The Time of our Working Lives

By Brian Howe

There is a lack of recognition in public policy of the extent of change that is taking place in Australians' working lives, and the need to design creative policy responses.

Time is central to life and work, and Australia, now facing an ageing population, and with fewer young people entering the workforce, needs to take the organisation of time over the life course seriously as a policy issue, and to examine the range of alternatives that have been trialled overseas.

Australia could do much better in helping people to manage time across the life course. If people had more flexibility over the life course about when they took time for study, or to care for children or older relatives, it could open up more opportunities for others to work, as well as giving individuals and families a more rational work-life balance.

People adopt a range of strategies to redistribute their work and non-work time so that it fits in better with their own and their family's preferences and needs.

Strategies for organising working time include: part-time work; final or gradual early retirement ('progressive early retirement'); extended leave or career breaks; parental leave and sabbaticals; educational leave/lifelong learning, perhaps involving an annual lifetime working hours entitlement to education to be taken up in a flexible manner; and temporary absences from work on sickness leave/maternity leave/holiday leave. Some of these options are not available to all employees- education leave, for example - and some focus on handling specific life course situations, rather than events that continue over the entire life course. And some are seen as more legitimate than others. Educational leave, for instance, is likely to have legitimacy for academics, because updating knowledge is necessary for successfully pursuing that occupation. On the other hand, extended absences from paid work to care for relatives do not have a similar validity.

In Australia, while there has been an increasing body of research on the way people use time, there has been little debate about the way people use or might use time across the life course. The European Foundation has been doing extensive work on the way time might be organised over the life course, and in the following section I discuss this work to illustrate the range of policy options that might be considered to enable people to make better use of time.

This is an edited extract from 'Weighing up Australian Values', UNSW Press 2007, $29.95