Work/Life Balance: A Rejoinder

Replying to Sagenz and Just Left on the subject of Worklife Balance (and some other stuff inbetween)

Sage, I would be hesitant to push for legislated overtime after 40 hours a week - as you say, it is an arbitrary number and interventionist. It impinges on people's right to contract certain hours of work. I accept that. The problem however, is to protect the ability for the worker to contract 60 hours a week with their employer, or 40 hours and overtime thereafter.

I'm sorry Jordan, I have to disagree with you here. One point to Sage.

However Sage, overtime is necessary. If you agree with your employer to work 60 hours a week and you are in a position to sustain that without overtime (ie. you have few family commitments, a financial goal in mind or are particularly driven), it affects workers doing a similar job who are not in the same situation. If you are in a small office environment with say, 4 other workers who do a similar job, your refusal of overtime affects their ability to claim it for hours that they have to do in excess of their norm (in this case, 40). Example, a bank officer. You as a green-eyed new recruit, have been employed on a fixed-term contract of 12 months in a bank branch, after which time you plan to go overseas. Becuase the bank is not open on the weekend, you make an agreement with your manager to come in an hour earlier and leave and hour later each weekday. During this time you will perform necessary tasks that the manager has otherwise had trouble getting done in the past. Win-win: you get more money, the boss gets those jobs done. In contracting this arrangement, you agree that those extra hours, even though they fall outside the normal work hours of your fellow employees, will be paid at T1 and not T2. Your manager is happy with this arrangement, and off we go. 6 months in (those odd jobs are recurring), your bank runs a particularly successful advertising campaign. Your branch is inundated with new customers and there is more work to be done. Essential day-to-day paperwork can no longer be done throughout the day, as customers have saturated your branch and you must complete interviews virtually every half hour for the new customers. As a young'un, you manage to stuff in the paperwork in between times because you're quick on the keyboard, however your fellow workers are having trouble keeping up. As a result, they must stay behind after the branch shuts at 4:30, even after 5pm, when the manager goes home. They have to stay until 6pm, like you, to get their paperwork done. When they approach the manager to put through their overtime, the manager points to you and says that you are working til 6pm and aren’t getting paid T2. Tough bickies, says the manager. I'll pay you the normal rate.

What has happened is that your contracting out of overtime has weakened the ability of your fellow workers to claim it. They are justified in claiming because they have other commitments and they are getting stressed by the amount of work they have to squeeze in now. They skimp on breaks or start cutting corners on the quality of service to their customers, and profitability suffers. It doesn't matter for you, because you 'feel the burn' and know there's an end in sight. For the others, it is their livelihood, and rather than go through the stress of job-hunting elsewhere in the banking industry (ideal employees are those who are younger or transient, who are more concerned with the short term cash in hand rather than long-term benefits such as a joint super scheme), they put up and shut up because they lack the confidence and skills to change industries. They get stressed, ergo worklife balance goes to shit.

End: Bedtime story of Overtime 101.

To clarify, a worker is unlikely to 'win on stress' at the Tribunal. A malicious employee would be more successful alleging sexual harassment and I would be the first to toss these wankers out where they belong. Small business employers are certainly on the edge with relation to grievance claims from exceptional malicious workers and they have my sympathy in this regard. The reality is that the retail sector is dominated by part timers, casuals and is for the better part deunionised. The nature of the beast is that the sector is high stress, high turnover, dominated by low wages and is characterised by temporary or short term employment, often by young people. If the work is too tough, a lot of people will stuff it and find another job somewhere else within the sector. High turnover does not give power to the workers. Any attempt to build solidarity with other workers with the aim of negotiating better conditions is continually undermined by turnover of staff. What remains constant is the employer. When one worker leaves, their position can always be replaced by another, sometimes at lower cost.

And market forces? Market forces will deliver the best goods at the lowest prices, as the nutshell goes. Where do the workers’ wages figure? In the costs. The employer who can stamp on the wages of their workers and keep them low will win. I don’t give a damn about quality of work or any other bullshit like that, in the end what happens with market forces is that they push workers’ wages down, not up. The employer will not go belly up because he loses one worker so valuable that his goods are no longer competitive in the market.

