Living and Working

The third of the Boyer Lectures by Professor Marmot is on a timely subject. With our ideologically driven government seeking to push people into under-employment and temporary work as way of cutting social security spending.  While Christian Porter pushes the idea of 'self-reliance' and 'obligation' it is worth asking are the government acting in people's best interests.

Cartoon by David Pope

​Professor Marmot underlines that while unemployment is bad for health, work can damage health too. Jobs characterised by high demands and low control, imbalance between efforts and reward, organisational injustice, shift work and job insecurity increase risk of physical and mental illness. The lower the position in the social hierarchy the greater the concentration of these stressful characteristics. When work is no longer the way out of poverty, health suffers.

Porter is seeking to push people into any work, and the question is will this cost more than it saves? As he is following a conga line of blinkered neoliberals into a social experiment that has repeatedly failed... the answer is YES. For the evidence on why Porter is wrong.... Listen to the Third Boyer Lecture Here.