Research,the application of ideas from the literature, problem solving and critical analysis (REPORT)

Blue collar hardly in the pink

· BY:
GEORGE MEGALOGENIS From:
The Australian July 20, 2013 12:00AM

·

THROWING cash at a social issue is a male way of problem solving. But it doesn't work any more. The disruption of the internet, the rise of Asia and the collapse of the Western business model of debt-led consumption - take your pick, the zeitgeist is screaming the party is over. A new way of running our system is required to restore stability.

I've been writing for some time that the worlds of politics, media and business are disconnected from the society they serve because they carry excess white male baggage. Almost half the population now is either first or second-generation immigrant or original Australians. Some 27 per cent of us were born overseas, another 20 per cent have at least one parent who is an immigrant and 2 per cent are indigenous. The economy has been transformed from blue to pink collar in our lifetimes.

Let's rewind to the workplace of 30 years ago, when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating took office as prime minister and treasurer. Men working full time held 59 per cent of all the jobs in the economy. Half as many women were working full time (they accounted for 24 per cent of all jobs) and another 17 per cent of the positions were women in part-time work. Men working full time outnumbered all women in work by 1,364,000.

Thirty years on, the full-time working male is a minority in the workforce - he holds just 45 per cent of all jobs. Women working full time haven't increased their share by that much; it was 25 per cent in April.

But the ranks of women working part time have expanded by four percentage points to 21 per cent of all jobs. Women in work now outnumber men in full-time jobs by 72,500.

The top six industries when the Hawke-Keating deregulation project began were manufacturing; retail; healthcare and social assistance; construction; professional services; and education. Manufacturing accounted for 16.8 per cent of all jobs in November 1984, the professions just 3.9 per cent. The most recent data showed the two in a virtual tie - manufacturing at 8.1 per cent, the professions at 7.9 per cent. The top six industries now are healthcare and social assistance; retail trade; construction; manufacturing; education; and the professions. We have moved from a society that makes things and shops to one more focused on caring, building and thinking.

The real economy is approaching its final female tipping point, where married women are more likely to be participating in the labour market than unmarried men. In the early 1980s, the proportion of married women in work or looking for it was less than 40 per cent; the figure for unmarried men was above 70 per cent. The lines almost crossed last August, on the eve of Julia Gillard's misogyny speech, with married women at 62 per cent and unmarried men at 63 per cent.

One part of this story is familiar to us: the early return of mothers to work after having children. The other is not well understood. The unqualified male, who can't find work in either the brain economy or the brawn economy of construction and mining, is forming a new underclass. Keeping him in touch with the mainstream is as important for social cohesion as looking after sole parents and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the two groups that form the bulk of the underclass today.

And yet the blokes still hold the levers of the economy, despite being the less qualified sex in the brain economy. Women account for 52 per cent of all professional jobs, but men have 65 per cent of all the management positions.

Partisan commentators eschew complexity because it requires them to think outside the comfort zone of their tribe. But I have to confess, I no longer believe that simply increasing diversity is the antidote to a fracturing society. More women running companies, and more olive, yellow, brown and black-skinned faces in our parliaments and on our TV sets will not, of themselves, make a difference if the new entrants simply adapt to the existing model.

Our first female prime minister is a case in point. Julia Gillard's stated reason for seizing power on June 24, 2010, was that a good government had lost its way under Kevin Rudd. She wanted to clear the decks on the mining tax, asylum-seekers and climate change, and then embark on a longer conversation with the electorate.

On the third anniversary of the leadership change, only the third item in Rudd's in-tray had been cleared. Yet her successfully implemented price on carbon may not survive a return to Coalition rule. Incidentally, her own agenda of disability insurance, education reform and budget repair also had a strike rate of just one in three.

The continuity between Rudd and Gillard is the gibberish of politics in the digital age. Neither leader could give Australians a strong enough sense of what they stood for. They remind me of a succession of editors here and overseas who thought they could recover lost readers and advertisers with a round of redundancies and a flash redesign of their newspapers. Or the TV programmers who chased the fool's gold of the reality format and wondered why viewers turned off in disgust.

I am wary of personal anecdotes, but I think there is a lesson in the way the professional loves of my life - newspapers and books - are dealing with the challenges of the 21st century. Newspapers are a collaborative venture, but with the ego of the editor sitting on top of the organisation. Editors still reserve the right to tell a reporter what to write. While I have sympathy for editors, they are losing cultural power because the internet now allows the reader to decide the page one story.

Books, too, have many mothers and fathers, but the publisher has been loath to dictate subject matter. Writers, unlike journalists, have been brought up as soloists. They can always find another publisher. But the cultural power hasn't shifted in the book trade. The reader still runs the bestseller list.

Newspapers and books are losing market share at roughly the same catastrophic rate. But I'm willing to bet that authors are better prepared for the pay cut this implies than journalists, because publishers have a keener sense than editors, in fact most CEOs, that loyalty can't be bought, or bullied; it has to be earned. The business round table I attended last year couldn't solve the obvious question of how to convince Australian workers, pampered by more than two decades of uninterrupted growth, to accept a squeeze on wages while returning to the old-school habit of sticking with the same firm.

I don't pretend to have the answer either. But one thing I can say with confidence: the stridency of the male brain, from the CEO to the partisan commentator, isn't it. When women finally claim their fair share of the decision-making, they have to be prepared to change the model.

This is an edited extract from the inaugural annual Griffith Review Lecture, to be delivered by George Megalogenis in Brisbane next Thursday.