Read on Twitter
Tonight in the senate @jordonsteele said so much of what we are feeling. We are so grateful for these words, and proud to see a young person, a disabled person, share our views and represent them in parliament.
The fundamental premise of this legislation is that regardless of the work – regardless of the amount of time, regardless of the conditions, the wages, the way the insecurity might impact on your mental health – any job is better than no job, no matter how poor that job might be.
This idea [that any job is better than none] comes to us after decade on decade, century on century, of a building idea that human value is connected inextricably to a human being’s engagement in the workforce, what we sometimes hear spoken of as the inherent 'dignity of work'.
Now on the surface this idea seems uncontroversial. However, when we look a bit deeper, what does this mean for groups of people that are either structurally inhibited from entering the economy like young people, or groups of people in our society like disabled people?
Many of us are locked out of the workforce, but many are also placed into jobs in "disability enterprises" that pay 30 cents an hour. Those practices are justified because of this idea of inherent dignity in work, regardless of what you're paid or the conditions of that payment.
The 'dignity of work' is one of these strange old ideas that have grown out of a misinterpretation, in my belief, of the foundational tenants of workplace activism and of unionism.
The history of the union movement here is that it grew out of an understanding of the inherent dignity of the worker, the inherent dignity and rights of all people, when they're on the job, when they're at work, when they're in the workplace, to be safe and to be fairly paid.
These workers' rights and these high ideals have over time been taken and twisted where now there is a belief that the engagement in the job itself is the wellspring of the dignity.
It's an idea we need to push back on as young people and as legislators because it ultimately sets so many in our community up to fail, to feel a sense of indignity and of shame because of an inability to gain work, when the reality is human dignity is inherent to human beings.
Human dignity is inherent in human beings regardless of whether we might be able to sell our labour for an hourly rate in a marketplace that is high enough for us to be able to eat or drink water or to have a secure roof over our head.
The dignity of work is an idea we need to bin + replace with an idea of inherent human dignity for all people, in all places. This bill doesn't address that. It makes it worse at a time when we young people are battling a history of insecure work that stretches far before COVID.
For many of us insecure work is the only work we have ever known. And the function of this bill is to come in and supercharge it, to make it a hell of a lot worse. To pit us against people in their 50s, people trying to make their way, and to pay McDonald's for the privilege.
People in our community, young people, older people, we want meaningful opportunities to expend our time and build our lives and define our purpose on our terms.
Some of us may come to the conclusion that paid employment right out of university or right out of school is what we want to do. Some of us may decide that we want to study or go to TAFE or do something in between.
And the goal of us here, as a legislature, should be to not only provide the opportunities, the abilities, the support mechanisms, that are needed for people to explore that life path to define and discover for themselves, what constitutes for them a good life.
But also to be finding new and innovative ways to reduce the overall amount of time that we as people have to spend in workplaces that might not be the most enjoyable, away from our friends and family.
There was a point in history where – admittedly for a narrowly defined group of people – Australia was a worker's paradise that struck a balance between work and leisure and rest.
In 2020, we are an economy that is driving people more and more to spend time away from their friends and family to make wages that are stagnating. Giving their life to work, living to work rather than working to live.
