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Ohs oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the tenth of September. I'm Harry, I'm Zara. Weekends are sacred in Australia. Whether it's kicking back to have a few beers with mates, exploring the great outdoors, or putting your feet up. It's a rite that work has fought for and was granted by the courts seventy seven years on. We're starting to look at four day work weeks. In today's rewind and
deep Dive. We'll look at how the Ausie weekend came to life and how the nature of work is changing. But first, Sarah, what's making headlines?
The Royal Commission into Defense and Veteran Suicide has handed down its final report, recommending a major overhaul of recruitment processes and better regulation of veterans and defense departments. The Royal Commission lasted three years, heard from hundreds of witnesses and received more than five and a half thousand submissions on the prevalence of poor mental health in Australia's military.
It found one thousand, six hundred and seventy seven serving and ex Defense Force personnel had died by suicide in the years nineteen ninety seven to twenty twenty one. That's more than twenty times those killed on active duty. The Royal Commission made one hundred and twenty two recommendations, including reforming the culture of the military and strengthening accountability for the health and well being of eighty f members. The Government will now consider whether it will adopt any of
these recommendations. If this story has raised any concerns for you, you can reach out to Lifeline any time on thirteen eleven fourteen or open arms on one eight hundred zero one one zero four six.
A group of Western Australian farmers are set to protest outside Parliament House in Cambridge today against the government's ban on live sheep exports. In July, legislation passed the Federal Parliament to introduce a live sheep export ban by May eight. Western Australia is the only state still conducting live sheep exports,
which have been criticized by animal welfare groups. Now advocacy group Keep the Sheep is protesting the ban, which they say will quote damage regional communities and impacted multiple industries. Today's protest in Canberra follows rallies in Perth and Regional wa.
Multiple polls released this week show Kamala Harris and Donald Trump neck and neck in the US presidential race just two months out from the November election. A national poll from The New York Times in Siena College showed Trump ahead of Harris by just one percent, while CBS News and Yugov polling in Key States showed Harris ahead of Trump, also just by one percent. The candidates will officially face off for the first time on live televis tomorrow morning
Australian time. That'll be the first debate since late June, when Trump debated current President Joe Biden.
And Today's good news. It turns out galaxies are a lot bigger than scientists initially estimated, according to new research from Durham University. An image taken by the researchers showed the gas around galaxies reaches much further into space than previously thought. According to the research, the discovery could help us to understand how galaxies build mass over time, and could impact how different galaxies interact.
Harry, I saw your piece on this over the weekend and thought that it was an excellent piece of trivia that people could go and take to their Tuesday trivia nights to say, hey, do you know how long the weekend's been around formally in Australia.
Would you have gotten it right before?
Certainly not, would have theyiled that one. But I think that this is so interesting because you know, us here twenty twenty four believe that the weekend is this kind of enshrined right that we have to turn off, and you know, especially with right to disconnect laws, especially to turn off. But it hasn't always been that way.
When I first thought about the weekend coming into existence for the first time seventy seven years ago, I sort of thought, Okay, that's a long time ago. It's been, you know, seventy seven years. But then you look back and think, nineteen forty seven wasn't actually that long ago. I mean, my grandparents, I was going to say, any
about older listeners will take great offense to us. So long ago exactly, and the whole concept of a work is right to some knockoff time just didn't really exist and there wasn't even really a word for it until maybe the nineteen thirties nineteen forties when this idea of a weekend actually started to spread and pick up around the world.
And what was the typical day for an Australian worker prior to to this weekend actually becoming a thing.
I'm sure a lot of people who are listening are visual learners like me. So I wanted to put myself into the boots of a steel factory worker. He and I can say he, because it was a largely masculine industry at the time, would get up at the crack of dawn maybe year around five am and head out to the factory floor slog away burning iron ore to make steel and would clock off sometime in the evening.
Some factories days were even longer and squeezed even more out of their workers, and people would normally work six days a week and the only sanctified day off was a Sunday because in Australia at the time we had a predominantly Anglo Christian population who was running the show and Sunday is the sacred day of rest.
And so then, how did this idea of the weekend come to be?
It was many, many years in the making, and looking back on it, Australia was actually comparatively late compared to some other Western countries, so in the US, UK, New Zealand, they had all developed the idea of the forty hour work week before they entered the Second World War. Once the war ended in nineteen forty five, Australian workers decided
to barrack for this right to reduce their hours. But this had been a fight that had been going on for decades, and many union groups and organizers brought legal action against some industries, including car manufacturers, metal workers, tailors, stonemasons, boiler makers. That's not a word I've heard in the recent past, but at the time was a very big industry.
The unions had pushed for a reduction in working hours, and on the eighth of September in nineteen forty seven, the Commonwealth Court of Arbitration made a pretty important ruling that gave life to the idea of the forty hour working week, and in handing down its unanim decision, the court actually said, and I quote, the future will be
watched with concern and interest. So I can't go back and ask the judges what they were thinking when they made this decision, But that kind of language just gives you a sense of how they knew. There was a lot writing on this.
