Abstract
It is often thought that people are either employed or unemployed. Inventing Unemployment helps to unpack why and how a rigid divide between the two categories is not particularly helpful in understanding either one. Perhaps the primary point is that it has never been. The focus of the book is more on unemployment than employment, though for reasons understandable to the primary intended audience, and to the author’s credit, both are necessarily covered. O’Donnell traces changes in the construction of unemployment through twentieth-century Australia. He first describes and problematises how unemployment has been conceived in mainly British social thought, and in policy and law in both Britain and Australia. The focus of the second half of the book is exclusively Australian.
Unemployment is analysed through understandings of its meaning within social surveys and public statistical databases, censuses, amongst trade unions, and in the largely unsuccessful movement for social insurance. As much focus is also given to the construction of unemployment in and by labour exchanges and public employment services, in the social policies of the welfare state, including in the administration of what were known as ‘unemployment and sickness benefits’. Unemployment is also understood specifically from the experiences of groups such as: married women; remote-area Indigenous communities; so-called ‘dole bludgers’; participants in the ‘active society’ policy push of the 1980s and 1990s; and in ‘work tests’ and ‘activity tests’ as part of the Australian ‘reciprocal’ obligations agenda of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments and the ‘mutual obligations’ agenda of the Coalition government under John Howard.
The first four chapters ‘tic-tac between Britain and Australia’ (p. 7), examining constructions of unemployment up to and including World War II. Chapters 5 to 8 focus on Australia. Chapter 5 analyses the post-war period up to the 1970s, while Chapter 6 interrogates the legal and policy treatment of the first three of the particular groups mentioned above. Chapter 7 examines the effects of the ‘demise’ of the standard – meaning full-time and mainly male-based – employment relationship. Chapter 8 explores the Commonwealth Employment Service (or the CES) and its replacement by a commercial contract-based Job Network.
Throughout, O’Donnell emphasises the difficulty of viewing unemployed people though the one concept. A wide variety of terms have been used in ways meant to be synonymous with not working, not being able to work, being shut out of work or not being willing to work. The book captures and problematises these terms, which include but are not limited to: jobless; not in the labour force; casual and intermittent worker; short-time worker; breadwinner and dependant; self-employed; sick and/or with disability; irregular and underemployed worker; voluntarily and involuntarily idle; disemployed; striking worker; discouraged worker; hidden unemployed; frictional unemployed; and agency worker.
The book is clearly written with interdisciplinary labour and welfare studies audiences in mind, including lawyers and industrial relations and social policy scholars. The central argument is admirably clear: that unemployment is socially constructed and historically contingent. It is not a matter solely of language or discourse. There is more than enough evidence presented to substantiate the argument. The book is also of great interest to researchers, students and practitioners interested in the important intersection points between industrial relations and the welfare state. Through this work O’Donnell stands as one of the champions of the area, contributing to an Australasian literature that dates back to Frank Castles’ (1985) classic, The Working Class and Welfare.
The book is also of interest to those who in recent times have been researching the vitally important area of welfare conditionality, which has always been a major feature of most Australian social policy programmes. The moral underpinnings of unemployment (and associated states) in Australia should be of greater interest than they have been in the recent international and more often British literature.
Given its objective, Inventing Unemployment could have made more use of some of the classic British works from late Victorian and Edwardian era scholars. These were and remain incredibly influential in Australian industrial relations and labour and social security law. Some of the most useful works of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Charles Booth and William Beveridge are cited and discussed by O’Donnell, but arguably deeper engagement with them could have enhanced the analysis.
Why would one say this? Examples abound, and mentioning them calls to mind an additional question: whether the book could have been brought up to the current time. An analysis like this could have powerful and important things to say on questions of so-called ‘gig work’, wage theft and similar phenomena which we now have names for and which have become more common. More broadly, and especially given that O’Donnell is primarily a labour law scholar, more could have been made of the nexus between industrial law and social security programmes in understanding employment and worklessness in our time. Here I speak of the failed but still significant WorkChoices experiment and the Fair Work regime. What are the implications of these in-work regulatory programmes for those who are at the edges of the labour market, those who are in the labour force but not employed or are employed for hours decided largely at the whim of their employer? Equally, what are the implications for the seemingly relentless political attacks on unemployed people?
Despite this and perhaps other missed opportunities, and despite some repetition here and there, Inventing Unemployment is an important and compelling book which furthers understandings of the employment–welfare nexus. Perhaps the audience that would benefit most is that of industrial relations, which has arguably yet to fully appreciate the capacities of workers who are either at the margins of the economy, or who make less recognised but substantive contributions to society.