People who quote economic theory to justify market conditions determining wages piss me off. I get the feeling that they sit on their arse in a little dream world where the happy worker gets the candy and goes and spends his disposable income on lovely little gadgets and garments shipped fresh off the child labour line outside Mumbai or somewhere else. The notion that bastard managers can fuck up the whole process is beyond them, they fail to see how workers don’t benefit in a lovely, liberalised, free, labour market. They fail to see how the odd tosser of a boss can make people miserable.

Unemployment is low at the moment, so in theory that gives workers an advantage in bargaining. Five years ago I would point to the nearest retail shop as proof that workers have no advantage whatever the unemployment rate. Now, granted, I’m not so sure with the progress of the Employment Relations Act. However, many workers and especially young workers are absolutely unaware when it comes to their rights. Given that a majority of the retail sector is dominated by young workers, it leaves them highly unlikely to be able to organise effectively amongst themselves and ‘hold the employer to ransom’.

I would assert that it is in the deunionised sectors that employers are most susceptible to malicious claims by disaffected workers. Why? Because the presence of a union acts as a magnet for disaffected workers, and any lone ranger who started any monkey- business after getting fired cause they were crap and turned up late all the time would be heavily leaned upon by the union. They would be given no assistance by the union and might indeed cause the union to side with the employer (they’re not all evil, you know) (Is that unions or bosses?) (You choose).

In a workplace with a strong union, said monkey-business would have to have a damn good case to convince the union to assist them. Second point: union officials (and I would hope, a majority of the other union members) are anything but stupid. Ergo, the absence of a convincing argument would put said monkey-business out on a limb all by itself.

I’m sorry, but you’ve have to take me back to the days of compulsory unionism or at least a similar scenario to tell me that employees have the advantage these days.

Next point being: don’t even try to tell me that we’re there already.

The proposed ‘bargaining fee’ is not doom and gloom, a return to the shadowy days of compulsory unionism. Anyone who wants to tell me that it is, is welcome to try, but they’d better have a damn good argument before they open their mouth.

One: Employers will die in the ditch before they allow such a provision onto their agreements.

Two: Unions will know that employers will die in the ditch and so such a claim may not even feature on their list.

Three: A majority of union members need to be convinced that the bargaining fee is a valuable strategic claim and is worthwhile for dropping another claim to make room, such as long service provisions or sick leave or (why the hell not, how about it) overtime.

Four: The workforce in New Zealand is dominated by individual agreements, and is characterised by the lack of union presence, not the other way round. Even if some unions managed to get a provision onto their agreements, who would it affect? That company. Whoopee. It’s not like we’re gonna see workers in the streets waving flags.

Five: Get over it. Just get over it. We’re used to sensationalist arguments coming from the shadowy wings of the far right and the blubbering mess that is known as the National Party. Reasonable debate and contested argument is what should happen online, not petty slagging and the bollocks that we see in Parliament.

The point here is that workers simply are not in a position to make demands and hold their own against an employer. They can only do so under two scenarios: legislated minimum protections or collective bargaining. In the former they can expect the legislated minimums when they ngeotiate with their employer one-to-one, and little more. In the latter, they can expect (depending on the relative density and activity of the union) conditions over and above the legislated minimums. The propensity for collective bargaining is predominantly limited to the public sector and certain private sectors, it is not what you would identify as a characteristic typical of the New Zealand labour market.

To refer this back to the original issue of work/life balance: Parnell’s tradition of the 40 hour week is a tradition for a very good reason: it worked. 40 hours per week is what society has generally deemed the maximum acceptable to allow family time and relaxation outside of work. Start tuttuing with it and you run the risk of screwing the system for those nine to fivers who depend on the threat of overtime from screwing their family time.

Isn’t the ‘family’ argument one that is used against the Government all the time? Being ‘family unfriendly’ and all the rest of it, my gosh what about rights for the fags? You’d think from the way that some people carry on, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen were born at twenty one and didn’t grow up in a family.

Overtime is family friendly. Nuff said.

I know someone is burning to slag something I’ve said, so please do. I’m lying down and begging for it, like Bill English lies down and begs to be rolled from the National Party leadership.