Australia’s care sector – aged, disability and childcare – is broken.

It does not meet the demands of a modern and changing world. The implications of continuing to place unreasonable demands on workers in return for little financial reward and minimal job satisfaction are enormous. They extend from the mental health of individuals, to the cohesion of families, and an economic cost of lost opportunities measured in billions of dollars.

The Senate Select Committee on Work and Care, which I have the honour to chair, has put the issues and challenges of the care economy on the public and political agenda with the publication on 18^th October of our Interim Report which includes recommendations for immediate action.

In a welcome and important move, the Labor senators on the committee have joined the Greens and backed the committee’s findings, thereby ensuring a majority report, adding significant political impetus to our work and the promise of much needed reform in this sector.

In more than 100 submissions and four public hearings to date, we have gained tangible insights into the harsh realities of life inside aged care, disability care and childcare workplaces, and in the broader community.

We have found a workforce that is in crisis, facing low wages, overwork, understaffing and a lack of respect. It is an environment that significantly disadvantages working women, who make up the majority of workers in the sector and, after a hard day at work, invariably bear a disproportionate share of the family caring duties at home.

Our committee has concluded that Australia’s work and care system is no longer fit for purpose given the make-up of our workforce and the economic challenges Australia faces, especially as we recover from the pandemic and learn its lessons for our work and care system.

We’ve got millions of Australians who experienced working at home during the COVID pandemic and, while they like it, working from home does have a dark side. Lots of people are struggling to disconnect from their phone or their computer because they feel the pressure to be seen to be working and accountable. These devices are now competing with their children for attention, and children are often the losers in that context.

There is a lot of research showing that being tied to our devices, as the stress of being virtually on call while people are at home in their family space, has a mental health cost, and certainly affects the care and engagement that we can offer those we love. This phenomenon has proved so pervasive that a number of European countries have moved to establish a ‘right to disconnect’, allowing employees to switch off their phone and devices after the working day is done.

Our committee has recommended that such a right “be considered for Australian workplace relations law to enable and support productive work from home and flexibility of work, while ensuring workers have the capacity to disconnect from their job and to work their contractual hours”.

Discussion of a right to disconnect is the latest, and most novel, manifestation of a demand for greater flexibility in our working lives. In hearings around Australia, we have found that “people balancing work and care responsibilities need workplaces to better understand the unpredictable nature of care. However, the committee has received strong evidence that basic forms of flexibility are not available to many employees”.

“Given the strength of evidence before the committee we are strongly of the view that reform is needed to the Fair Work Act to rectify this imbalance and better support working carers; this reform could be accomplished in the short term with important benefits for working carers.”

Some of the shortcomings in our work and care regime are perplexing. How is it, for example, that in a sector like retailing where sales patterns are a known quantity and hours of business are predictable, it is apparently not possible to advise employees what their hours of work will be tomorrow, let alone next week? The expression, a lack of ‘roster justice’, has been coined to describe such outcomes.

The pressure on employees and the competing demands of work and care, both in workplaces and for those working from home, confirms that the balance is out of whack in the context in which we now live. We should be talking about support and a voice for workers that is backed up by legally enforceable rights – something our committee has recommended for both a ‘right to disconnect’ and a right to request flexible work.

The committee has heard that the work-care balance is not right, working carers are suffering, and this disproportionately affects women. Women have been the ‘shock absorbers’ of the pandemic and they are the shock absorbers of an outdated work-care system. There is a limit to how much pressure and stress people can absorb. The system is broken and it’s only a matter of time before people, particularly women, break too. In fact, it’s already happening.

The pursuit of better pay, as justified as that is, is certainly not the primary motivation for the people who are leaving the care economy in large numbers. It’s more fundamental than that – people ache for a better quality of life for those they care for, their partners and themselves.

To do nothing in the face of this crisis is not an option and that is why the Select Committee has made some recommendations for urgent action at this mid-point in our work.

There is no doubt we need to lift pay across the care economy – disability care, child care, aged care. The Fair Work Commission is currently considering a proposal for a 25 per cent increase in pay rates for the aged care sector. If aged care workers get a significant boost in pay, which they should, we have to think about what sort of distortions that decision might create across the broader care economy.

We don’t want to lose workers from child and disability care into aged care because wages are higher in that space. We need to improve conditions across the care sector with appropriate wage relativities between the different parts of the sector.

Other practical actions that would address the inequities and challenges of the care sector include extending the Paid Parental Leave scheme from its current maximum of 18 to 26 weeks. As we bedded down that recommendation in our interim report, we were delighted to see the Federal Government announce such an increase, over a fairly extensive timeline. And we still have a long way to travel to reach the OECD standard of 52 weeks.

Other recommendations for immediate action in our interim report include upgrading our collection and analysis of data on workers, their families and workplaces, and enhancing the quality of early childhood education and care, particularly for First Nations children.

In a fiscal environment where support for businesses and individuals affected by the COVID pandemic, and its impact on economic growth, has changed the context of the federal budget, it is reasonable to consider the cost of fixing our work and care system. Here is one perspective. The onus of caring for families unquestionably falls on women and it is their careers that are most compromised, and often cut short by that responsibility. Now consider the comment made by the Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, at September’s Jobs and Skills Summit when she said that if women’s workforce participation rate matched men, Australia would increase its GDP by 8.7 per cent, or $353 billion, by 2050. Fixing our work and care system is a productivity as well as a gender equity and health issue.

Adopting the recommendations of our interim report would go some way towards realising the financial dividend that flows from giving women, and all working carers, a fairer go in our workplaces and the broader community.

Barbara Pocock is a Greens senator for South Australia. She chairs the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care which is due to make its final report in February 2023.