Our national political conversation is littered with words that have lost their meaning: ‘fighting for peace’, ‘protecting our borders’, ‘truth in sentencing’, the list goes on.
When it comes to the economy – ‘productivity and flexibility’ are two more benign, if somewhat bland, words that have been abused so horribly it is now tough to remember what they originally meant.
Often I read the commentary pieces in newspapers about these issues that make grand claims about the virtues of productivity and flexibility, a panacea to every business problem, a self-evident good.
And I wonder who the authors are talking to – where they are getting their information – because they aren’t talking about the issues workers talk to me about, or the issues people who actually run real businesses talk to me about.
Because when it comes to the way Australians work, productivity and flexibility’ have come to be terms that cause justified anxiety.
Unfortunately for many workers their experience of “productivity” and “flexibility” in the workplace has translated as “insecurity” - temporary work and volatile income.
Recently, the Prime Minister declared that one of her aspirations in government was to rescale the ‘productivity’ peaks of the Hawke-Keating era.
If this means creating an economy based on well-designed, well-managed jobs that deliver better returns to the business, the economy and the worker, then ‘productivity’ is an admirable ambition.
Unions share the government’s aspiration to lift productivity after it languished during the Howard years. For this to be feasible, however, employees need to be fairly rewarded for their efforts.
It is not a tough equation to get your head around: higher labour productivity will be encouraged when workers feel they will share fairly in the rewards of growth.
At the moment that is just not happening. We have seen productivity rise faster than wages, resulting in real unit labour costs hitting an all-time low of more than 17 per cent below what they were during the mid-1980s.
It is no coincidence that productivity growth has been sluggish during a period of strong downward pressure on wages and unfair IR laws.
So, how do we get Australia back up to those productivity peaks of the 1990s?
We could start by recasting collective bargaining as a friend to productivity, instead of an enemy.
The reasoning is simple: only a group of employees can offer real and meaningful productivity gains to an employer in exchange for a fair share of the reward.
A single employee can cut no such bargain. It has now been proven that fragmenting and isolating individual workers and cutting them off from unions does not lift productivity.
Now to that other poor, abused term: flexibility. On its face, no one should have any opposition to increasing workplace flexibility – who wants to work in rigid, inflexible ways?
But the term has been co-opted by some employer groups and businesses to simply mean “flexibility to lower wages and conditions”.
If we are going to talk about flexibility, it should not be at the expense of rights, fairness and proper workplace protections. Nor should it be a code word for more outsourcing, more use of labour hire companies, more casual work.
Flexibility is a two-way street. Workers also need flexibility, so they can balance their job with their commitments outside of work. Getting this balance right will open the door to better productivity.
Indeed, if there is one area where we need more flexibility in workplace relations, it is around bargaining.
Bargaining is currently restricted to a limited range of matters. This prevents workers from bargaining on a range of issues that are vital to their interests. If those calling for increased flexibility were consistent, they would be encouraging more bargaining, more often.
Of course all working Australians want workplaces that allow them to get more out their working day and have more freedom in how they structure their working life. If these are the definitions of ‘productivity’ and ‘flexibility’ we are all for it.
But if the words simply mean taking away rights and doing more with less, then this is a very different debate.
Words matter – their meaning matter – and if we want to have a decent debate about the Australian workplace we need to agree on the definitions first.
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