Time For Working Families
12 Dec 2007
Assistant General SecretarySally Anne Kinahan, Assistant General Secretary
Less than three weeks ago, the Australian electorate unceremoniously dumped John Howard's Liberal Party from office after eleven long years. The result caught many by surprise, not least the Prime Minister himself who managed to lose his seat in the process. He no doubt had assumed that an ongoing economic boom would suffice to secure him in high office. Instead, the incumbents were unseated by something they never saw coming - the future.
Rather than simply draw comfort from the present, the victorious Labor Party had articulated a clear, coherent vision of what was required to secure Australia's future. Central to this was a realisation that investing in people - in their skills and their potential - is what the smart economies of the 21st Century will be built upon.
This is not a concept that conventional economic thinking - or what passes for same - can readily grasp. But if the swings and roundabouts of this globalised economy have taught us anything over the last decade, it is that future competitive advantage cannot be built on such flimsy foundations as low taxes, poor public provision and inflexible employer practices.
This message has been well-learned in the Nordic countries and Australia is now a convert. But here in Ireland we appear to inhabit a time zone specifically set aside for slow learners, if Budget 2008 is anything to go by. In that most recent demonstration of government priorities, bricks and mortar triumphed over people, developers over much needed development.
Investing in people is the key to raising productivity and, ultimately, enhancing our competitive capacity. Central to this, is the need to deliver greater flexibility and support for working families. That much should be self-evident. Yet, fine words notwithstanding, a quick appraisal of existing economic policy totems might lead you to conclude that people are the awkward things that get in the way of policy implementation and foul up the smooth running of business.
Indeed, as was reiterated in Budget 2008, this country can be a cold, cold place for working families. In reality, we are at the wrong end of every relevant, comparative chart and graph across the EU15 and we sometimes fall behind the new accession states, in terms of services and supports for working families.
While our public spending on families has more than doubled since 1980, we still spend less, as a percentage of GDP, on this crucial sector of the population than 11 other European countries, including Hungary. Their public spending on families accounts for over 3.5 percent of GDP, ours just 2.5 percent, according to the OECD.
In terms of the mechanisms and services that facilitate workplace flexibility for families, we are amongst the worst in Europe. Leave schemes - maternity and paternity leave - are prominent examples. A 2005 EU study which combined and weighted existing EU schemes in terms of payment, found Ireland in fourteenth place behind Greece.
The situation is exacerbated by restrictive employment practices. In March 2006, the CSO estimated that some 80 percent of our workforce had no discretion over what time they started and finished work.
And then there is the issue of childcare which, to date, has hardly been characterised by what might even be remotely described as 'joined-up thinking'. In fact no thought other than the old canard that 'the market will provide' appears to have been given to this crucial issue.
There are serious moral and child development issues at the heart of this matter but as yet, we have not even managed to frame the debate in what is its proper context. Yet, as the recent OECD report Babies and Bosses concludes: "..the available evidence seems to suggest that child development is negatively affected when an infant does not receive full-time personal care for the first 6-12 months of the child's life."
In our pre-Budget submission Congress explicitly sought the introduction of a package that would have allowed parents to combine leave entitlements and provide that vital first 12 months of care themselves. Unfortunately, bricks and mortar carry more weight than babies these days.
Indeed our public spending on childcare falls well below the OECD average and ranks us at 27, out of 28 countries surveyed. Only Korea manages to spend less. Thus, the burden is transferred to hard-pressed parents with almost 25 percent (24.8) of average earnings now required to pay childcare costs - the OECD average is 16 percent and in many EU countries it is comfortably below 10 percent.
Left at the mercy of the market, we now have a childcare model of inconsistent quality wherein, the OECD again concludes that, "the costs of childcare can be so high that in the short-term work does not pay for many second earners in couple families...."
This is economic and social madness which harms our productive capacity and does untold damage to working families.
Our priorities are utterly skewed. We need to put people at the centre of all that we do, refocus our services so that they support and not hinder working families. If we continue to be held back by slow learners we will soon be eclipsed by the societies that invest in people and which are learning to work smarter. We need more time for working families.
This article originally appeared in the Irish Times on December 12, 2007