Ask the thousands queued at Sydney Airport about ‘insecure work’

While the Coalition, employers and the business media insist that insecure work is a figment of Labor’s imagination, Sydney travellers have been experiencing the pointy end of an increasing reliance on poorly paid casual work and a reluctance of large employers to offer workers pay rises.

Throughout the pandemic, both Qantas and Sydney Airport constantly demanded that border restrictions be lifted and airlines be allowed to fly again. In September 2020, Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert said states closing their borders to protect their citizens “is inconsistent with what it means to be Australian”. In February 2021 Culbert called for an early reopening of borders “once vulnerable members of the community were vaccinated”. And even as the east coast entered an extended lockdown and states shut borders again due to the Delta wave last year, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce repeatedly issued “plans” for travel to resume.

As well as standing down 20,000 staff during the pandemic, Joyce sacked 6000 workers as part of a major cost-cutting exercise over 2020-21. Now people wanting to make inquiries or speak to Qantas, which was privatised by the Keating government, have to endure seven-hour waits on the phone.

The bigger queueing problem is at the airport itself, of course, with massive queues outside the door at domestic terminals due to a lack of airport security staff. The NSW government today admitted that people unlucky enough to have to use Sydney Airport were stuck with nightmarish waiting lines.

Sydney Airport — privatised by the Howard government — doesn’t provide its own security services. They are provided by security company SNP, which in 2018 was bought by Singaporean company Certis. Certis is a corporatised arm of the Singaporean police force, and a major company in security and public order in Singapore. It is owned entirely by the Singapore government’s investment arm, Temasek.

Certis says it is a victim of workforce shortages and COVID restrictions and can’t attract staff, which it is desperately advertising for. Risibly, it was reported today the company is offering a $50 Woolies gift card to attract more workers to understaffed shifts.

This is the standard approach by Australian employers to staff shortages now — not to offer higher wages that might attract more workers, but to offer one-off incentives — though few have offered an incentive so lacklustre as a $50 grocery card.

Insecure and casualised work is a problem for workers when unemployment is higher: workers’ bargaining power is limited or non-existent, and the industrial relations system does little to protect them — though the Transport Workers Union has been effective at using the Fair Work Commission to push back against the core myth of the gig economy, that its workers aren’t employees but independent contractors.

It’s also a problem when unemployment is low, but the labour market no longer responds in the way that markets should to shortages, by raising the price of labour, because employers refuse to countenance ongoing wage increases. For whom is it worth getting out of bed, taking time away from friends and family, sacrificing a weekend or a night’s sleep, for award minimum wages and a $50 bag (you’d only get one bag) of groceries? The market response is to not provide labour.

Queueing is another form of market response. Queueing is what happens in command economies when there are no price signals — producers don’t have an incentive to produce more because prices don’t rise — so people have to queue up for limited supplies of a product. And as a result consumers pay with their time stuck in a line, if they can get that product at all.

People stranded in those absurdly long queues at Sydney Airport can thank business-as-usual public policy over the past 30 years: privatised public entities, with monopoly or near-monopoly market positions, more intent on maximising profit than ensuring customer service for people forced to use them, and transferring the cost of those companies’ refusal to pay higher wages to consumers stuck in a slow-moving airport line.

And economists wonder why voters utterly despise privatisation so much.