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Introduction
The Impact of Neoliberal Policy on Workplace Health
Toni Schofield
Behavioural & Community Health Sciences, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia
Article Text
I am writing the introduction to this special issue of Health Sociology Review (Workplace Health and Neoliberalism) as some unprecedented national political developments are about to unfold. By June, the recently re-elected Howard Coalition Government will control both houses of the Commonwealth parliament. With this power, one of the Government's main objectives is to introduce further 'reforms' to Australian industrial relations. These proposed changes, if implemented, will entrench the values, principles and practices of an aggressively re-invigorated liberalism in Australian workplaces, in both public and private sectors. The working lives of most Australians and the conditions under which they work may be radically altered as a consequence. One of the major but largely unmentioned workplace casualties likely to result from this project is workers' health and well-being.
Also released as a course reader (ISBN 0-9750436-4-1), Workplace Health and Neoliberalism brings together a diverse collection of groundbreaking research articles on the subject of workplace health and the impact that over a decade of neoliberal social and economic policy has had on it. The overall picture that emerges is astonishing in terms of the state's apparent indifference to the quality of most people's working environments and their collective well-being while at work. It is even more so in relation to the incivility and disrespect that workers with employment injuries regularly experience in negotiating state-managed workers' compensation and rehabilitation schemes.
It is fitting, then, that the special issue's first article, by Kevin Purse, provides a historical account of the development of workers' compensation policy in Australia. According to Purse, the trajectory of Australian workers' compensation policy has been characterised by four distinct stages. These have involved periodic bursts of policy 'reform' interspersed with longer phases of gradual change. Throughout, contestation between business interests and organised labour over the distribution of work-related injury costs has been the main driver. As Purse's account makes clear, the state has been a key player in this drama. Indeed, it has been the main arena through which the contest in workers' compensation policy has been played out. The state's neoliberal 'turn' from the mid-1980s onwards has created a political space for holistic redesign of workers' compensation schemes that focuses on the burden to employers of paying for the financial costs associated with workers' compensation. This has had an enormous impact on injured workers' rights and benefits.
This theme is revisited in Kate O'Loughlin's article that examines the parliamentary politics that produced the changes to the NSW Workers' Compensation Act 1926 in 1987 and its new provisions. O'Loughlin argues that the 'reforms' introduced by the Unsworth Labor government were designed primarily to reduce the 'burden of cost' associated with employers' insurance premiums. The delivery of such relief to employers required restriction on injured workers' rights to common law action and lump-sum settlements, and an obligation on injured workers to return to work. This was to be supervised and expedited by therapeutic and rehabilitation professionals. As a result, injured workers were transformed from industrial citizens to clients of intensified therapeutic management authorized and overseen by the state. Underpinning this new direction in policy was a significant change in political culture that saw the disappearance of class-based parliamentary discourse and its replacement by a neoliberal discursive consensus in identifying and managing the needs of injured workers.
Pursuing the subject of further changes to workers' compensation in NSW since 1987, the article by Margarita Parrish and myself explores injured workers' experiences of the claims process. The claims process throughout most Australian jurisdictions has attracted sustained criticism through public inquiries and university-based research. In NSW it has been the object of significant legislative reform since the late 1990s. The article, based on interviews with injured workers who had lodged a compensation claim in NSW, identifies considerable discontent with the process that is associated with powerful feelings of degradation and humiliation in having undergone it. These derive, the article argues, from institutional practices associated with the day-to-day corporate management and administration of the claims process. Such practices involve intense intersubjective relations between claims management officials, employed mainly by insurance companies, and injured workers. They embody the principles and techniques of a growing neoliberal governance in the Australian state.
Bronwyn Davies' and Peter Bansel's article shifts the focus from workers' compensation to the impacts on the health and well-being of academic workers of neoliberal management practices of work intensification. Davies and Bansel propose that such changes affect the way time is constituted by academics and the way it constitutes their lives. Neoliberal work practices within universities enmesh academics in 'end-product driven time' that 'controls their work-related actions' and erodes their 'private' time, shaping 'their subjective sense of embodiment and emotions'. The article draws on academics' stories from Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and the US and discusses questions about the limitations of neoliberal structurings of time on intellectual creativity. Davies' and Bansel's analysis of these accounts leaves no doubt that increased workloads in teaching and administration, and greater emphasis on research that is measurable in terms of the dollar-value of grants won to conduct it and the number of articles produced to disseminate its findings, render 'non-instrumental' intellectual work a luxury for most. Many are experiencing acute stress simply meeting the instrumental requirements of neoliberal regimes of university governance.
