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Dink on facts of life7/14/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Well, that’s certainly a finding that grabs our attention. Over half the prime working-aged Australian population either had an income below the poverty line and/or worked more than 40 hours a week earning that income. 4 But if you ask, “What proportion of the population was either time-poor or money-poor?”-that is, were poor by one or other (or both) of those standards-the answer jumps to a whopping 51%. In one pretty typical year, the proportion of the prime working-aged Australian population who were “money poor” was just under 13%. Then just go to the Luxembourg Income Study database and run the numbers. Call anyone who spends more than 40 hours per week in paid labour “time poor”. 3 Let’s take that as a rough-and-ready indicator of time poverty. Then recall the international convention (to which Australia is a signatory) that says people should not have to work more than 40 hours per week in paid labour. Call anyone who has less income than that “money poor”. ![]() Begin with the standard way of calculating poverty rates in terms of money-as half of the median equivalent income (i.e., household income adjusting for household size) across the country as a whole. Here’s one back-of-the-envelope way of getting a sense of that. That is the observation that people can be “time poor” as well as “money poor”, and that those two may not always track one another closely. One key insight runs through all those books. Janeen Baxter and Diane Gibson’s book, Double Take (1990), and Michael Bittman’s on Juggling Time (1992) stand alongside international classics such as Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1991) and Arlie Hoschshild’s The Second Shift (1989) and The Time Bind (1997) in that tradition. Those ABS studies have become the gold standard, methodologically, among time use researchers worldwide (Stinson, 1999).įrom the earliest days of those time use studies, family researchers have been exploring them to cast light on issues of work–life balance that confront Australian families. Piloted in 1987, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has been conducting time use studies (increasingly intermittently, which is a great pity) for almost a quarter century now. 2Īmong the many high-quality research tools available for exploring those issues in Australia, I want to draw attention to one in particular: the Australian Time Use Study. It has been studying that for three decades now: through its path-breaking Maternity Leave Study through the book Work and Family Life (Wolcott & Glezer, 1995), and the magisterial Australian Living Standards Study underlying it and continuing into the present day through the Institute’s research theme on “Families and Work”. 1 Taken very literally, and seen in a narrow family law context, that could have been pretty limiting.īut right from the start, the Institute saw the impact of work on family life as an important part of the “factors affecting marital and family stability”. The Act charged it with (and I quote) studying “factors affecting marital and family stability in Australia”. The Institute’s original mandate seemed to give it little scope for action. Not only were the circumstances of its birth unfortunate. Conceived as an afterthought to the Family Law Act of 1975, the Institute’s birthing took fully another 5 years, and another Act of Parliament to patch up botched initial legislation. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) fits that bill. But they lie at the very opposite ends of the spectrum when time use is calibrated in terms of our measure of needs-based 'discretionary time' instead.Īustralians pride themselves on having dubious origins. A person in a dual-income household without children and a lone mother would appear to be equally time-poor on naïve time use measures of 'free time'. He shows the importance of making this distinction by reference to groups that are the most and the least advantaged, in terms of this measure of 'discretionary time'. In his keynote presentation to the 11th AIFS Conference, 2010, the author proposes a way of measuring how much time people strictly need to spend on various activities of daily life. In particular, people use their time in the way they do out of choice or out of necessity. However, social researchers ought to take care in interpreting that data. People can be 'time-poor', just as they can be 'money-poor' and those two groups are very often not the same. Social researchers make heavy use of that data, which helps us see important dimensions to social disadvantage that are elided by statistics reporting financial flows alone. Australia is blessed with time use data that constitute the gold standard worldwide. ![]()
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