This final report of the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care draws on 11 days of hearings across Australia, as well as 125 published submissions. The committee thanks all those who made contributions to our deliberations.
At its core, the committee has investigated the ways in which Australians combine their jobs with care of others—of children, parents, disabled people, of frail and aged friends and family.
Many Australians—and most over the course of their lives—combine jobs with care of others for years, and too many are struggling with this combination. They experience time poverty, unpredictable hours of work and care, challenging transitions between work and care through different life stages, high costs, and inflexible working conditions. Many feel the costs of this combination in their household budgets, especially as inflation increases and the costs of care rise.
These effects do not fall evenly. They especially affect women who pay lifetime penalties in lost income and time that is stressed and pressured. And some groups are especially negatively affected: for example, young people caring for family members as they try to work or get to school; immigrant workers who cannot get access to work and care; First Nations communities who need culturally appropriate, place-based early childcare services but cannot find them nearby; low-income households who struggle to pay for care alongside their unpredictable hours of work and incomes.
For the large and growing number of workers in our care industries—childcare, aged care, disability care—the burden is especially intense as they receive low pay in flat career structures in jobs that are demanding, while at the same time juggling their own care responsibilities at home. They are mostly women.
The issue of predictable pay and working hours has emerged as an important and unexpectedly significant issue in the inquiry with too many Australians working in conditions that lack predictable hours and thus pay.
Time for a new 21st century work and care social contract
While Australia was seen by some as a working-man's paradise in the 1900s, leading the world in establishing working rights like a living wage and reduced working hours, it is far from a working-person's paradise now. The 19th century social contract that provided workers and their households a living income in exchange for their work, is no longer fit for a world where so many workers have caring responsibilities and where so many women join men at work.
Australians now have a right—indeed, an obligation—to work, but they do not have a right to both work and care. This mattered less when the paid workforce was mostly made up of men – with women doing unpaid work at home: it matters a great deal now when the labour force is almost half women and an ageing population is increasing the need for care.
It is time for a new right to care, alongside the right to work. In a world that increasingly relies upon the paid work of its citizens who are also carers, it is time for a new social contract around work and care—one appropriate to the 21st century.
That contract should have at least ten characteristics:
(1)
ensure that workers with caring responsibilities do not suffer large lifetime losses in pay;
(2)
provide paid leave (sick, parental, holiday, carers) to care for others;
(3)
ensure that job insecurity is not the price paid for being a working carer;
(4)
provide flexible jobs that enable care;
(5)
provide critical support at the arrival of children through a strong interlocking system of universal, quality early childhood education and care (ECEC); and
(6)
a pathway to reach a year of paid parental leave (PPL) at minimum wage for new parents, a portion of it shared;
(7)
ensure poverty in retirement is not the reward for a lifetime of work and care;
(8)
provide liveable income support, above the poverty line, for carers when they cannot work;
(9)
facilitate transitions into and out of work over the course of people's lives; and
(10)
enable both men and women to care, ensuring that gendered patterns of hours (men long, women short) do not entrench gender inequality and make it hard for men to care while loading up women with unpaid labour.
The architecture of this new 'contract of care' is reflected in the recommendations of this report, based on the evidence put before it.
International standards have moved forward: Australia is an outlier
Australia is now an international laggard when it comes to key working conditions of significance to working carers: paid leave when sick or when children are sick; paid parental leave to recover from having a baby, breastfeeding and caring for infants; childcare that is as essential to getting to work as the road workers travel on. Many countries have moved ahead to improve these working conditions, adapting to the changing nature of the worker and their household, but Australia's adaptions have not met those of some of our trading partners.
Further, some of these adaptions have had perverse effects. Most significantly, a common adaption to combining paid work with care in Australia is part-time work, often undertaken by women. Unfortunately, too many part-time jobs are not secure, and they lack essential working conditions like access to training, promotion, pay increases, some forms of leave, and so on. The work of adaption has fallen to working carers to morph their lives around working conditions built for workers and households of the last century. As a consequence, our approach to part-time work in Australia makes us an international outlier. Other countries have not adapted to women and carers' entry to paid work in this way.
