The best of times, the worst of times, or indifferent times: views of Australians on job security and the future of work

Abstract

The Australian labour market is changing, with new occupations being created, as others become more precarious. Some of this change is being driven by technological advances; some is due to external factors. Although there has been a considerable amount of research documenting this change and predicting what the labour market will look like in the future, there has been far less research looking at the attitudes of current workers towards their own jobs now and in the future. In this paper, we summarise and analyse a specially targeted survey (the 25th in the ANUPoll series) that looks at the attitudes of a representative sample of the Australian population, and test how these attitudes vary by important demographic, geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. We document different aspects of job security: perceptions of job security in Australia, including by industry; categorisation of different threats to job security; and perceived longer-term changes in work and society. We also undertake a randomised survey experiment that tests for the role of sex, ethnicity and qualifications in how people perceive medium-term labour market change, and compare these results with the views of 'experts'. We show that Australians are relatively relaxed about their current job and are somewhat concerned about finding a new job if they lost theirs, and that the general public has somewhat different views on what jobs are most at risk compared with experts.