Workers in a Changing Work Environment

Both projects fed our continuing interest in the nature of competence, who has authority to define it and how it is policed. This is the common thread between the two projects, but it is also central to our new and current study. This project, under the banner of the Australian Literacy Research Program, is based upon the knowledge that the Australian workforce is becoming increasingly casualised. (Australia boasts a figure of 41% of the workforce who are not permanent employees.) In the past, workers with literacy dependencies were supported through staff networks in dealing with challenging literacy tasks. They were often “buddied” with people who could help. In a casualised workforce these relationships may not be possible.

A further complication for vulnerable employees is that the literacy demands are increasing. Our economy is wedded to policies of outsourcing work and managing suppliers through rigorous auditing systems. These trends are particularly observable within the industries of aged care and food manufacturing and preparation. Both these industries have been the subject of considerable litigation as a result of food poisoning or inadequate care. As a result, issues of risk management have become synonymous with quality management and exercise dominance over concepts of competence, and hence literacy, in these industries.

Within this environment, our project has set out to investigate how workers, particularly contingent workers, manage within this changing work environment in the two identified sectors. As is often the case, the deeper our involvement the more new questions arise. The central issue that is beckoning to us is how key texts in industry are interpreted to define competence, and literacy as it is embedded in competence.

Aged Care Industry

Aged care is an industry that has been managed and staffed mostly by older women motivated by humanitarian concerns. They have worked in autonomous ways within a community of practice particular to different facilities. Those days are gone and people whose primary motivator was heart-based are being replaced with people who are systems driven. The accreditation document that authorizes institutions to operate and receive government funding is, in many ways, a document that values humanitarian concerns. It talks about the need for aged care residents to determine their own futures. It respects individual autonomy and the ideological and lifestyle affiliations of residents. But it is read and enacted in very particular ways by auditors and facility managers. Under new management philosophies, set practices have been defined as the interpretation of the principles and often, those practices leave little room for initiative or authentic personal interaction.