The NEWORK Centre
Level 2 Willbank House
57 Willis Street Wellington
Phone 499 1048
e-mail nework@xtra.co.nz |
|
No 47 January 2005
Hard Working Kiwis pay price!
Sunday Star Times article
14 November 2004
By RUTH LAUGESEN
Workplaces must become more family-friendly, says the government, or it could adopt new laws forcing bosses to change.
The move comes as new research shows New Zealand couples work longer hours than in any other country in the developed world.
Well-qualified, well-paid professional couples are leading the charge, clocking up the longest hours of all, suggesting long hours are not solely driven by poverty.
But in research being released this week by the Labour Department, economist Dr Paul Callister found a pattern of mounting hours across almost all age and income groups.
Working couples aged 25 to 59 with no dependent children boosted their work hours by close to an extra day between them from 1986 to 2001. Average hours rose seven hours to 78 for the couples over the period.
Couples in the same age group with dependent children were close behind, boosting their work hours by five hours a week. Their average total had risen to 69 hours a week by 2001.
The proportion of couples topping more than 100 work hours between them a week also climbed. There were 67,000 New Zealand couples in the under-54 age group in this group, and 32,000 of them had dependent children.
Callister found those toiling the longest were those at the privileged end of society. Couples (aged 25-59) that both had a degree or higher were working 74 hours a week. Couples in which neither person had a qualification were working an average of 68 hours a week between them.
Callister said it wasn't clear how much the growing work hours was because people enjoyed working, or because workplaces had norms that "you have to meet to succeed".
But help could be at hand.
Best-practice guidelines will be unveiled by the government at the end of the month showing how good employers can accommodate staff looking for work-life balance, says Associate Labour Minister Ruth Dyson.
If in 12 months workplaces have shown little or no sign of greater flexibility, she says she will consider flexible work legislation based on new British policies.
The British approach gives employees with children aged under six the right to request part-time or flexible work hours. Employees can also ask to work from home.
Employers have the right to say no, but they are required to seriously consider employee requests and give reasons for their decision.
Dyson said she thought the British legislation was "quite a good idea", as it did not force employers to agree to requests for flexible work.
She said changes further down the track could also include:
Introducing the right to domestic leave in the Holidays Act for parents with a critically ill child.
Introducing caps on very long work hours for crane operators and other construction workers where there were safety issues, similar to caps on hours worked by taxi drivers.
With current labour shortages, it made sense for employers to try harder to meet some workers' needs to fit in with school hours or school holidays, for example.
While recently released International Labour Organisation figures showed individual Kiwis were second only to the Japanese in long working hours among developed nations, Callister's work is the first to look at couples. He found that among other Western countries, New Zealand was first equal with the United States for working hours by couples.
Family advocates have expressed alarm at the working-hour trends.
Plunket chief executive Paul Baigent said employers, including organisations like his, needed to start questioning the culture of long working hours.
"Spending time with kids at home is really important and everyone knows that," he said.
Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O'Reilly said businesses that wanted to attract the best staff were increasingly aware of the need to tailor-make jobs and hours to suit people's circumstances. But legislation would be a blunt instrument that would create winners and losers.
Do It Anyway
Others may be critical, unreasonable, illogical, and self-centred;
Promote yourself anyway!
If you are generous, people may accuse you of having ulterior motives;
Be generous anyway!
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some enemies;
Succeed anyway!
If you are honest and open, people may cheat you;
Be honest anyway!
When you come up with bright ideas, others may steal them;
Keep generating ideas anyway!
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway!
If you find serenity and happiness, some will be jealous;
Be happy anyway!
The good you do today, may be forgotten tomorrow;
Do good anyway!
Give the world the best you have, and it will never be enough;
Give your best anyway!
Counting For Something
The Value Added By Voluntary Agencies (VAVA) Report , released in early September by the New Zealand Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations and Price Waterhouse Coopers, measures the voluntary contributions to 10 major social service agencies in New Zealand.
'Volunteers make a significant contribution to New Zealand society,' said manager Sam Huggard 'Through the fields of education, heatlh, welfare, environment, sports and on Marae, volunteers are everywhere making generous contributions to their communities.
'We have always known that many organisations would not be able to function effectively without the dedication and effort of their volunteers. The research now released goes some way towards validating what we all instinctively know that without volunteers we lose the lifeblood of communities,' said Sam Huggard.
The 10 agencies who participated in the project were: Barnardos, Citizens Advice Bureau, Diabetes New Zealand, Literacy Aotearoa, IHC, National Association of ESOL Home Tutor Schemes, Playcentre, Royal NZ Foundation of the Blind, Royal New Zealand Plunket Society Inc, Victim Support. Some key findings from the report are that volunteers, with these 10 national organisations, worked:
- A total of 7,638,238 hours made up of:
- 6,850,130 hours per year from voluntary workers
- 720,214 hours from voluntary managers, and
- 67,894 more hours from board members.
This adds up to the equivalent of 4,063 full-time workers per year. And further, that is only referring to those 10 agencies. What about all those thousands of community groups, clubs and organisations that would just ground to a halt if it wasn't or the work of the volunteer incorporating such activity into their portfolio.
2002 statistics say that New Zealanders 15 years and over spent 536 million hours on unpaid work outside the home in 1999. The estimated value of this work was just over $5 billion, equivalent to five percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Approximately two-thirds was done by women and one-third by men. Another $34.5 billion dollars worth of unpaid work was performed inside the home – the two categories together were equal to 39 percent of GDP. That's a huge contribution to NZ society.
| 
