Antony Funnell: I wouldn't normally start a program by referring back to a previous show, but today's Future Tense is really a bit of a book-end in many ways. It's the companion to the episode we did recently on the future of full-time employment. If you didn't catch it, go to the RN website where you can podcast or stream the audio.

Hello, Antony Funnell here.

Our topic today is around work and expectation; the expectation that you'll do work for free. Exploiting employees has always been an issue, but in a world of growing inequality, employers are now doing it on an industrial scale, and those in the creative sector, as we'll soon find out, are among the most disadvantaged.

For the past eight years the Australia Institute has produced an annual report on working overtime and work/life balance and they're just getting ready to release their findings for 2016. The news isn't good. Jim Stanford is an economist and the director of the Institute's Centre for Future Work.

Jim Stanford: It's now about two-thirds of Australian workers who are expected to put in some kind of unpaid time for their employer, whether that's going in early, staying late, working through lunch, even replying to emails and texts and so on at any time of the day. So the incidence of unpaid work is all over, unfortunately it's getting worse, not better.

Antony Funnell: And what are we talking about in terms of that unpaid work? How many hours are we talking about?

Jim Stanford: Well, we've done a survey of about 1,500 workers each year. If you are a full-time worker, on average you are reporting about six hours a week of unpaid work for your employer. That's a fair amount in a week, but add it up over a year and it's staggering, that's over 300 hours per year, and at the average wage that people make, that's a gift to your employer of about $12,000 worth of your time per year on average. If most Australians thought who could I give a generous gift of $12,000 to, their employer wouldn't be at the top of the list.

Antony Funnell: In one way this is actually distorting the economy, isn't it. If we just leave the effects on the worker to the side for a moment, this paints an unreal picture of the way in which the economy is operating and how buoyant it is.

Jim Stanford: Well, the economic and social consequences of unpaid work are extraordinary and stretch right through Australian society. You've got obviously the loss of income for the worker, you've got a loss of spending power in the economy as a whole. If you add that up across the labour force you're looking at roughly about $120 billion a year or something like 7% of GDP that isn't being paid. That drains spending power, it drains economic growth.

Another obvious set of consequences is that if employers can get you to work longer for free, then they are not going to hire someone new to do that extra work. And I believe that unpaid work is one of the factors behind the very slow rate of job creation that we are seeing in the labour market.

Antony Funnell: There's unpaid overtime in the sense that you work longer, you stay on for an extra hour or two at the end of the day, that kind of thing, but there are also lots of…and you've hinted at this, there are lots of hidden overtime measures, aren't there, as well?

Jim Stanford: Well, as work becomes more flexible, obviously the technology allows you to take your work anywhere with you, then the ways that employers are able to squeeze little bits of extra time and little bits of extra effort out of you become more omnipresent, if you like. So the fact that your work does come home with you, that you can look at your smart phone and return some messages, that you are on call, so you are looking at about one in four Australians reporting that they are expected to return emails and work-related calls outside of hours, and that time adds up as well.

Antony Funnell: This isn't all employers doing this to employees, is it? We also take part in this. I know I often eat my lunch sitting at my computer, continuing to do work. So we are culpable as well as employees, aren't we.

Jim Stanford: Well, on one level, Antony, I think you can say that much of this unpaid work is voluntary in the narrow sense. That is, you don't have your boss over your shoulder saying right now you must stay this extra two hours after work. But it does take place within the context of a compulsion and fear I think in the labour market. The fact that it's so hard to get and keep a decent job means that workers are willing to push themselves more and more, including doing this unpaid work, in order to please their employer, keep their job and perhaps even get a promotion someday.

So we are driving ourselves, but it is within the context of a labour market in which this expectation, implicit or explicit, is there, that you will do anything you can for the job, including work from home, stay late and work for free. Until we get a situation where the labour market is stronger and people feel more secure about demanding fair treatment from their employer, I think that trend is going to continue.

Antony Funnell: And it's probably worth recalling at this point one of the statistics from our recent show on the future of full time employment. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, nearly 90% of the jobs created in Australia over the past 12 months were part-time or casual. So, it's a reasonable bet that job security isn't going to change anytime soon.

Now, by the Australia Institute's estimates, one in three Australian workers are now part-time, not always by their own choice, and even they, Dr Stanford says, are not immune from the pressure to clock-up unpaid overtime.

