All posts tagged work

• November 17, 2017

  The Weekend Australian Magazine story: ‘Mind The Gap: Training Queensland Rail train drivers’, November 2017

  A feature story for The Weekend Australian Magazine, published in the November 11-12 issue. Excerpt below.

  Mind The Gap

  It took a “rail fail” to realise the network needed more train drivers. So what does it take to be one?

  

  The passenger train slows as it approaches Grovely Station, 11 stops north of Brisbane Central, on a lovely winter’s Friday. At precisely 10.10am it comes to a stop and a bloke alights, pulls out a can of bourbon and cola and takes a swig as he passes the train driver’s cabin, occupied by tutor Chris Haag and his trainee, Matau Hohaia. They pay no heed. Hohaia pauses for a few moments and then presses a button on the console, triggering an automated announcement that’s heard throughout the carriages behind his ­comfortable seat. “Doors closing,” says a calm male voice. “Please stand clear.”

  At the end of the platform a few metres from the driver’s seat is a silver pole topped by a single yellow light. “Restricted signal,” says Hohaia, thinking aloud in a coded shorthand for the ­benefit of his tutor. “So our red will be the red starter at Keperra. We’re going to be taking the 60 for the 80 straight track sign, then 20 over the magnet, stopping at the six-car stop.”

  Hohaia reaches a top speed of 60km/h and slows to ease into Keperra Station, bringing the front cabin to a stop beside a mark on the platform that’s no bigger than a dinner plate. This black ­circle inside a yellow square denotes the proper finishing point for a six-car carriage, part of the Queensland Rail Citytrain service. “Beautiful. It’s surprising just how difficult that is — it takes a lot of practice,” says Haag. “Why thank you,” replies Hohaia with a grin. “I’ve been working on that!”

  “And I owe you a jelly bean,” says Haag, referring to the unofficial reward system for trainees who stick the landing at each platform. “You’ll make me a poor man from all those jelly beans!” At 29, Haag is eight years Hohaia’s junior, but the older apprentice has a great respect for the keen eyes and observations of the younger master, who is helping him to finish his training and become one of Queensland’s most precious resources: a qualified train driver.

  To read the full story, visit The Australian. Above photo credit: Justine Walpole.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• August 12, 2013

  The Guardian story: ‘School’s out early for overworked and undersupported young teachers’, August 2013

  A story for The Guardian Australia; my first for the website. Excerpt below; click the image to read the full story.

  School’s out early for overworked and undersupported young teachers

  Nearly half of all teaching graduates leave the profession in the first five years, Monash University research has found

  

  Close to 50% of Australians who graduate as teachers leave the profession within the first five years, many citing overwhelming workloads and unsupportive staffrooms as their main reason for leaving the job, according to new research.

  The apparent exodus of early career teachers is a significant drain on resources, says Dr Philip Riley, of Monash University’s faculty of education, who is leading Monash’s research into the reasons that lead to young educators resigning at an alarming rate.

  “It’s costing the nation a huge amount of money. It’s just a waste, particularly when we’ve got so many threats to the funding of education,” he says.

  Riley estimates that between 40% to 50% of “early career” teachers – defined as recent graduates with less than five years of practical experience – ultimately seek work in another profession, a nationwide figure that’s consistent with research published in the UK and US.

  The most frequently cited reasons for teachers leaving aren’t related to the traditional complaints of difficult student behaviour or mediocre salaries. Instead, Riley’s research – currently unpublished, with a view to publish later in 2013 – pinpoints unsupportive staffrooms, overwhelming workloads, and employers’ preference for short-term contracts as the main areas of tension.

  “Graduate teachers feel relatively well-prepared to deal with difficult kids, although that can be hard,” says Riley. “Young teachers tend to go into schools highly optimistic and full of energy, but if there’s no one to take them under their wing and help them through those first couple of years, they get very disillusioned. The smart ones start to imagine an easier future doing something else.”

  The estimates in Riley’s study are supported by the Australian Education Union and highlight a system in crisis. “It’s a very demanding profession,” says the AEU federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos. “Workloads and stress are both high. Teachers remain undervalued, underpaid and overworked.”

  This scenario rings true for Nick Doneman, a 28-year-old based in Brisbane. He graduated with a bachelor of education from Queensland University of Technology in 2007. “I really enjoyed my degree,” he says. “My practical experiences [before graduating] were really good. But all of that died quite quickly when I saw that the job wasn’t so much about teaching as it was about being a parent. That was a huge turn-off for me. I felt like classroom teaching was only 25% of the job – the rest was dealing with kids and all their issues, the things that go on between them and their parents, and behaviour management, as well as paperwork.”