This has important consequences for gender inequality in Australia. Many jobs in which men predominate—like management and professional work—have increased their hours of work, making it harder for workers in them to be active carers. On the other hand, Australian women are more commonly found in lower paid and part‑time jobs especially in the services, retail and care sectors. This gendered regime of working time, with more men working longer hours and more women working shorter, locks in lifetime patterns of gendered work and care. Its imprint on our persistent gender pay gap and on the gendered allocation of care is deep and significant. It explains the very wide gaps in lifetime earnings for workers with caring responsibilities and it casts a long shadow into retirement for many working carers and women who, after a lifetime of work and care, enter a retirement of poverty. It inhibits the opportunities for men to engage in care.
The costs of the current system
The costs of the current system of work and care are felt by individual workers and those they care for. They are also felt across our social system through widening inequality, and in our economy in terms of a diminished labour supply. Many carers would like to have a job and many more would like to work more hours. Childcare shortages are a critical component of this, but so are inflexible working conditions, unpredictable hours that make organising care difficult, high effective marginal tax rates that penalise extra hours, and inadequate aged care and disability respite. There are also costs to the health budget arising from the stress, anxiety and physical and mental load of putting together care responsibilities with work—and these are evident across age groups, beginning with young people who suffer high mental health costs arising from caring for family members when still at school.
Things can be different. Other countries do it differently. There is overwhelming evidence that structural reforms to the architecture of Australia's work and care system would reap significant social and economic benefits not just for individuals and families, but for communities and the national gross domestic product (GDP). It would improve wellbeing.
A whole of government response is required: there are clear steps forward and this report recommends a comprehensive set of actions that need to be considered holistically. Our work and care challenges must be met by a comprehensive package of measures that change our system, and that move us to a new social contract for the combination of paid work with care in this century.
We must recognise the essential value of care to our community, economy and well-being – by measuring it. This should be considered as a regular part of budget reporting and a key element in any measure of well-being. Calculations of the value of unpaid work in the Australian economy put it at around half of GDP: an essential underpinning of all aspects of our economy. Without the work of social reproduction and care, there is no economy.
Universal, quality early childhood education and care is a critical element of change. It is time that the essential infrastructure role of ECEC to the world of work—and beyond—is recognised. Like transport, childcare is essential infrastructure to get to work. The case for universal, quality ECEC is unassailable, proven in many countries including Australia. Good early childcare and learning narrows inequality, improves life chances and can help narrow intergenerational inequity. The return on investment in the sector is multiple. If it is offered as a wrap-around service, bringing together the range of supports essential to a good start for children and new families, it can not only improve health and reduce the chances of poverty but also create strong communities and social connection for families that strengthens communities. That is why a priority recommendation is for quality childcare that is universal, place-based and child-centred.
Underpayment for relative skills, experience and qualifications is endemic across care occupations, reflecting the undervaluation of this work, the feminisation of these occupations and the long shadow of gender inequity. We recommend immediate action by the Fair Work Commission to revalue the work of all types of paid carers, to unpack classifications and create well-paid, decent remuneration structures that are fair and appropriately value care work. Amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 through the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022, passed in late 2022, are a welcome expansion in the capability of the Fair Work Commission to achieve this.
This revaluation must be met by government commitments to consider funding and implementation mechanisms for any pay increases in the care sector agreed to by the Fair Work Commission.
Paid care workers—like most others—also need appropriate remuneration for the time they spend on work-related travel and essential training and administrative work. The increasing reach of gig work, artificial 'self-employment' and other fractured employment arrangements in the care sector create an argument for improvements in the conditions and terms of care work.
Paid Parental Leave: Australia introduced its first national PPL scheme in 2011 and the Australian Government has recently committed to increase it to 26 weeks at minimum wage by 2026. This is very welcome and an important advance for Australia's working parents.
Many countries now provide much longer periods of paid parental leave and the standard is now close to or better than 52 weeks, shared by new parents. There is a strong case for an extended period of paid leave for new parents, especially new mothers in late pregnancy, recovery from birth and when breast feeding. Such leave is an important complement to universal, quality ECEC, ensuring that infants receive the best chance of a good start in the early years.
It is time that Australian parents had a sure pathway to the international standard of paid parental leave, one worthy of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country increasingly relying upon the paid labour of its mothers and women. Successive advances in paid leave should be agreed as an essential part of a new national work and care contract. They are basic infrastructure for an economy dependent upon the labour of carers, especially mothers.
