PERSONAL AND ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT

Personal and Organisation Development

Personal and Organisation Development

Introduction

Young Australians are increasingly combining study with work. Research and media reports frequently reveal that young Australian workers know little about their employment rights, placing them in a poor bargaining position and exposing them to the risk of exploitation. This study, using data from a survey of 1200 Australian university students, finds that students with experience in the labour market are more knowledgeable about their current employment arrangements and more confident about entering the graduate labour market once they finish their studies, reporting higher expectations of job security and being able to negotiate pay. Students also seem aware of segments in the graduate labour market, with confidence also varying by field of study.

Australia has one of the highest rates of university student employment in the world. In 2006, 70.6 percent of full-time undergraduate students worked during semester (James et al., 2007). On average, full-time undergraduates are working 13.6 hours per week during semester, with one in six (14 percent) working more than 20 hours per week (James et al., 2007: 38). The majority of university student workers are still in their teens or early 20s, and during this period their understanding of the economic system and the function of institutions such as trade unions is still developing. Traditionally, young people learn about work and its regulation from family (Dickinson & Emler, 1992; Furnham & Stacey, 1991) and school (McDonald & Dear, 2005; Sultana, 1988), although Australian education systems have been criticized for not teaching young people enough about how work is regulated (Denniss, 2005; McDonald & Dear, 2005, 7; Norrie, 2005, 79).

In this context, student employment has been identified as an increasingly important source of young workers' knowledge about the labour market and employment relations (Jackson, 2005; McDonald et al., 2007; Smith & Green, 2001). As students derive knowledge about how employment relations function, they also form expectations about how they will negotiate the labour market into the future. This is so even though surveys of student workers have indicated that many young workers do not know their employment rights and conditions (Jackson, 2005, 12; Price et al., 2010, 66; Smiljanic, 2004, 63). The lack of knowledge is assumed to place young workers at immediate risk of exploitation, but less consideration has been given to whether young workers' early experiences with employment relations in the student labour market have any longterm implications. The aim of this study is to explore what university students know about the regulation of their own employment, and whether their employment arrangements and other labour-market experiences are associated with what they expect from employment relations once they finish their studies and enter the graduate labour market.

The recent economic downturn is a reminder that young people face a greater risk of job insecurity, including unemployment as well as being unable to find permanent or ongoing work (Richardson & Mavromaras, 2010, 168). Secondary student employment improves employment outcomes after finishing study (Vickers et ...