Over the past few years I regularly kept newspaper articles relevant to employment or the labour market. I have used the material in my teaching and thought it might also be relevant to share with you. Nearly all of it comes from the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. Of course, no claim

is made that these clippings are comprehensive or representative; for instance, at different moments throughout the year I was too busy to glance at newspapers, or I may have missed some headlines or thought that some thing was not important. It all sounds a bit like the story of my life--I did some things, or I didn't do some things, or I let slip some things that were of value. Well, let us go and we can see what overwhelming questions this last year or so has answered.

Most students in my Work and People class come to the subject with some idealised views of the workplace through subjects they take in human resource development, organisational learning or management, so I usually try to dispel some myths and textbook ideas about work. I start with a news report to show them that work can be dirty and dangerous. Take the 203 miners who died after a gas explosion at a coal mine in northeast China in February 2005. The government is taking steps to close down unsafe mines but China's coal industry is still the most dangerous in the world with some 6,027 workers dying in 2004. So the first lesson is that work is not always glamorous--it kills many people.

The next story is also indicative of the realities of work. You might have missed the account in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005 (Mutton, 2005) where two people were found guilty of murder in South Africa. Mark Scott-Crossley, a farmer, and one of his employees attacked a farm worker with machetes. If that was not bad enough, they then threw him into a lion enclosure. I use this example to show that not all employers are nice people.

The third lesson about work is the exploitation of people in need. I use an example such as the phenomenon of day labourers, which has been around for a long time in Australia. It is an unregulated labour market with no controls over pay or working conditions. Such working arrangements are probably more common than realised and challenge our traditional or middle-class notions of employment, career and occupation. Steven Greenhouse's report, 'Broad survey of day labourers finds high level of injuries and pay violations' in the New York Times in January 2006, recounted the results of a United States' study in which 117,600 people gathered at more than 500 hiring sites to look for work on a daily basis. More importantly, over half of the day labourers said they had been cheated.

I have a view that career practitioners typically operate in oblivion to industrial relations or labour law despite the fact that these have immediate ramifications for every person in Australia. Ross Gittins has provided readers with some incisive economic and political comment in his opinion pieces over many years and in May 2005 wrote a piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled 'The end of the wage-setting world as we know it'. He described the changes to industrial relations and the system of conciliation and arbitration. Gittins concluded that the five aims of the Work Choices legislation were: to bring industrial relations under federal rather than state control; to reduce the powers of the Industrial Relations Commission; to abolish the award system; to weaken the influence of trade unions; and to emphasise individual rather than collective bargaining. The fourth lesson is that work is a contractual arrangement subject to changes in our labour laws.

In Australia there has been an underlying egalitarianism or social contract that permeated the community's thinking about work and careers. It was embodied in the basic wage, industrial awards and our social security system. This egalitarianism is fast disappearing due to deregulation of the labour market, international competitiveness, the privatisation of many government services, and federal or state budget spending cuts. Such changes, which come at a social cost to people's lives and careers, are also evident internationally. In Japan there is a widening gap between rich and poor; according to Norimitsu Onishi (2006) of the New York Times, nearly a quarter of all Japanese families have no savings.

In the past, both Australia and the United States had embraced an expectation of a fair day's pay. There is now a sense of exploitation of labour; for instance, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $5.15 an hour for more than eight years, and has not even kept up with inflation over the past 25 years ('A fair day's pay,' 2006).

Concepts of fairness for the average worker seem to have been eroded internationally, much to the detriment of future generations: but this is not the case for all strata of society. John Garnaut (2006), the economics correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, described how the salaries of chief executives in 2002 were 100 times the average worker's earnings. Moreover, while worker salaries struggle to keep up with inflation, corporate profits have improved substantially. In the US, wages make up just 45.3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, the lowest level on record, while corporate profits, at 10.3 per cent of GDP, are at their highest level since the 1970s.

Earnings hardly feature at all in most theories of career development and it is probably time for career practitioners to have a clearer understanding of the impact of pay and earnings on work. Most people work for money; if you don't believe me then just stop paying your staff and then tell me how many show up at work after a few Mondays!

We expect that there will be differentials in pay based on personal preferences, organisational factors, skill requirements or the demand for labour but it is not always straightforward. At the Caterpillar company, for instance, the union accepted a two-tier contract that provided for lower wages and benefits for newly-hired employees (Uchitelle, 2006).