Sick leave and a holiday: access to paid sick leave is a first-order issue for working carers. They need it both for their own sick leave, but also for dealing with the ill health of those they care for. Anyone who has cared for young children knows how frequent that can be. Making arrangements when a child is sick is a source of great stress to working parents and to those caring for all kinds of family members. It is especially stressful for those casual workers have to choose between income and the safe care of themselves or their dependents. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the importance of access to paid sick leave to maintaining safe workplaces and communities.
Holiday pay is also an essential element of a decent working life.
Therefore, a Fair Work Commission review of access to and compensation for paid, sick and annual leave for casual and part-time workers would be highly advantageous.
Working time regulation for a 21st century workforce: some of the most frequently mentioned issues heard by the committee relate to working time: the security, predictability, length, flexibility, intensity and fit with caring responsibilities all emerged as pressing issues.
Working carers need predictable, secure working time. Without it, they cannot plan care. Insecure hours also mean unpredictable and insecure income. Evidence before the committee shows that many Australian workers are working on terms that are inferior to those prevailing a century ago: they cannot predict their pattern of work a week ahead and sometimes tomorrow. This is hard for a worker without caring responsibilities. It is impossible for a worker responsible for someone else's welfare. We make strong recommendations about predictable, secure rosters and the need for workers to have genuine say about roster changes without suffering disadvantage. This is a pressing issue given the fraying of employment standards at a time when our workforce has never been in greater need of security, given its increasing care responsibilities.
Flexibility is also important. The committee commends the amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 through the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022, passed in late 2022, that made the right to request flexibility enforceable (as recommended in the committee's Interim Report), along with the right to request an extension of unpaid parental leave. However, evidence before the committee suggests that more is needed, and in this light the committee recommends that companies with over 3000 employees report annually on workplace practices to ensure they uphold a duty to provide a flexible workplace—not in piecemeal response to specific request making, but as a general duty in workplaces where care responsibilities and the need for flexibility is now widespread. Many workplaces already do this: it is time for it to be more general.
The committee heard robust evidence about the impact of long hours of work and the challenges they create for working carers. Carers struggle to do jobs where long hours are regular, and this creates high bars that exclude women and carers. This contributes to a gendered work-care system where men work more, while women do more unpaid domestic work. Our recommendations address this, along with the need for workers to be able to disconnect from the technologies of their work. We recommend a right to disconnect of the kind that now prevails in a range of other countries and some Australian workplaces. Emerging technologies should not tether workers to jobs outside paid working hours without formal agreement and recompense, and they are particularly problematic for working carers.
The question of job insecurity received considerable attention in evidence and we strongly endorse the previous recommendations made by the Select Committee on Job Security. Insecure work—including casual, gig and artificially structured 'self‑employment'—make combining work and care very challenging for many, and we recommend new statutory definitions of these forms of work, and better regulation of conditions.
The committee heard substantial evidence about the four-day week. It is many decades since Australia made general reductions in the length of the working week and we are far from our mid-nineteenth century leadership in international rankings for reductions in the length of the working week. It is time for a review of standard hours, the frequency with which they are over-run without recompense, and for more widespread experimentation with shorter working weeks. Many carers seek shorter hours and we heard evidence that shorter working weeks enable the 'mainstreaming' of carers into the workforce without loss of promotion, pay or opportunities.
Many other important issues arose in evidence before the committee, including considerable material about the diversity of carers' and workers' needs, how they change over the course of life including into retirement, and how we need to value care in all its forms. Greater financial support for carers who are not in work was especially highlighted, along with the need to lift all forms of income support above the poverty line.
Key challenges exist in our aged care system in terms of pay and conditions and access to respite. Similarly in relation to disabled people, there are important challenges in ensuring access to open employment and recognising the enormous contribution that workers who support a disabled person make to our social and economic good.
Overwhelmingly, carers with jobs want greater support for what they do: workplaces that enable their participation without penalty, government payments that enable transitions into and out of work and fund periods out of work for care at key moments in life, and infrastructure like aged, disability and childcare that underpins getting to work.
It is time for a new 21st century social contract, one that creates a practical right to care alongside the right—indeed, obligation—to work. And it is time for a holistic, rather than a piecemeal, response.