Time to 'casualise' the boss: Rob Campbell's Labour Day message

Professional director and former trade unionist Rob Campbell says the casualisation of the workforce should start stretching to senior executive positions, where companies can reap the biggest savings.

Timed for the Labour Day, Campbell, who chairs NZX-listed Summerset Group and Precinct Holdings, as well as P2P lender Harmoney, said the casualisation of the workforce comes with positives and negatives, but has largely been implemented in jobs which are among the lowest paid, with managers and directors viewing the concept as "being for others" and especially those with the least influence. That's in spite of the potential for bigger gains the higher up the pay-scale the casualisation process is taken.

"Properly structured, having your business able to access senior and high paid skills when and where you want them seems pretty attractive," Campbell said. "Do I really need a full working week from each of the senior executives in my team? Not always is the honest answer.

"In practice, while we are 'flexing at the bottom, we are often promoting salaries and incentives at the top which emphasise total time and other commitments sustained over long periods with major break costs on our business," he said. "Maybe we should be rethinking this and really embracing the flexible work model."

The Labour Day missive is the second time in two months that Campbell has laid down the gauntlet on corporate norms, delivering a searing criticism of the financial sector's remuneration and incentives at an annual Institute of Financial Professionals New Zealand get-together, describing the financial sector elite as "a cost or gate-keeping burden" for people taking commercial risks to build productive businesses.

The increased use of casual labour attracted media headlines earlier this year over the use of 'zero hour' contracts, where on-call staff aren't allocated any guaranteed hours, though a recent survey of small- and medium-sized firms by MYOB found little appetite to use them.

Campbell said the increasingly casual workforce provided benefits such as flexible hours to suit people's lifestyles, but was a threat for others by reducing their ability to earn a sustainable wage from one job and introducing a new set of costs to the process.

"The work pattern change, however challenging for many, is simply too consistent with the pace and direction of change in so many other aspects of social and economic life," he said. "As it evolves we will see ways to deal with the negatives and embrace the positives."

The evolving nature of the labour market has prompted a re-think from the union movement, with the recent merger of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union and the Service and Food Workers Union partly in a bid to catch up with those changing trends, which national secretary Bill Newson describes as employers shifting the risk of employment to the workers.

One of the ways the newly-form E Tu, the country's biggest private sector union, wants to make itself relevant to contractors is by providing ancillary services to them, because it can't organise collective pay bargaining for them, which would breach anti-competition rules in the Commerce Act.

(BusinessDesk)