Jim Stanford: Oh sure, that's the most outrageous part of it. You have part-time workers who might only get 10 or 15 or 20 hours a week, and even they are being asked to stay longer and work for free. Our survey showed that on average even part-time workers are asked to do four hours of unpaid work a week. And in their case, where there incomes are very low because they aren't getting enough hours, I think this unpaid work is especially exploitive.

Antony Funnell: Are there certain jobs and professions where there is a greater expectation of working overtime?

Jim Stanford: Well, we've surveyed workers from all parts of the economy and all regions and it really is an increasingly universal phenomenon. There is a stereotype, that it's this high-level CEO, white-collar executive who is putting in all those extra hours for a high-pressure job. That stereotype is quite wrong. The phenomenon of unpaid work is being experienced in all sectors; blue-collar, white-collar, goods industries, services industries, and even obviously entry-level workers, not just senior workers who are doing a very high performance job, even entry-level workers are expected to do this.

And another example of it, Antony, is this phenomenon of unpaid internships, where more and more people are expected to work for free, period, for some period time, even a year or two, before they start getting paid at all, and that comes from the same place, namely a labour market that is so weak, people are so desperate for a job they will even work for free.

Antony Funnell: The Australia Institute's 2016 report on unpaid overtime won't be released until next month, so thanks very much to Jim Stanford for giving us a heads-up on what we can expect.

Andrew Stewart: Andrew Stewart, Professor of Law, University of Adelaide. We have statistics for the US, for Europe, we don't yet have any definitive figures for Australia that will tell us how many people are doing unpaid internships or other kinds of work experience. But all the anecdotal evidence suggests that it's very common. This is something that has crept up around the developed world. Internships have been around for a long time. Very often they can be paid.

So the origin in fact is interns training to be doctors, getting paid, working very long hours, perhaps not being paid very much but certainly paid, and it seems to have grown rapidly since then and spread out across the developed world. So we find examples of this in many countries to the point where the International Labour Organisation over the last few years has been identifying this as a real problem, because you've got the potential here for internships to provide a really good bridge between education and work.

But at the same time there is so much potential for exploitation, so much potential for them to be used to replace what used to be paid jobs. There are some estimates that say that something like 75% of all college graduates in the US will have done an internship of one kind or another while they were studying. Sometimes that will be part of their studies, but very often it will mean going out during their breaks and working for free at a company or sometimes paid a small wage below the minimum wage in order to improve their job prospects.

Antony Funnell: So when does it become exploitation? Because a lot of people would be fine being paid a small amount or perhaps being unpaid for a certain period of time. When does it tip over though on the scale?

Andrew Stewart: It's a very difficult question to answer because from the point of view of a particular individual, if they freely agree to work for free, and if that actually gives them the break that allows them to get a job in the industry or the sector of their choice, it's very hard to say they've been exploited. It's probably a good move for them. But looking overall, there certainly is a potential for exploitation in a number of different ways. One way we can think about this is avoiding our minimum wage laws. So there are circumstances in which companies or organisations may get jobseekers to work for free, to get them to do productive work but without paying them minimum wage. From one point of view that's exploitation.

Another kind of exploitation is taking someone on to do some form of internship, but not giving them any meaningful form of training or really giving them a chance to practice their skills. So lots of examples here. If we look at some of the cases from the US where interns have gone to court, arguing they should have been paid for what they were doing, you have stories of people working, particularly in the media, working on films or in newspaper or magazine offices, the one thing they are not doing is anything that's creative. They are taking the laundry out, they are going to get cups of coffee, they're doing the photocopying. So in other words, exploitative in that situation means getting experience of a kind that is in fact nothing like the job you are trying to do, doesn't involve any professional skills at all but simply means being used as a dogsbody.

Antony Funnell: And it displaces somebody else, doesn't it, from the workforce. There is a role there that somebody could be paid to fulfil.

Andrew Stewart: That's one of the two big concerns about the rise of unpaid internships, that what we are potentially seeing here and in fact what I'm certain that we are seeing in certain industries is organisations increasingly using desperate job seekers to work for free where previously you had paid, low paid but still paid, entry-level jobs. The other big concern here is that if we do move to a situation where doing unpaid work is a standard way of getting your entry into a particular job, who is that going to exclude? It's pretty obvious that people who come from wealthier or more privileged backgrounds are much more likely to be able to afford to work for free for lengthy periods of time to break into a particular industry or a particular job than people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. So there's a real issue here about access to professions and social mobility.

