HR news this week: ‘Dole bludgers’, TV dinners, and (hidden) AI job cuts

The past week has been hectic in HR news. From a proposed shake-up to our national employment service to the dietary implications of the cost-of-living crisis and the hidden gravity of the great AI replacement – we’ve been spoilt for choice.

Exorcising the ghost of the ‘dole bludger’ myth

Two years out of the new millennium, the Howard government revamped Australia’s federal employment service. Before the changes, the service was federally funded. After, the new Job Network was a hybrid system fuelled by businesses in the private and community sectors.

As noted in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, which shared the results of the Albanese government’s inquiry into the employment service, Howard’s reforms were far from perfect.

According to the inquiry report, the current employment service is based on two “flawed theories”. The first is that unemployment is a failing of the individual and not the system and that “clients will make efforts to secure employment if only they are beaten hard enough”.

The second is that choice and competition – as opposed to a government monopoly – will bring about a better, more effective employment service.

“Many staff are compassionate, caring people who deliver great outcomes in difficult circumstances,” said the report.

“Yet overall, the employment services system is not delivering adequate or optimal outcomes for clients and appears to now largely neglect employers.”

Not only, the report said, are the services inflexible and ill equipped to adapt to unique client needs, but staff are often undertrained and under-resourced, while excessive red tape complicates service delivery.

Perhaps closer to home, the report also criticised the current system for being built on the myth of the “dole bludger”, a connection exemplified by the “patently ridiculous level of compliance and reporting activities”.

It was on this basis the report concluded that it “should not be controversial to conclude that full marketisation has failed”.

The 650-page report called for a new employment services system, one built on sturdier ground than its predecessor.

Cost of living affecting our diets

Two recent studies led by Flinders University researchers have found that our dinner table spreads have suffered from recent cost-of-living pressures.

Though the studies found that Australian families continue to value the social role of a shared family meal, higher costs and more demanding work means fewer opportunities to go all out.

Our family dinner preferences largely parallel those of the 1990s, when similar pressures meant less time and money was being spent on the habit. Unlike the 1990s, however, parents are now more likely to forego their dinner preferences and insist their children eat what they are given so that only one kind of meal must be made.

In the 1990s, on the other hand, children and adults were more likely to enjoy different meals.

According to the lead researcher, Dr Georgia Middleton, we are seeing the same problems persist today because the necessary support systems were not put in place back then, or since.

The researchers suggested that a solution would likely involve some combination of flexible work, better and cheaper family-friendly convenience meals, or school or workplace meal programs.

“We have been told that to achieve the benefits of family meals, we must follow an idealistic age-old formula: all family members at the table, happily sharing a home-cooked meal and chatting without distractions,” said Dr Middleton.

“But modern reality includes time-poor families, fussy eaters, siblings at odds, and stress about what to cook – not to mention cost-of-living pressures.”

AI job cuts ‘hide in plain sight’

A recent ABC News article shed light on the odd phenomenon of unnoticed, but not hidden, AI job replacement. Specifically, bad data is making it so that when Australians lose their jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), economists and members of the public aren’t hearing about it.

This can happen in multiple ways.

Sometimes, employers are attributing AI job cuts to factors other than, or in addition to, AI replacement. Other times, AI is chipping away at hours worked rather than taking jobs outright – obscuring the gravity of the issue.

That said, as is, AI job growth is currently outpacing the associated losses. As noted in the article, the number of jobs in AI, according to Mandala, has doubled this year alone, “often in the same areas thought to be prone to cuts”.

“The jobs that are most exposed to AI generally tend to also create opportunities for people who can learn those particular skills,” said Amit Singh, who qualified this by adding that more job cuts are to come in a transformation that is “likely to be swift”.

While it’s unclear whether the average Australian worker has more to gain or lose to the coming AI transformation, the article does make one thing clear – our presumptions involving the technology are often wrong.