’t say when in 2007 Essential Media polled).
Continue reading “The end of WorkChoices” →

Over-educated graduates, again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The annual ABS Education and Work report is out today, and so another round in the Birrell vs Norton dispute as to whether we have too few, or too many, graduates for labour force needs.

This is the first Education and Work survey using the ABS’s new occupational classifications. This mucks up my time series, but by abolishing the ‘associate professional’ classification ends my indecision as to whether these occupations should be counted as ‘graduate’ or not. Some of the occupations formerly classified as ‘associate professional’ have been transferred to the ‘professional’ or ‘managerial’ classifications that graduates typically aspire to, while others are now in the new categories of ‘technicians and trade workers’, ‘clerical and administrative service workers’, and ‘community and personal service workers’. (It was the mixed nature of the ‘associate professional’ category that made be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Birrell case, and count these as ‘graduate’ jobs.)

With this sharper definition of which jobs are graduate jobs, I arrive at a higher estimate of the proportion of employed graduates in ‘non-graduate’ occupations – up from 19.2% to 26.5%. That’s 644,000 persons. There are another 400,000 graduates who are not working, giving us more than a million graduates not using their qualifications. By contrast, there are about 1.8 million graduates who are using their qualifications.

This new data supports my argument earlier this year (pdf) that labour market shortages in graduate occupations are more due to a misallocation of places between disciplines than to a shortage of places overall.

Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 4

~ Andrew Norton ~ 31 Comments

Another Roy Morgan job security survey is out today, and yet again they fail to find the job insecurity the unions would have us believe WorkChoices is causing.

According to the ACTU in March 2007:

Job security for Australian workers has been eroded – with 3,761,000 Australian workers employed in businesses with less than 100 staff having lost any protection from being unfairly dismissed.

That’s about 35% of all workers at increased risk of being ‘unfairly dismissed’. Yet by how much has the proportion of people feeling their jobs are safe gone down? One percentage point over the last year, and three percentage points since WorkChoices was introduced, to 80% of all workers believing that their present job is safe. Perhaps there is a very small WorkChoices effect there, but that 80% is higher than it was between 1999 and 2004.

Another question asks whether, if the respondent became unemployed, he or she could find another job fairly quickly. 72% of respondents thought they could find another job fairly quickly – the highest figure since Morgan started asking the question in 1975, when 57% of respondents thought that they could find a job fairly quickly. The lowest ever result was 38% in 1992.

The two questions highlight a difference between job security and employment security. All other things being equal, a highly-regulated labour market makes it less likely that someone will be dismissed from the particular job they have now. So it increases job security. But all other things being equal, a highly-regulated labour market will also make it less likely that employers will take on new staff. So this lessens employment security, the confidence workers have that they will have a job, even if not necessarily the job they have now.

But the job security statistics suggest that employment laws are not the major influence on either job or employment security. Commercial considerations are the biggest factor, and relationships within the workplace probably the next most important.

Propaganda failure

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The WorkChoices campaign – for and against – must be the most expensive in Australian political history. But how effective was it?

Last month I argued that perhaps the government’s ‘fairness’ test change and subsequent advertising helped ease concerns among Liberal voters. But the polling data I have been analysing over the last week for a Policy article I’ve been writing on WorkChoices tells us something, I think, about the limits of political propaganda.

All along, the polling on for or against questions about WorkChoices has been stable. Three Morgan Polls between July 2005 and April 2006 found the proportion of voters against the reforms varied by just 0.8%, after taking out those not expressing a view. Just under three-quarters of Morgan respondents with an opinion were against WorkChoices. In five ACNielsen polls, of those offering a for or against opinion, the proportion against varied from 69% to 74%, a very similar result to Morgan.

This suggest that the outline of WorkChoices triggered reactions based on stable aspects of public opinion, and nothing anyone said or did after that changed the basic yes/no position of the electorate.

On more specific aspects of WorkChoices, we do see opinion changing. Continue reading “Propaganda failure” →

Is there ‘huge growth’ in the cost of university administration?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

In responding to a Group of Eight whinge about university funding, Julie Bishop alleged:

“There has been huge growth in the cost of university administration and, given their strong financial position, the challenge for university management is to ensure their institutions are operating more efficiently and to invest more in teaching and research.”

I agree that universities could be more efficient. But I am not sure that we are witnessing ‘huge growth’ in the cost of university administration. I don’t know of any public data that directly measures administration costs, but DEST finance statistics divide employee costs into academic and non-academic. Staff are the major expense for universities. Over the period 2002 to 2006, total enrolments increased by 9.8% and total university expenses rose by 38%. Academic staff costs increased by 48% and non-academic staff costs by 46%. This suggests that staff costs are heading up at a faster rate than other costs, but not that administration costs are blowing out relative to teaching and research costs, unless there has been a growth in central administration staff at the expense of other non-academic staff.

DEST’s staff statistics get us closer to central administrators, but without counting just them. Their numbers are mixed in with the delivery of non-administrative services, such as maintenance and security. But their total share of university employment is stable on around 19% since 2000, slightly lower than it was in the 1990s. Continue reading “Is there ‘huge growth’ in the cost of university administration?” →

Have the WorkChoices ads made a difference?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 52 Comments

For weeks now we’ve been hearing complaints about the level of government advertising, much of it on the changes to WorkChoices. It isn’t having any obvious effect on the two-party preferred. But today’s Newspoll issues survey (pdf) suggests that it is perhaps having some impact.

On the question of which party would better handle industrial relations, the Coalition on 34% is now 7 percentage points above its low point of February this year. As The Australian pointed out, that’s taken them back to where they were before WorkChoices.