The work practices of public bus drivers in Newcastle, a regional city of NSW, would appear to share little in common with those of academics. However, Dennis McIntyre's article provides an analysis of stress among public bus operators that reveals some compelling similarities. Adopting a 'labour process' approach that is informed by Marx's theory of class and history, McIntyre argues that the extraction of surplus value that occurs in the process, and its obfuscation by the class relations that characterize it, ensure that working-class employees receive the lion's share of ill health. The article focuses on the organisational dominance of the 'managerial prerogative' in the public sector bus industry and its obsession with 'efficiency'. According to McIntyre, the growing prevalence of neoliberal ideologies in the management of public sector industries has rendered bus management more violent towards workers. This is manifest in the increasingly harmful conditions of work it has imposed on bus operators in the name of efficiency. Organised resistance by workers is vital in redressing this situation, suggests McIntyre, but it needs to be informed by an understanding of the structural imperatives of the capitalist labour process.
Suzanne Jamieson's article draws our attention to the significance of gender in workplace health and its legal regulation. Based on extensive study of work injury prosecutions by the WorkCover Authority of NSW from the late 1990s to 2003-2004, Jamieson finds that women are so grossly under-represented in occupational health and safety prosecution files that they are basically invisible. Held by the Chief Industrial Magistrate's Court and that of the Industrial Relations Commission in NSW, the case files show that it is the 'serious' injuries and fatalities sustained by those employed in the construction industries - overwhelmingly men - that are most commonly prosecuted. As Jamieson explains, this does not mean that the 'serious' work injuries of men in all industries are prosecuted. It is evident that those emanating from a selection of male-dominated industries is over-represented. Nevertheless, compared with work injury prosecutions for men, virtually none exist for women. This is despite occupational health and safety legislation in NSW that has been 'vigorously shorn' of all gender discriminatory language and provisions. Jamieson's article raises serious questions about how gender-neutral occupational health and safety laws are no guarantee of non-gendered occupational health outcomes. Jamieson's findings point to a gendered prosecution culture that requires further investigation.
Finally, the article by Lyn Guy and Stephanie Short reports on a Sydney-based study of the rehabilitation experiences of workers with musculoskeletal injuries and chronic pain. Reviewing the literature on injury and chronic pain, the article shows there has been little investigation of social factors in the success or otherwise of the management of people with enduring injuries and chronic pain. This has been dominated by a biomedical approach that has attracted significant criticism for its limitations and even harmful consequences. The study finds that current provision of pain management and rehabilitation services for most workers with musculoskeletal injuries offers little joy. The authors explain that this appears to be strongly associated with the previous blue-collar occupations and socio-economic backgrounds of those who sustain the majority of painful musculoskeletal injuries incurred at work. With the neoliberal emphasis within compensation schemes on financial self-reliance, the focus by rehabilitation services on return to work is largely inappropriate for the majority of workers with long-term and painful musculoskeletal injuries. This is because they do not have the resources to retrain and to find alternative employment. The prevailing approach to rehabilitation, the authors conclude, inevitably sets these workers up for failure usually at enormous cost to them and the community more broadly.
As the collective knowledge and wisdom in these Health Sociology Review special issue articles suggests, the neoliberal path to workplace health and happiness is no place for the less-than-robust or for those who hark back to the securities of a working week with regular hours and permanent employment. It is also no place for those seriously injured at work, especially those with limited social and economic resources such as bank savings, education and extensive social networks. Several of the authors in this collection identify various strategies for addressing the effects of neoliberal governance and management that involve collective industrial and political action. With the impending legislative changes to industrial relations proposed by the present Commonwealth Government, the opportunities for adopting such courses of action may be considerably more limited. It may be time to re-invent the political wheel.
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