Effects of Casual Employment on Employees and the Economy

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Enterprise Industrial Relations
Name
Institution Affiliation
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Enterprise Industrial Relations
Introduction
Social legitimacy refers to the idea that a regime that lacks societal acceptance is bound
to disintegrate (Boxall and Purcell 2016). In terms of employment, the societal acceptance level
of most employers is low. That is because they fail to offer a work environment that increases the
employees’ ability, provide the opportunities that offer a contribution to the economy and
provide motivation to employees by adopting casual employment. The popularity of casual
employment leads to a low level of social acceptance because of its exploitative nature. It also
has low flexibility. Flexibility refers to the ability to transform or change easily. This type of
employment concentrates on getting the most out of the employees within a short time and
leaving them without any investments in their skills and abilities. Casual employment has the
nature that it does not care about the development of the employees as individuals. In its nature,
it has barely invested in the development of the workforce. That is detrimental to the employees
and retrogressive to the development of an economy. More reasons for that have been discussed
below.
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A recent decision by the Fair Work commission to provide casual employees including the ones
in the retail and hospitality sector, will have the right for requesting full time or part time
employment. That is under a federal coalition shake up initiative meant to neutralize the attacks
coming from labor and unions. That move was not received well by the Australian trade unions.
Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O’Dwyer weighed on the move but the Australian Council of
Trade Unions weighed on intervention measures with the secretary of the Union accusing the

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minister for defending companies to rort the system. The union has been carrying campaigns that
target increased casualisation of work.
It is important to understand that the rise of casualization in Australia is coincident with the
Accord signing between Labor governments and unions in the year 1983. That saw the
agreement of unions to take industrial actions to defend the rights of workers for a promised
social safety net.
However, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has claimed that there is an
increasing casualisation. The Autralian Industry Group however, refutes the claim and purport
that there has not been increased casualisation rate in Autralia.
Through that agreement, many employers have been taking advantage to exploit workers through
the means explained below. The recent push by trade unions to defend the rights of workers on
the basis of social acceptance have been a positive initiative because of defending the rights of
workers in the following ways;
Casual employment hurts the employee and shows the greed of the employer by striving
to exploit human labor with minimum compensation. Many employers like using this kind of
employment because they will not have committed themselves to a lot of employment benefits
(Barry and You, 2018). Therefore, they use the employees as much as they want and leave them
to their devices. In as much as this is one technique for making savings and cutting costs, it
normally leads to unfairness to the employee. The reasons for that are discussed below;
One of the reasons casual employment is burdensome to the employee is that it has no
facility for the provision of access to sick leave. Employees have the right to stop his/her work
and leave the area of work without having to undergo disciplinary actions if he/she has any