  Doneman says he got “thrown from school to school” upon graduating; he took several short-term contract jobs, teaching English, Film and Television, and Social Science, but found it difficult to attain full-time employment. His contract stints involved travelling to schools in and around Brisbane, including Kenmore, Bray Park and Carbrook. He found that it wasn’t the kind of job where you could go home at the chime of the three o’clock school bell with a clear head, either.

  “It involved a lot of work in the afternoons and on the weekend, if you wanted to do the job properly,” he says. “It’s easy to be a bad teacher, and not plan ahead of time what you’re going to teach.”

  In each staffroom, Doneman looked around him and found that very few teachers could relate to the young graduate’s initial passion for making a difference to students’ lives.

  “The majority simply did it as a job,” he says. “They didn’t feel like they had the responsibility to do any planning outside of work. I couldn’t live like that, doing a crappy job. There was no teacher at any of those schools where I looked at them and thought, ‘I like what your life looks like’.” After three and a half years, Doneman threw in the towel, went back to university, and now works as a paramedic.

  To read the full story, visit The Guardian.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• October 24, 2011

  The Courier-Mail author profile: Melissa Gregg and ‘Work’s Intimacy’, October 2011

  A short author profile for The Courier-Mail’s new Life section, which is included in the Saturday paper. Click the below image to view the version that appeared in print.

  The text I’ve supplied underneath is the full article, which was slightly edited in print due to space restrictions.

  How to leave work at home: Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg

  If the office exists in your phone, how is it possible to claim the right to be away from it for any length of time?

  This question is central to Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Gregg’s book is the result of a three-year study of information workers – including broadcast journalists, librarians and academics – which took place in Brisbane between 2007 and 2009.

  “That question captures the twin tensions in the book’s title: the idea of work being something that we’re invested in, in a way that’s pleasurable, and the way that technology allows that relationship to be available wherever we are,” she says. “Mobile devices are increasingly marketed as this desirable object because it gives us access to every pleasure we could possibly imagine,” she laughs. “The more portable the device, the more intimate the device, right?”

  If we’re to believe the companies that market these devices, that’s absolutely correct. Yet Gregg’s book contains dozens of examples of salaried professionals struggling to draw barriers between their work and leisure. This behaviour extends to checking and replying to emails outside of the workplace, in preparation for the actual workday.

  “That was extremely common,” Gregg says. “It seemed to point to a sense of unpredictability in people’s work days. We once thought of the office as a mind-numbing routine of 9-5, of always knowing what’s coming, and that being part of the problem. This tendency to check email outside of the office seemed to suggest that, individually, people did not know how to cope with the pace and the unpredictability of the workplace today.”

  For Gregg [pictured below], being based in Brisbane for the duration of her study was a blessing. “As someone who’s always been a bit of an outsider to any city I’ve lived in, I saw this as a great chance to look, from an outsider’s point of view, at changes that were happening in Brisbane at that time”; namely, the way in which the city was positioning itself within a creative economy.

  This confusing transitional period was reflected in the workers Gregg interviewed. She met a 61 year-old university professor, Clive, who said “I worry that I’m going to miss something” if he doesn’t check his email constantly. “I’m a bit addicted,” he said. “Partly because I don’t want email to swamp me. If I had a weekend off the Internet, then on Monday, I just have a huge inbox.”

  Similar anxieties were expressed by Patrick, a 24-year old part-time radio producer who barely sees his partner, Adam, since their schedules rarely align. Yet Patrick admitted “I do get a pang of sadness” when the pair were home at the same time, but both absorbed in their individual computer screens. The author dubs this being ‘together alone’.

  Gregg says that maintaining an emotional distance in these scenarios is “one of the challenges of this kind of research, because you’re always needing to retain objectivity in the moment of the interview, and to say as little as possible to affect them telling you what’s really going on.”

  She says that “a number of the interviews were quite shocking to me, and did make me feel that there was merit in having people talking about these issues, because they could at least become prominent in their minds for a while, to see just how much they could recognise their relationships had changed within the family structure.”

  Though Gregg says she’s “no shining example” in contrast to the work/life issues raised by her interviewees, she hopes that people “take a little more independent action to refuse the pace of their workplace. Teamwork culture is very coercive because of the rhetoric of collegiality and friendship, so it does make it very difficult for people to resist. But that’s not going to stop me recommending that people do it.”

  Work’s Intimacy can be ordered via Polity Books’ website.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• September 12, 2011

  Stilts journal submission: ‘Home is where I live and work’, September 2011

  I was asked to submit a piece for the first issue of a Brisbane literary journal named Stilts. The brief was short: I could write about anything, as long as it began with ‘Home is where…’. I decided to write frankly about what it’s like to work from home, which I’ve been doing on and off for over two years.

  I’ve included the full text below; click here to check out the rest of the Stilts issue, which includes an excellent piece from John Birmingham. Illustration by Merilyn Smith.