Antony Funnell: And imagine this; imagine if you actually had to pay a company so that you could take on an internship.

Andrew Stewart: There are number of examples of this. One situation in which that happens, and this particularly tends to be international students who have come to Australia to study, want to stay here and work, but then in order to have a chance of getting a visa or getting permanent residents with at least some chance to stay on, they need to show that they have worked in a particular industry. A lot of those international students are paying agencies thousands of dollars in order to get the chance to work for free to simply satisfy that work requirement. That's one example.

Another example we found is internships being auctioned off. That is, the internship goes to the highest bidder. So not only are those organisations saying that you can come and do your job if you pay us money to give you the privilege of working for us, but we are going to take the wealthiest person, the person who can most put up the largest sum of money. Not so many examples of that in Australia, but it's very common in the US. And certainly, I think most people would agree that's a pretty pernicious practice.

Antony Funnell: Andrew Stewart from the Adelaide University Law School.

So, if things are as we've heard and there's a growing tide of employee exploitation, what's to be done? Jim Stanford again, from the Australia Institute.

Jim Stanford: You know, I think they have a moral responsibility here but I'm not going to hold my breath for employers to suddenly change their practices voluntarily. This is where you need obviously governments to play a role. I think the national employment standards and regulations and the interventions of the Fair Work Commission could be a lot stronger in the area of unpaid work. Cracking down on time theft. Putting in place clearer guidelines around things like unpaid overtime or internships. So far the government rules have been vague enough that employers can get away with it.

And at the end of the day, employees, workers, both individually and collectively through their unions, where they have one, are going to have to demand better treatment from employers to keep track of the amount of time that they are working for free.

Antony Funnell: So do you see a time where there will be increased industrial disputation over this issue? Will we eventually get to that stage where people just get fed up with it en masse?

Jim Stanford: I do believe that people will resist this growing expectation that they should work for free. I believe they will have to resist because it's hard enough to make ends meet in this society, even when you are getting paid for every hour of work.

Now, again, in a world where unemployment is high and people feel desperate to find and keep a job, their willingness to stand up to an employer and say this isn't fair, you have to do something different, their willingness in that type of resistance is going to be undermined, but I think it will come. And I think that policymakers, trade unionists, and people who are concerned about the state of our families have to all be more concerned with this trend towards working for free, and again, demand of employers and governments that we set high standards here.

Antony Funnell: And as unrealistic as that might sound to some, it's worth remembering that that sort of mass employee backlash against rising exploitation and inequality was exactly what occurred across the Western world back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

You're listening to Future Tense, I'm Antony Funnell.

If you go to the RN website you'll find details about all our guests and links to relevant information.

You should also take a look at some of the other podcasts on offer. If you're interested in developments with apps and gadgets, for instance, then Download This Show might be one for you, the consumer side of technology. It's also produced by RN and you can download it, pardon the pun, from our website or via iTunes.

Talk to many people in the technology sector and they'll tell you that copyright is a bad thing, that it holds up innovation. But my experience is that when you speak to people who actually create original material—artists, writers, musicians—not surprisingly, they want to be paid for their work.

And one of the ways creative types get remunerated, of course, is through copyright. In Australia, in a few weeks' time, the powerful Productivity Commission is expected to hand down its long-awaited report into the future of copyright. In a draft version released in April they suggested that Australia import a US system called 'Fair Use'. And that's got many artists, writers, film-makers and others up in arms.

Adam Suckling is the CEO of the Copyright Agency and he explains why.

Adam Suckling: Look, fair use is a really complicated American legal doctrine which covers the circumstances in which people and large companies, including large tech companies, can use other people's copyright without getting their permission. The problem with it is twofold. Firstly, it has seen in the US and in Canada, which has moved to that system, a whole lot of copyright material which previously companies had to pay to use. They no longer have to pay to use it under fair use.

Antony Funnell: So the artist or the creator in that instance there therefore gets none of the revenue that is generated from the interest in their creative output?

Adam Suckling: That's right, precisely, and then the second problem is it really is a legal minefield. It's a highly uncertain doctrine which basically says if you want to establish whether someone has breached your copyright, you need to go to court. And if you go on to multiple American websites that seek to describe fair use, they basically say call a lawyer.