Decision, and I mean that, as you said, betrays a lot of the thinking at the time, which was that it was this really novel concept and it was new and untested, at least in the Australian market, whether people who are posed it or groups that are posed it at the time, i'd presume.
So, yeah, definitely. And in fact, some employer groups had made pretty detailed arguments against introducing a forty hour work week.
So they said that it would devastate some businesses, It would lead to lower productivity, there would be good shortages, price increases, and they leaned on this idea that some overseas trading partners were more competitive than Australia and so reducing working hours would just see their overseas competitors dominate an increasingly globalized trade in a post World War two era.
So while that might have been somewhat accurate when you look at some parts of the world, as I mentioned earlier, some big economies like the US and the UK had already given work as a weekend, so it doesn't really hold water entirely. The unions have pointed out that some conservative politicians at the time were keen to avoid the forty hour workweek. But I got to say the tune
has definitely changed over time. I was reminded of the time when Prime Minister Scott Morrison in twenty nineteen, who is from the more conservative side of politics the Liberal Party, went against his more progressive opponent Bill Shortened for proposing a way to get more electric vehicles sold and used in Australia with this line.
Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles.
And Scott Morrison went on to beat Bill Shorten at the election. Was it a line like this that helped him? Very possibly, I would say, because the weekend is sacred in Australia. And I spoke with Sally McManus, who is the Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and she quite succinctly said, quote, you wouldn't want to get in between an ordinary person and their right to a weekend. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone fighting against the right to a weekend in this day and age.
No, I would agree with that, But when you are listing the reasons why people at the time or business groups at the time were rallying against this notion of a weekend. It did sound eerily familiar and like the same tune that people who are against the four day work week. Now you know all of these ideas of a loss of productivity, and you know what will happen.
It will devastate businesses those sorts of things. So, I mean, it's been seventy seven years since the six day work week turned into five, and now we are, as I said before, kind of hurdling towards this idea of a four day work week. Where are we at with that now?
Well, I was hoping you'd bring that out, Sarah. When I first looked at this idea of a weekend first coming into existence, some people said to me, the court should have barracked for a three day weekend instead of
a turns weekend. But that's where we're out now. So the weekend was hard fought for, and the conversation is really increasingly focused on a four day work week and whether it could improve productivity and work them morale because we know, especially post COVID, that burnout rates are pretty
high in most industries. In fact, Australia has one of the highest rates of burnout in the world, with Microsoft's work Index trend showing around sixty two percent of workers feel burnt out, compared to a global average of forty
eight percent. So a few workplaces have now trialed a four day work week, like Manibank, the private health insurer, and in twenty twenty two there were about two dozen companies that trialed the four day work week and recorded a sixty four percent in burnout among staff, and more than a third of workers also said they felt less
stressed at work. And it's trickled into politics too. The act government is considering a four day workweek trial for the public sector employees, and that was after a parliamentary committee had recommended it.
I'm curious because in the forties the push was really led by the unions. Are we seeing the unions behind this current push for a four day working week in the way that they were behind you establishing the weekend back then.
They definitely are considering it. In fact, when I spoke to Sally McManus, she said that they've been looking through some ideas of reducing the work week from thirty eight hours, which is what it's at now to thirty five, So that would take the number of hours worked down three hours spread across four days, but incomes wouldn't be affected. Salaries wouldn't be impacted by that kind of work week. So the unions are definitely looking at.
And I mean they did have quite a bit to do with the right to disconnect legislation as well, So I guess there are just different ways that this is now being woven into the public conversation.
Absolutely, but you also mentioned a really important point that I think is worth touching on, which is there was some resistance to the weekend initially from some of those employee groups, and there continues to be a little bit of pushback when it comes to looking at the four day workweek. There are some very genuine questions about how that would actually play out, what that would look like, and there are definitely some issues that some business groups
are concerned about. So you and I have also spoken at length about the nature of the workplace as boss to employee, and I think it's just important to note that we as journalists also work in one of those industries where it could be really tricky to bring in a four day work week, just by the sheer nature of the news cycle. It's a twenty fourth to seven grow.
If we could just switch it off one day of the week, no news today, bragging news.
No, no one do anything interesting. But that would also require people to just not die on Sat Days because that's newsworthy. Significant events can occur at any time of the day. We just would never be able to predict it. So the four day work week's just definitely something we're going to keep hearing about. And in the meantime, Zara, Happy weekend anniversary to.
Happy weekend Anniversary, and thanks for jumping on the plot again today, Harry. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Daily OS. If you learn something and want to take it to trivia on Tuesday, let us know. We love hearing about all the fun facts that you pick up through the week. If you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there. Otherwise, if you are watching on YouTube, can leave a comment on there. We will be back again tomorrow, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Runda Bungelung Cargoton woman, Gadigol Country. The Daily Oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.