Media Release

October 21 2009

Loving work fuels extreme jobs: Foenander Lecture

Loving the job will only get you so far, says Prof Barbara Pocock Australians love of work is fuelling ‘extreme’ jobs and preventing us from loving other areas of our life, a leading expert on working life will tell the annual Foenander Lecture in Melbourne tonight.

Professor Barbara Pocock, Director of the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, says in loving their jobs, many workers are putting up with poor conditions such as bullying and working longer hours than they want.

“We need to make sure that in loving our jobs we do not stop loving other honourable human activities such as rest, recuperation, contemplation, art, companionship, gardening and the making of community,” Prof Pocock said.

Prof Pocock said love of the job will only get you so far.

“There is a convincing case for strong regulation of work, so that we can contain our addiction and the worst aspects of lean management, which create extreme jobs and prey upon the commitment of workers whether they be good journalists, aged carers, plumbers, retail workers or school assistants,” she said.

“And there is a good case for being – for at least slabs of your life – not at work!”

Prof Pocock also describes the ‘wicked’ legacy of three decades of women’s entry to the labour market, without enough change on the home front and workplace.

“While the feminist project always contested the male terms of paid work and the reallocation of unpaid work, the failure to achieve either makes liberation through paid work a wicked result: guaranteeing merely the right to perpetual exhaustion and a diminished sense of self – unless one is a care-less, be-suited professional or a full-time worker who joins the ‘masters of the universe’,” she said.

Prof Pocock will present ‘Meaningful Work in the 21st Century: Terms, Conditions and Contexts’ at the Foenander Lecture at the University of Melbourne tonight.

The Foenander Lecture was established in memory of Orwell Foenander, a former academic at the University of Melbourne, who was one of the leading figures in industrial relations scholarship in the early 20th century. Each year a distinguished figure from government, business, the union movement or academia is invited to present a lecture on contemporary issues in industrial relations and human resource management to an audience of practitioners and academics.