Antony Funnell: So the people who are going to be advantaged by that fair use system are obviously big corporations who have lots of money to facilitate or to argue in a court.

Adam Suckling: That's right. The people who benefit are large, large corporations who rely on using other people's content to drive their business models. And they would like access to that content for free, or for a very small price, and I think most reasonable people would say, look, if you are taking someone else's content and you're making money out of it, you should provide them with a fair return on the use of that content.

Antony Funnell: The argument that information should be free is a very popular one, particularly with the technology sector. And given that there is so much unauthorised sharing of material in the modern social media world, I mean, we all do it, rightly or wrongly isn't the age of copyright therefore doomed overall?

Adam Suckling: No, look, I don't think so. I mean, it is clearly a balance between ensuring that you have in place a system where people who create fantastic content are rewarded for that content. But also a system that allows people to share and disseminate that content when they want it. And I don't think there's any suggestion at all that we would change our copyright laws to stop people putting things up on their Facebook, for example.

Antony Funnell: The idea that people should be paid for the work that they do, again it's a commonsensical idea. Why then do arguments around copyright becomes so difficult, so impenetrable for people to understand, do you think?

Adam Suckling: Look, it's a very interesting situation I think because if you look at what we have today, we have more information, more films, more movies, more songs available to more people on more devices. So there's this absolutely huge wash of information and entertainment that's available to people. But there is with some people, certainly not everyone, a kind of view that they shouldn't have to pay for it. But that is by no means universal. I mean, if you look at something, for example, like iTunes, that's a very good example where the provision of legal content at a price across a platform that people like means is that people will pay for it. Spotify is another good example of that, that the rates aren't huge per song, but it is a legal service that provides a revenue stream to artists. So I think it's a complicated picture. Yes, it's true, an expectation amongst some consumers that things should be free, but there are also an awful lot of people across the world and across Australia who are quite happy to pay for legal content, as long as it's provided across a device that they use, it's simple to access and the price is reasonable.

Antony Funnell: Adam Suckling, the CEO of the Copyright Agency.

Now, I work in the media industry and I get paid a half-decent income. But a lot of my colleagues don't.

As Jim Stanford, from the Australia Institute, mentioned right at the beginning of this program, the media industry is among the most exploitative. For free-lance writers and journalists it's become particularly difficult.

Elmo Keep is an Australian writer who now lives and works in New York. And she's been writing for several years about just how hard it's become to make a living if you're cursed with being creative.

Elmo Keep: I feel sometimes like I managed to get through the door as it was closing in the last possible time to make a living of sorts as a writer, whereas I feel like if you are a young person now like in your early 20s or even your mid-20s, you've just grown up in this new reality where your baseline expectation is that you aren't going to make money. So I've seen that shift happen even in a relatively short period of time.

So I think that that is significant, that there are people who are entering the industry now as freelancers who know that they are probably not going to be paid because the market is set at either no payment or very, very low payment for work. It is an oversaturated market and that is the economic reality of it for most people right now.

Antony Funnell: Is one of the drivers behind this expectation that many of the cultural products that we consume online are free. So has that fed into the idea that if we don't have to pay for these products, the creators of these products, who cares whether they really get paid in the end?

Elmo Keep: I think that there was possibly…definitely actually an element of that. But I think that the bigger problem is that the product itself was always free. That there is no surefire way for digital media publications to make money means that it's almost impossible to get people to pay…like, the idea of a pay wall hasn't worked. There has been so many years now where the prevailing idea is, oh, we're going to work out how to make it pay later, we are just going to figure out how to build our audience and then we will figure out how to make it work and how to make it pay. That hasn't happened and isn't going to happen. And in the case of journalism, journalism itself never paid for itself. It was classifieds that paid for journalism. Paying a dollar for the newspaper wasn't paying everyone who made the paper, it was the huge amount of money that came in through classifieds. But that has not been replaced by anything. And so the idea of being able to monetise journalism is not a reflection of historically how it has paid for itself. So we have a whole lot of problems that are working together on top of the fact that people have a perception of all content on the internet being free to them as consumers.

Antony Funnell: And what does it do, do you think, to creative people like yourself if their work is devalued in this way, if people say, look, this is great, we want it but we are not prepared to pay for the things that we want, the things that we love?

