| Book Review | Labour History, 91 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do about It, Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2003. pp. xi + 288. $39.95 paper.

Barbara Pocock's book, The Work/Life Collision, draws on over 20 years of expertise and training in labour economics and social sciences, as well as a prodigious amount of serious, scholarly work. The book also reflects Pocock's experience as a political advisor, her research for the labour movement and her empathy with real people and their work and domestic issues. In The Work/Life Collision, Pocock analyses a vast range of material and brings together in a cogent and accessible style the private and public tensions besetting many Australians. With the advent of the new industrial relations laws, the book's message is even more relevant today than it was three years ago.

Pocock's principal argument is that the work-care regimes of Australia are in urgent need of attention and change. Current polices do not address the problems of the current labour market, nor of contemporary Australian society. These problems are often referred to as work/family or work/life tension. Paradoxically, as the tensions have become greater, institutional arrangements have become less responsive. Instead, privatised responses are forced, either from individuals or organisations.

The methodology employed by Pocock in this book is, to my mind, entirely appropriate for the questions she is examining, although there are those who criticise qualitative approaches. For this reason, the appendix is interesting reading in itself — for instance, by acknowledging that many women were interviewed. In the past, almost all labour market research has been done about men — but not acknowledged as such. The advent of feminist critiques of labour market and industrial relations research has been invaluable in exposing the gendered nature of scholarly output. Pocock's book is commendably located in that feminist tradition.

Much has been written in Australia about how work is changing, the demise of the standard working week and the intensification of working lives. Pocock brings it all together nicely and she paints a picture that is more complex than decisions about individual preferences. Pocock explicitly talks of the constraints people are forced to work and live within.

In the early chapters, Pocock canvasses all these issues and provides the supporting evidence from the available statistical data. More interestingly, midway through the book Pocock dares to move into the private lives of women and men, into their arguments about intimacy and the mal-distribution of work and care that is occurring in Australian households.

Often it is in the lives of women where the work-life crunch is really being felt. Some women are accommodating and some are resisting — but on the whole they are managing the situation themselves. Most policy makers and labour economists are men, most do not truly realise the tensions or the precision parenting that women deliver. As a result, their policies have been gender blind, not gender neutral.

The concerns outlined by Pocock are not abating and resistance to fundamental change is noticeable. In many organisations good policy talk abounds, but change is slow. Ironically, at the same time that organisations talk of balancing work and life, they openly speak of 'stretch targets' — urging their employees to go even further than they have to date. In many workplaces and occupations, the requirement to increase discretionary effort is even greater than before and, as tasks become unbounded by time, individuals commit more of their own time to work. Good for business, but not so good for families or communities.

Pocock argues that the main causes of the work/life collision lie in the institutional disequilibrium and significant policy lags relating to Australia's work and care regime. Australia is way behind the rest of the developed world — with the possible exception of the USA. Furthermore, we are old fashioned. Attitudinal and community resistance to changing some behaviour is strong, particularly in relation to women and motherhood.

So, how do we avoid the collision? Pocock concludes her text with ten key measures for a new Australian work/care regime. These reach beyond the public sphere into the private sphere, covering hours of paid work, part-time work, leave, care, workplace policies, payments to families, the division of domestic work and unpaid care, cultures of motherhood and fatherhood, community revitalisation and rethinking consumption (pp. 253–257). If implemented they would amount to a new social contract, a new Australian society, and perhaps even a new workers' paradise.

Pocock offers us a way around the collision, but we are yet to see a political party adopting the full suite of options outlined in the book. Call me cynical, but maybe that's not surprising, as women would have the most to benefit if such policies were delivered.


University of Sydney	MARIAN BAIRD

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