ACTU boss calls for legislative changes to reverse trend, as push grows for casual workers to be able to convert to permanent employment after six months

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Unions have signalled they will campaign for significant legislative changes to reverse the casualisation of the Australian workforce.

In an interview with the Australian, the Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Sally McManus, said workforce casualisation would be a key priority for the union movement next year.



“One of the key things we want to change for working ­people is turning around or reversing the casualisation of jobs,” she said.

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McManus said she would lobby Labor to support a new definition of casual work, which would include workers who have a “reasonable expectation of ongoing work” and who are completing regular shifts.

Unions also want legislative changes to give casual workers the ability to automatically convert to permanent employment after six months with the same employer.

Brendan O’Connor, the shadow workplace relations minister, said Labor was committed to examining the casualisation of the Australian workforce and the ACTU’s proposals.

He said “something has to be done”, and indicated the need for an objective test to ensure casual employment was being used for proper purposes.

“Too often now we see people working as their main job in what employers are deeming to be casual, even when they work for years on end,” he said. “For that reason, Labor is committed to examining this.”

Industry groups have immediately dismissed the proposals, saying they are not new and had already been considered and rejected by the Fair Work Commission.

Stephen Smith, the Australian Industry Group’s head of national workplace relations policy, said the union’s propositions, if adopted, would cause “enormous disruption”.

“There’s about 12.5 million people in the workforce, there’s more than 2.5 million casuals,” Smith told Guardian Australia. “So any move to restrict casual employment would cause enormous disruption to employers, employees, and the broader community.”

Smith dismissed the notion that casualisation was a worsening problem. He said the rate of casualisation had remained stable at 20% of the workforce for the past two decades.

“There was an increase in casual employment in the mid 1990s, but it flattened off at 20% of the workforce in 1998, and we’re nearly at 2018 now,” he said. “So 20 years, casual employment has been at 20%. It hasn’t moved at all.”

The federal government appears to have changed its focus on employment from the usual mantra of “jobs and growth” to the new slogan of “let’s keep Australians working”.

Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash declared an economic revival fuelling strong jobs growth will be key to the coalition’s election fortunes, with her new super-portfolio to take centre stage.

“To me that is just a good message that really does encapsulate what the government is all about – strengthening economic growth and creating more jobs for all Australians,” Cash told the West Australian.

“We understand that Australian workers need Australian businesses to succeed if you are going to create more jobs and more opportunity.”

McManus said the old slogan was being canned because it was clearly not ringing true.

“There’s been more jobs, but they’ve been casual jobs,” she told reporters in Melbourne on Wednesday. “And growth? Well, we’ve seen profits grow but we haven’t seen wages grow. Wages are at a record low.”

Labor’s O’Connor argued Australians did not need “patronising” or “insulting” slogans, but rather a government committed to ensuring wages were keeping up with prices.

“We’d like the government to explore why is wage growth at its lowest in 20 years, and why are people confronted with only casual work, when in fact they have permanent families,” O’Connor said.

“They need some sense of security in their workplace, they need opportunities at work that mean they can get a home loan or a car loan. But too often, you see that’s not happening.”



The union’s proposal for automatic casual conversion was already considered in detail by the Fair Work Commission earlier this year, as part of its four-yearly review of modern awards.

The ACTU had argued to the commission that casual employment was being improperly and unfairly used for “a significantly large category of workers” in a manner that undermined Australia’s safety net.

Many casual workers were permanent in all but name, the union argued, and were afforded significantly inferior rights and conditions, despite working regularly for the same employer.

That accords with the findings of the most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (Hilda) study, which found 60% of workers who self-identified as casuals were doing regular shifts for an employer they had been with for at least six months.

But the commission rejected the union’s conversion proposal, and instead gave workers the right to request a conversion to permanent employment after 12 months of regular work.

Employers retained the right to reasonably refuse a casual worker’s request to become permanent.



A 2015 report on workforce casualisation by Professor Raymond Markey of Macquarie University found casuals were most common in accommodation and food services (20%), retail (19%), and healthcare and social assistance (11%).

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It found about one quarter of Australian employees did not have leave benefits – a method of measuring casual employment. The proportion of casual employees increased rapidly in the 1990s, the report said, but stabilised in recent years.

Regardless, Australia has a very high level of casual employment among OECD economies, the report found.

But Smith said casual employment allowed for “critical” flexibility in the labour force.

“When people are given the right to convert, very, very few pick up that right. They either don’t want to lose the flexibility that they enjoy with casual employment, or they don’t want to give up the 25% casual loading,” he said. “Whatever the reason, people seem happy with casual employment.”