Elmo Keep: Well, I think for the majority of people, and this has probably been true for the majority of people who have made art and who have been writers and creatives forever, which is that you do other work; you're a teacher or you have a completely different 9-to-5 job, which is how you make your living, and you write as what would be professionally considered a hobby because you are not making all of your living from that, but it doesn't mean that it isn't your vocation and the thing that you are driven to do and want to do and get the most meaning out of doing. So I think that that has just cemented that way of working, which is that what you are passionate about doing is not necessarily the thing that you can pay the rent with, and I think that that has always been the case, it has just been really exacerbated now in a way that it might not have previously been.

Antony Funnell: And it's a curious thing, isn't it, because we don't expect many other professionals to provide work for free, we don't expect it of plumbers or GPs, for instance, but we do expect it of freelance journalists and writers.

Elmo Keep: Yes, and this is something that you were saying earlier, which is there's this idea that because it is something that you are passionately engaged with and care about for the most part, and anyone is doing that kind of work has to really care about it, and then there's this kind of fallacy that goes hand in hand with that which is that if you are doing it for the love then you shouldn't care about getting paid, which I think is a very insulting way to look at how people's labour is employed because it is your time and it is your labour and we all have limited time. And for people who are making whatever negligible profit there is to make off writers' content that populates all of these websites, for those people who provide that content without which there would be that business at all is really pretty unconscionable to me, that you can justify to someone I'm not going to pay you because you should love it enough to just take this $50 or no dollars that I'm offering you or $100 or whatever it is which, for the hours and hours and hours and days and days or maybe weeks or months that go into creating something really doesn't help anyone pay their rent.

Antony Funnell: There is an interesting thing too, isn't there, that in many cases it's the middle man, if you like, it's platforms, platforms like Facebook that are making the money from creative product which is created by other people. They are not involved in the creative process but they are the ones who end up with the money from advertising in the long run.

Elmo Keep: Yes, that has been the business model for all of those platforms, for Google, for Apple, for Facebook, for Twitter, they are entirely built on serving and either directly selling and taking a cut or monetising alongside through advertising the content that hundreds of millions of people have given up for free. But those people aren't necessarily also professional content creators, producers, cultural producers have been thrown into with that whole bunch of millions of people who were told, hey, this is a terrific way to express yourself, this is a terrific way for everyone's ideas to be heard, and isn't that what is more important, isn't this democratic right for everyone to be heard what's most important? But that was just the way that those companies framed their particular business model, which was running ads alongside as much content as many pages as possible on the internet. So that definitely muddied the waters as well in terms of the perception of value of who creates work and what kind of work, and differentiating between what is something that is I guess a professional level of creation which involves a lot of people and a lot of money for something to come at the end of it, versus posting something to your Facebook page. So I think that there is this real confusion among people broadly about what it costs to actually create anything.

Antony Funnell: So is there a solution to this problem? I know you've said that the undervaluing or the devaluing of creative work has been going on for a while, it is perhaps exacerbated by the current structures that we have in the digital world. Do you see any kind of solutions for somebody like yourself who is a creative professional?

Elmo Keep: Leave Australia, which is what I did. I don't think that there is a solution to be honest, I think that you are just going to come to a point in the not too distant future where a lot of different kinds of platforms and publications, whatever you want to call them, are going to find themselves unsustainable because they don't have a solid revenue stream.

The fact is that wages have been…like, the downward pressure on these wages has been such that there's really no coming back from the fact that people will accept zero payment. As long as there are people who will accept zero or little payment, that's what the market is going to set the rate at. So that's done. Unless there is some kind of collectivisation where through industrial action it's outlawed to take free labour from people for your business, this is unlikely to happen. Or the other thing is that all people withhold their work unless they get paid properly, which is also a kind of collectivisation, which is also unlikely to happen.

So this is going to sound really dark on the whole situation but I don't see it being a good time in the future. I think we are stuck here. It's already at the bottom and how you crawl back out of that, I don't really know the answer. If I did, I would be super-rich and running a successful publication making tonnes of money on the internet.

Antony Funnell: Well, at least she's managed to keep her sense of humour. Elmo Keep there, a freelance writer and journalist now living in a self-imposed exile, of sorts, in the Big Apple.

Thanks to my co-producer Karin Zsivanovits and sound engineer Steve Fieldhouse, both of whom, I can assure you, have been paid appropriately, so don't worry about that.

I'm Antony Funnell, until next time.