Australian Financial Review March 3, 1999 http://www.afr.com.au/content/990303/news/news8.html When trust is missing Work Relations, By Julie Macken What happens to a person, business or country, when they're asked to live in a world bereft of trust or loyalty? Try this bizarre exercise for a couple of hours. Presume everything you read and hear is a lie, everything you see is an illusion and every secret you hold is now open to public scrutiny. Then try to perform your work. It can't be done. Individuals soon collapse into schizophrenia, businesses to bankruptcy and countries to the madness of year zero. While these offer the extreme example of such a paranoid existence, to a lesser degree, the changes that have swept the Australian work environment over the past 20 years have all but bankrupted the collective storehouse of both trust and loyalty. Of course the consensus is that Australia has had no control over this unfortunate turn of events, that we are hooked up to a global economy where only the competitive survive. In such an environment any business that attempts to put loyalty to stakeholders in front of loyalty to shareholders is considered naive in the extreme. However, even if the community accepts that the devil/global economy made us do it and no one can be expected to assume any culpability for it, the facts remain unaltered. We live and work with ever decreasing levels of trust and loyalty and this impacts badly on the quality of our lives. According to the results of a Drake survey, contractors and casual workers now account for up to 17 per cent of the workforce. A figure that has grown by 5.4pc over the past five years. While the greatest growth has been in the area of casual and temporary work, which has increased from 9pc to 13pc of the total labor market, the contract workforce is also gaining ground. This transitory relationship with work destroys loyalty in two ways. The company employing causal or temporary workers is sending a loud -- if non-verbal -- message to their employees that they're not interested in a long-term commitment. Conversely, casual and temporary workers are now being encouraged to not identify too strongly with their place of employment. "People need to view themselves outside the confines of their organisation," says Peter Renfew, executive director of Drake. "They may find themselves, in effect, stuck -- that they've become so closely identified with a particular company or industry that their skills are not viewed as transferable." In this situation loyalty to a company may actually jeopardise future employement. In Relationship Australia's 1998 Relationship Index, those surveyed were asked to nominate the most common contributors to relationship difficulties. The two highest factors nominated were, 'financial difficulties' (29pc) and 'work or study demands' (26pc). That is, the poverty and tension bought on by under or unemployment and the stress involved in over-work both play a foundational role in the disintegration of over a quarter of Australian relationships. Almost no work has been done by the private or public sector to put a cash value on trust or loyalty. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped the community from paying heavily for their absence. c This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
