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Article Excerpt
David Peetz, Brave New Workplace: How Individual Contracts are Changing Our Jobs, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2006.
Summing up the Holy Roman Empire, Voltaire joked that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. A similar point could be made about the regime of individual bargaining promoted by the federal government's Workplace Relations Act since 1996: it is neither particularly individualised, nor does it involve much bargaining.
David Peetz's comic reference point in Brave New Workplace is more contemporary. He recalls Brian in Monty Python's Life of Brian, addressing a crowd with the exhortation: 'You're all individuals', only to have them answer in unison: 'Yes we're all individuals'. He tries again: 'You're all different'. 'Yes, we're all different'.
As Peetz observes:
When we collectively call out 'We're all individuals' ... we are instantly demonstrating the farce in the claim. Yet for many corporations, this is exactly what they seek of their employees: individualistic rhetoric to signify that we do not identify with each other as a collective, but act out collective behaviour for the benefit of the corporation. In other words, they do not principally seek the end of collectivism, merely a reorientation of the common social identity that drives it.
The continuing conundrum for corporations is that much work--and organisational success--remains predicated on collective and co-operative endeavour. The highly skilled and intellectually trained may exercise a level of autonomy that makes them look and feel like 'free agents', but this idealisation of the 'knowledge worker' owes more to management theorists' Power Point presentations than it does to changes in the workforce at large. A British review pinpointed nursing aides and corrections officers as the fastest growing occupations: the immediate future of capitalism is care or custody. Similarly in Australia, jobs growth is strongest at the higher and lower ends of the skills spectrum. And those...
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