Neither is skill an indication of earnings. Wages are not based on skill and, as John Legge showed in his report 'Skill alone is not key to good pay packet', published in the Age in September 2005, semi-skilled workers on factory assembly lines can earn much more than highly-skilled craftspeople in fields such as musical instrument making. Legge observes that, based on the work of economist James Galbraith, workers' pay rates were determined by 'both the market power of their employers and the high cost of mistakes on the job'. By 'mistakes', Legge means the potential cost to an employer of an error. The lesson from this is that you may not always get paid for your skills.

There are many other issues that highlight less-than-pleasant aspects of the workplace: such as the demonstrations of French students against laws that were intended to lower unemployment, particularly among disadvantaged young people--23 per cent of people under the age of 26 are jobless--but which also made it easier to hire and fire workers under the age of 25 (Sciolino, 2006). Then there is the phenomenon of the declining attractiveness of demanding work for some women with young families where women faced limits on what can be done in a week (Porter, 2006); or the voluntary reduction in vacations in the US where workers already take fewer holidays than most other developed nations (Rosenbloom, 2006). All of these facts, phenomena and incidents have some reflections or echoes in our Australian labour market and implications for careers practice in Australia.

Finally I finish the semester with a moral message that is gut-wrenching. It deals with the United Nations' estimates that some 49.3 million children aged 14 and under in the Sub-Sahara are working. The New York Times reports that these children work as 'prostitutes, miners, construction workers, pesticide sprayers, haulers, street vendors, full-time servants, and they are not necessarily even paid for their labour' (Wines, 2006). The story on one of these children, Mark Kwadwo, aged six, was enough to make an eleven-year old donate their birthday money to the United Nations Children's Fund. Mark lives in a fishing village which is a two-day trek from his home. He accompanies fishermen out in a canoe up to a mile from shore; his job is to scoop water out of the canoe so that it will not be swamped. He cannot swim. He is indentured for something like US $20 a year; he goes days without food; and if he is slow at his work he gets beaten (LaFraniere, 2006). Now tell me that the world of work and careers is a lovely place!

As part of this editorial I would like to pay tribute to Deirdre Morris, manager of ACER Press who passed away in 2006. She was an ardent supporter of the journal. As an editor I was keenly aware of her professionalism, her quick grasp of key issues and her genuine interest in promoting career development in Australia.

At the same time I want to thank Amanda Pinches, a Senior Editor at ACER Press who has supported the journal and overseen many aspects of its production over recent years. Her contribution to the technical aspects and administration is gratefully acknowledged and we wish her well in her new publishing role at ACER Press. We also welcome Rebecca Leech as the new Senior Editor to the journal and Rebecca brings with her some new ideas from her a background in journalism, her experience with educational journals and her background in educational publishing at ACER.

REFERENCES

A Fair Day's Pay. (2006, January 3). New York Times, Editorial Desk p. A16.

Garnaut, J. (2006, August 21). Boom time--especially if you're a CEO. Sydney Morning Herald, News p. 1.

Gittins, R. (2005, May 28). The end of the wage-setting world as we know it. Sydney Morning Herald, Business p. 46.

Greenhouse, S. (2006, January 22). Broad survey of day laborers finds high level of injuries and pay violations. New York Times, National Desk p. 20.

Greenhouse, S. & Leonhardt, D. (2006, August 28). Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity. New York Times, National Desk p. A1.

Hoo, S. (2005, February 16). Gas explosion in Chinese mine kills 203 in industry's biggest reported disaster since 1940s. Associated Press Newswires.

LaFraniere, S. (2006, October 29). Africa's world of forced labor, in a 6-year-old's eyes. New York Times, Foreign Desk p. 1.

Legge, J. (2005, September 29). Skill alone is not key to good pay packet. The Age, Business p. 8.

Mutton, R. (2005, September 28). Life sentence awaits white farmer who threw black worker to lions. Sydney Morning Herald, News p. 9.

Onishi, N. (2006, April 16). Revival in Japan brings widening of economic gap. New York Times, Foreign Desk p. 1.

Porter, E. (2006, March 2). Stretched to limit, women stall march to work. New York Times, Business/Financial Desk p. A1.

Rosenbloom, S. (2006, August 10). Please don't make me go on vacation. New York Times, Thursday Styles p. G1.

Sciolino, E. (2006, March 15). French students step up protests against new job law. New York Times, Foreign Desk p. 3.

Uchitelle, L. (2006, February 26). Two tiers, slipping into one. New York Times, Money p.1.

Wines, M. (2006, August 24). Africa adds to miserable ranks of child workers. New York Times, Foreign Desk p. A1.

James Athanasou

University of Technology, Sydney

Jim.Athanasou@uts.edu.au