Policy goal: secure, safe jobs with decent wages, conditions and opportunities for career development
The Australian Government is committed to boosting job security and wages and to creating safe, fair and productive workplaces. Our policy vision is that jobs in the care and support economy will be attractive and competitive options for long-term, professionalised careers in the labour market. Jobs will support the wellbeing, safety and economic security of workers. Jobs will also enable quality provision of care and support. Jobs will promote women’s economic equality. Jobs will be sufficiently attractive to build the workforce size and skills needed to cater for Australians requiring care and support.
Australians deserve jobs that work for them
The quality of a person’s job is an essential factor in life satisfaction. In care and support, quality of jobs is important not just for the worker, but for the people they provide care and support to: decent work is a necessary condition for quality care and support. Given the growing shortage of staff in care and support, improving the quality of these jobs is the best way to improve retention and attraction of a skilled workforce.
Care and support work can be highly rewarding and our care and support system contains many talented and dedicated workers. However, there is high turnover across the system. Evidence suggests this is due to a number of factors including: high workloads, concerns about service quality, low pay, unsafe work conditions, and lack of career progression opportunities.54 The reputation of care and support jobs as being hard work for little reward reinforces workforce shortages.
What makes a quality job?
Job quality is a combination of factors broadly encompassed by:
- pay and conditions
- intrinsic characteristics (including use of skills, recognition, autonomy, relationships, level of effort required)
- terms of employment (including stability, training and development, progression opportunities)
- health and safety
- work-life balance
- worker representation and voice.55
The attributes that make care and support jobs unattractive come down, largely, to job design: what tasks are done and how that work is organised. In turn, job design is driven by the how programs are funded, regulation and relevant industrial relations instruments. The cumulative impact of these forces creates incentives for employers to organise work and workers in certain ways.
Management and leadership capability also plays a role in determining whether a job is good or not, due to the role of management in determining job design, workplace culture and ensuring the safety of workers.
Improving the quality of jobs in care and support is also an important lever to enhance women’s economic equality, due to the large proportion of women it employs.
- BETA (Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government), Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, ‘NDIS Workforce Retention: Findings from the NDIS workforce Survey,’ PMC, 12 June 2022; K Thorpe et al., ‘Identifying predictors of retention and professional wellbeing of the early childhood education workforce in a time of change,’ Journal of Educational Change, 2020, 21(1), 623-647.Return to footnote 54 ↩
- Warhurst C, Wright S and Lyonette C, Institute for Employment Research within the University of Warwick, ‘Research Report: Part 1 – Thematic Literature Review- Understanding and Measuring Job Quality,’ CIPD, November 2017, [23].Return to footnote 55 ↩