Last week Deloitte Access Economics released a report The path to prosperity: Why the future of work is human. Economist Chris Richardson featured in multiple media reports to iterate the principal messages from the report: robots will not take our jobs, 'work is becoming more secure, not less, and Australians are staying in their jobs longer than ever'.
While not taking issue with the data in the report, its key messaging is notably optimistic about contemporary work in Australia. The choices made in how the data is presented raises some interesting questions not about the overall figures concerning employment security, but about its distribution.
Despite all the headlines about human work being overtaken by technologies, there is wide acknowledgement that technologies will create new types of work, and that the human touch will remain vital to the workforce. Emotional intelligence is, as the report points out, central to the future of work. It is clear that machines are able to do routine jobs and they will make our lives easier. Humans will therefore continue to work, but they will work alongside machines.
What is concerning, however, is that the routine jobs that machines take away are also the sort of jobs that might have been done by young people — so-called entry-level jobs. We need to be asking how our young people will gain the experience they need, and employers call for, if there are no entry level jobs left.
A further concern is the high rate of young people in casual jobs. Approximately 75 per cent of youth aged 15 to 19, and 42 per cent of young people aged 20 to 24 are in casual work. If it is increasingly difficult for young people to find entry-level jobs, these statistics perhaps indicate increasing insecurity at the beginning of our working lives. The report acknowledges this challenge: 'Broadly, the labour market is performing well for those with just the right amount of work experience — but less well for those with too little or too much.' Unless employers take responsibility for training and supporting young people, including casual workers, this problem will continue.
There is also a slightly higher rate of women casual workers than men. Approximately 53 per cent of all casual workers are women while approximately 47 per cent are men. Women often work in the so-called 'caring' occupations that are frequently lower waged and casualised.
For example, education is an increasingly casualised