  Home is where I live and work

  Business and leisure, both rolled into the one location. This has benefits and costs. Benefit: No early-morning, cross-town commute. Cost: If I don’t have any meetings scheduled, I generally don’t leave the house. There’s a point each day—usually about 2pm—where I become thoroughly disgusted with myself and have to change out of my pyjamas. Benefit: A dedicated, comfortable workspace that’s free from distraction. Theoretically. Cost: Every form of entertainment imaginable is never more than a few footsteps or mouse clicks away from that same workspace.

  I am a freelance journalist. I’ve been doing this full time for almost a year. Monday to Friday I research, pitch, interview for, and write stories. I try to adhere to the business hours of the ‘real world’ so that I can interact with people at their workplaces. People, like editors, who determine my weekly income.

  I often feel as though I’m living outside the system. I can pinpoint this feeling on my choice to not partake in the work commute. I’ve been there before, and found that the cyclical nature of that process—a joyless hour or two that’s essentially lost to the sands of time—was a massive drain on my creativity and optimism. Occasionally, I feel guilty for living outside this daily ritual. I don’t take my ability to roll out of bed whenever the hell I feel like it for granted; more often than not, I feel like a cheat, a scoundrel, for having arranged my life in this way. If I’m to fully understand the world as a journalist and capture that understanding in my writing, it’s important to be able to relate to my fellow man.

  I’ve blocked off Saturday as my ‘PC-free day’. Before I made this decision, the laptop was the biggest source of anxiety in my life. I’m not an anxious person but the laptop is the source of my entire income. My mindset was something like, if I’m not using the laptop, I’m not getting paid. I need to get paid to continue living my life outside of the system. Now that Saturday is my PC-free day, I only feel this anxiety six days a week, not seven.

  Ultimately, the fact that I live and work in Brisbane is largely inconsequential. When I’m at home, working, I could be anywhere in the world. All I need is my laptop, a sturdy desk, a strong internet connection, a comfortable chair, and loud speakers. Everything else is a bonus. With those five components in place, I’m content.

  Brisbane is convenient. I know a lot of people here. There are a lot of stories to be told here. I don’t have enough experience living elsewhere to compare Brisbane’s creative communities to any another. But I know from experience that Brisbane is a fine place for a freelance journalist to call home.

  For more Stilts, visit their website. Thanks to editor Katia Pase for inviting me to write.

  No Comments / Published Writing, Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• May 16, 2010

  Interviewed: Plus One Brisbane

  Sarah McVeigh of Brisbane music blog Plus One asked me some questions, mostly about music writing and my work habits. I answered them. Excerpts below.

  Is Brisbane as good a place as any to be a music writer?

  Without doubt. There are loads of great stories within the local scene waiting to be told, and there are always nationals and internationals visiting. Anyone who argues otherwise isn’t trying hard enough.

  You seem to be getting alot of work – what’s your work routine like? How much time is spent chained to the desk? How do you deal with all the distractions of being constantly online?

  I pitch at least ten story ideas to various publications each week. Those that are approved, I write. Those that are rejected, I shop elsewhere if appropriate; if not, I let them go. I use an application called RescueTime to track the time that I spend on the computer each week, and how my time is split between different kinds of software usage. (It’s free and it’s pretty ace, you should check it out.) Looking back through my personal history, I spend 40-45 hours per week in front of a computer. I split my time between working from my bedroom, and from an office with friends just outside of the Brisbane CBD.

  Distractions are tough. Really fucking tough. If I told you that I had the discipline to work all day without checking in on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Mess+Noise, The Vine, ABC News and email, I’d be lying. But I am improving. Slowly.

  That’s the beauty and burden of working in and around the internet: it’s both my workplace and playground. It is a pleasure and a curse. But all things considered, I get by. I don’t miss deadlines. Those are the biggest motivator to quit screwing around and get to work: the reality that if you miss a deadline, you’re fucked. So the goal is to consistently create deadlines for myself (published articles, reviews, blog stories, Waycooljnr entries, etc) to ensure that I’m constantly on deadline. That’s the mentality I aim to inhabit.

  On a related note, the website that I use to plan my week is TeuxDeux. It’ll probably change your life, like it did mine.

  What (in your view) is the likelihood of you sustaining a career in music writing? Do you know many young writers who are managing to earn a wage?

  I don’t know many my age who are earning a wage, no. But my skills aren’t based entirely around around writing. I’m doing copywriting and digital strategy on the side. I just tend not to blog about these side gigs, though, because they’re less interesting. In time, though, all will be revealed. It’s all contributing to my path as a writer, in the end, so I’m grateful for every opportunity I receive.

  As to the first question, it’s a case of ‘we’ll see’. Ask me the same question at the end of the year. Right now, it’s fun and it’s profitable, so I see no reason to give it up.

  Full interview at Plus One Brisbane. Thanks Sarah.

  No Comments / Interviewed by Others, Writing / Andrew McMillen

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