The Pandemic has brought into clear focus the human cost of large scale casualisation of the workforce. Businesses everywhere, large and small, need to wake up to these human costs in a post Covid-19 world.
There is no denying that the gig economy has had its benefits: it has offered individuals the flexibility to make extra money to make ends meet; it has offered employers a way of keeping fixed costs down, although employees will not enjoy the same certainty about how they will cover their own fixed costs. Consumers are benefiting also in having more control over how they consume services.
Casuals – many with ‘zero-hours contracts’ (which some countries with more progressive social policy have outlawed) - are at the beck and call of app driven distribution of work, not knowing from one day to the next what their income might be. Even where casuals have remained working with the same employer for months even years, they enjoy no benefits other than the agreed hourly shift rate.
Insecure and precarious employment of this kind ultimately impacts businesses as has been exposed by the Pandemic. Casuals who have no basic protections have felt they have no choice, even when unwell, to go to work to keep the lights on and pay the rent, a key reason for rapid community transmission of Covid-19. The anxiety they feel from knocking back a shift one too many times for reasons of feeling unwell has real consequences. They risk not being called at all. In the midst of rapidly rising unemployment, this is a very real consequence for many.
Band-aid solutions such as 2 weeks of pandemic leave may temporarily address anxieties that casuals feel about staying home. But there is a need for more systemic change - change that is rooted in a key question about the sort of society we want. In 2015 the ILO defined decent work as opportunities for work that are productive and deliver a fair income, security in the workplace, social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration.
Business and Government must come together to put considerations about profitable endeavour alongside considerations of humanity and societal well-being and engage constructively on how access to decent work opportunities can become a right for all. Government, business and community leaders must partner to reframe and structurally solve for the pandemic triggered workforce dislocation that is already underway for older, younger, and female workers. A more inclusive economy will also demand that the assessment of work, which until now has only accounted for its financial value, take into account the social value of work.
BoardQ, July 2020