So why isn’t it showing in the two-party preferred? Partly, perhaps, because industrial relations is ranked the least important of the nine issues Newspoll has asked about in recent surveys. But the main answer, I think, is that the extra 7% are mostly Liberal voters now less worried about WorkChoices than they were before. Labor has kept the 7-8% WorkChoices advantage it acquired from WorkChoices, with the recent Liberal gains coming from the ‘uncommitted’, ‘none’ and other party columns.

With the Coalition primary vote looking so sorry, the ad campaign may have had a useful political impact for the government (the same can’t be said for the environment ads; the government’s numbers have been flat all year). But it is not a vote changing impact, just firming up Liberal-leaning voters who might be tempted to stray.

Do graduates from private schools earn more?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

In The Sunday Age yesterday, there was another article about private school students struggling at university. It was based on the numerous studies (I mention a couple here) which have found that, for a given ENTER score, kids from private schools, and also selective government schools where they have been examined, average slightly lower first-year university marks than kids who have been to government schools.

Though this finding has been repeated frequently enough for it to be regarded as a valid social science generalisation, it is also widely misunderstood as saying that private school students get lower grades at university. I haven’t seen that question specifically answered in research, but given that private school students have much higher median ENTERs that is unlikely to be the case. Though private school students are not as academically prepared as government school students who get the same grades as they do, disproportionately few government school students actually get those matching grades at the end of Year 12.

There is also the problem that the studies are all of first year students. It would not be surprising if the differences narrowed in subsequent years, as private school students adjust to the more self-directed study style at university and learn that university life doesn’t offer quite the same freedom compared to school at they might have first thought.

As an ACER study I blogged on in April found, private school students have a higher rate of actually completing university, though once starting ENTER scores are taken into account there are no significant differences betweens school sectors.

One issue we don’t know much about is the differences between government and private school students after university. I have been trying to do a little research on this using the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes.
Continue reading “Do graduates from private schools earn more?” →

Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 3

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Not all the data reported in Australia@Work follows the union line. The unions have persistently argued that WorkChoices reduces job security. For example, in the ACTU’s one year on report on WorkChoices, released in March this year, Sharran Burrow claimed:

Job security for Australian workers has been eroded – with 3,761,000 Australian workers employed in businesses with less than 100 staff having lost any protection from being unfairly dismissed.

Yet as I have argued in the past, there is little evidence that variations in employment law have much impact on how likely someone is to be dismissed. While statutes may make getting rid of unnecessary or incompetent employees more time-consuming and costly, it has nearly always been possible. Even where sacking is legally difficult, employers can encourage ‘voluntary’ departures by giving unwanted employees boring work, or treating them poorly.

In Australia@Work, employees were asked to agree or disagree with the statement that:

There is a good chance that I will lose my job or be retrenched within the next twelve months.

About 9% agreed or strongly agreed. I can’t find an exact pre-WorkChoices comparison point, but neither of the two 2005 surveys I have found suggest that things have deteriorated since. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes asked:

Continue reading “Australia’s surprisingly secure workers, part 3” →

Proxy analysis

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

On complex issues, people often resort to proxy measures to make judgments. At think-tanks, we get it all the time. People often seem more interested in who the funders are than the time-consuming process of working out whether our arguments make sense or not.

So the authors of this week’s Australia@Work report can hardly have been surprised when Joe Hockey focused on the report’s union links. Particularly as it turns out that Hockey made his original comments afer being called by a journalist for comment on a report which he had not seen. The summary the journalist gave probably focused only on negative comments about the government, which generated the predictable response.

The actual report, however, would not immediately give any cause for confidence that it was not just pushing the union line. After all, if as its cover says it is ‘sponsored by Unions NSW’ the conclusion that its content would be favourable to Unions NSW is not exactly counter-intuitive.

In this morning’s Australian, the paper digs up a speech by Australia@Work author John Buchanan, in which he declares himself to be a socialist. Can a socialist view WorkChoices objectively?

Buchanan and his co-authors were also trying to invoke a proxy measure of the report’s worth, citing the Australian Research Council in addition to Unions NSW as a ‘sponsor’ of the research. According to The Age:

Continue reading “Proxy analysis” →

What effects would rising uni fees have on the labour market?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

The intuition that rising university tuition fees are a problem is a powerful one, but in need of persuasive theories and evidence to support it. As research cast more doubt on the idea that HECS negatively affected decisions to attend university, the argument switched to its effects after graduation.

The first serious attempt to do so was a paper in 2002 by a University of Tasmania academic, Natalie Jackson, suggesting that HECS might reduce fertility, as couples, and particularly women, postponed having children to pay off their HECS debt first. Though Jackson herself was cautious, given the data limitations, the idea was enthusiastically taken up by proponents of lower HECS, as I noted in my 2003 paper (pdf) criticising the idea. Subsequent analysis using HILDA data, published recently in the Journal of Population Research, showed that my argument was correct.

Another version of the argument is that, because of HECS, graduates will struggle to buy a home. Kevin Rudd has made this argument, effectively suggesting (as I pointed out at the time) that graduates be given a second first home buyers grant not available to the poor plebs who have to work to pay for their homes, rather than getting a wealth transfer from the Commonwealth.

A third version of the argument, which has come up this weekend in The Age and from commenter Matt, is that HECS debts will distort career choices away from public service type jobs towards employment that will generate the cash flow required to repay loans.

As The Age put it:
Continue reading “What effects would rising uni fees have on the labour market?” →