Debt and Work-Family Collision a Toxic Mix for Work Choices, But Don't Expect Much From Rudd.

By Ron McCallum

The high debt levels carried by working families, in league with the work-life collision, has put them on a "knife edge" that explains their rejection of Work Choices, according to Sydney University Dean of Law, Ron McCallum.

Australian working families are now more vulnerable to any insecurity because of their indebtedness - from both mortgages and credit cards, he says. Credit cards, he says, are financing what people consider the essentials of modern living, such as pay television, mobile phones, wireless internet access and so on.

"Modern living is requiring us all to go into debt" (something that has prompted McCallum to retire shortly to pay back his own debt), he told the NT IR Society conference in Darwin on Friday.

"This means that the part-time job or the casual job more often or not done by the woman is not an add-on - if mum loses that job the family can tailspin."

"The same goes for the father if he can't work those 55 hours and do the overtime."

McCallum says that in the typical "couple family", "dad is working over 50 hours a week at his job and mum is working over 30 hours a week at her paid job and god knows how many hours in her unpaid job particularly when dad isn't around".

"That is the nature of modern life and that is the family work-life balance collision.

"I think that these new ways of working - labour hire, outsourcing, part-time - when it's mashed up with our debt levels and the modern way families operate makes workers, male and female, much more vulnerable to the winds of unemployment and makes them much more susceptible to be bargained down in their terms and conditions of employment.

"I think it's this very knife edge that has made people in the community distrust Work Choices.

"I think the people who framed Work Choices didn't understand the modern way families are financed - the debt structures - and the way part-time and other forms of employment are absolutely essential to the family's operations.

"That vulnerability... is a key to why... Work Choices has gone sour and as one reporter put it in a New South Wales paper recently "this 550 pages is the longest suicide note ever written by a Prime Minister".

He argues against the ALP using the corporations power to regulate IR, tpoints out the total lack of choice under AWAs and WOrkChoices and the need to people to argue long and loud for change. The coproations power is what lies behind the worst aspects of legislation. He said "if we build our laws on corporations - to the detriment of conciliation and arbitration tribunals - we will have a very different creature in the coming years."

As reported in Workplace Express.