`Family friendliness
The Work and Family Unit in the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations
and Small Business released a report in June called “Work and Family --
State of Play 1998”. The report examines “the extent of progress and developments
in the spread of family friendly provisions at Australian workplaces generally,
and specifically through the legislative framework provided by the Workplace
Relations Act 1996”.
It reports on the incidence of “family friendly” provisions in the certified
agreements and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) that have replaced
awards coverage.
Family friendly practices are divided into two groupings. The first
includes “tangible items”, such as on-site child-care centres, family rooms,
and conditions such as paid parental leave, career breaks and purchased
leave schemes.
“While paid maternity and paternity leave are obviously important conditions
for employees, and are very beneficial for employers in terms of increasing
retention rates, they are accessed at most only a few times during the
working life of an employee. Similarly, on-site child care centres are
a great facility, particularly if no other child care providers are available
close to work and home, but they are only used by parents with children
of a particular age.”
What a bother! All that outlay by the boss and the employees use the
service only once or twice in their working lives.
The report points to a second group of provisions to show that AWAs
have succeeded in making workplaces family friendly. These include flexitime,
control over start and finish times, influence over the pace of work, access
to a phone at work and access to regular part-time work. These measures
are “arguably just as important to employees with family responsibilities,
and cost the employer little to provide”.
Approximately 67% of certified agreements and 79% of AWAs include one
or more family friendly measure, with flexible working hours being the
most common (52%).
The report extols the repressive Workplace Relations Act's encouragement
of family friendliness: “It allows employers and employees to sit down
and decide what terms and conditions suit them best. They are not being
dictated to by third parties such as unions who have a very poor record
of helping employees combine work and family responsibilities.”
The report neglects to mention that hard-won conditions are being sacrificed
in many agreements, and that those workers in weak bargaining positions
-- especially women and people from non-English speaking backgrounds --
are far worse off than when they were covered by the conditions of an award.
It was the strength of workers organised through their trade unions
that won significant gains for workers, like maternity leave, paid holidays,
paid sick leave and wage increases. These conditions were not the result
of a friendly chat with the boss over tea and scones. They were won using
industrial action and often in conjunction with movements like the women's
liberation movement, which fought hard for child-care and other conditions
that made it easier for women to participate in paid employment.
Part-time work is widely touted as a great advance for women, even by
some feminists, because it supposedly allows women to combine work and
family life. But most women part-time workers to not have a choice; they
would rather work full-time, but child-care is too expensive (around $170
per week per child, or 37% of the average weekly wage for women).
The fact that it is overwhelmingly women who take part-time work after
having children reflects that parenting and unpaid work in the home are
still seen as women's work. The government's industrial relations legislation
exacerbates this. It is employers, not women, who benefit from the “flexibility”
of part-time work.
While it was the Australian Democrats who allowed the Coalition government
to enact the anti-worker Workplace Relations Act in 1996, the ALP-dominated
trade union bureaucracy's refusal to put up a decent struggle against individual
and workplace agreements replacing awards was just as big a sell-out.
Workers need to once again stand together and fight back if we are to
defend the gains won by and for women in the past. Real flexibility and
real choice for women workers will not be granted by governments and their
big business chums, but must be taken from them through struggle.
By Margaret Allum
