With the release of unemployment figures late last year, John Howard remarked approvingly on an apparent fall in "second income earners" in the work force. There's obviously no doubt in the PM's mind that women should be safely at home, not out taking "men's" jobs.
It seems contradictory: the government's rhetoric and welfare policies extol the virtues of women's traditional role as unpaid mothers and wives, yet its economic and industrial relations policies are entrenching women's waged work force participation, which is needed to supplement increasingly inadequate household income from men's wages.
The economic and political context in which this reinforcement of women's "double burden" is occurring hinges around the neo-liberal attacks since the early 1980s to drive down all wages and working conditions and create a more "flexible" work force, and reduce government spending. Reasserting that women's "proper" place is as secondary waged workers who move in and out of the work force depending on the stage in their reproductive lives and "responsibilities" serves both ends by ideologically justifying government funding cuts to public child-care, aged care and health care services, youth benefits, and so on, while rendering women a "reserve army" of cheaper labour which exerts downward pressure on all workers' wages and conditions.
Some of the significant milestones on this neo-liberal road were Labor's 1983 Prices and Incomes Accord followed by its introduction of enterprise bargaining in 1991. The restraint upon the labour movement generally, including its ability eliminate the male-female wage gap, and the gradual introduction of a productivity-based wage system, began the erosion of working conditions and relative loss of full-time, permanent jobs in favour of part-time and casual jobs.
Both enterprise bargaining and subsequently the Coalition's 1996 Workplace Relations Act (WRA) have played a major role in converting workers from full-time to part-time: according to August 1998 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, 9% of workers are now employed on a casual full-time basis and another 17% are employed casual part-time. In addition, 9% are permanent part-time workers and 17% are casual part-time.
These changes have increased the chronic gap between men's and women's wages.
Unequal pay
In 1907, the famous Harvester decision pegged women's wages at two-thirds of the level of men's. The idea was that the male wage should be sufficient to support a family and women's work force participation would be only to support themselves.
The right to equal pay was legislated in 1969 (affecting 18% of women workers) and the concept of equal pay for work of equal value was legislated in 1972 and extended to all awards after that. By 1977, the gender pay gap was reduced to 19%. However, despite unequal pay having been formally overturned, the gap remains.
In evidence to the 1998-99 NSW Pay Equity Inquiry, the Australian National University's Bob Gregory identified a range of factors that influence the gender wage gap, including the state's role in fixing particular wages and incomes, competition among professionals, the size of the firm, union coverage (unionised women currently earn, on average, 22% more than non-unionised women), and occupational crowding/segregation.
Australia has one of the highest levels of occupational segregation by gender in the world. Although women are increasingly found in occupations that used to be the preserve of men, the overall degree of segregation has not narrowed appreciably. In May 1996, 56% of women workers were congregated in two industrial sectors: clerks or sales people, or personal service workers.
Gregory pointed out that centralised wage bargaining systems (such as the national wage case system, which was largely dismantled with the introduction of enterprise bargaining in the 1990s) generate less gender wage inequality than non-centralised systems and also tend to produce less of a wage gap between female segregated occupations and average female wages.
Meg Smith also gave evidence to the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry, based on her comparison of the wages of hairdressers and motor mechanics. She noted that the characteristics of female dominated occupations and industries, all of which affect women's wages, include segregation, small work places, low levels of apprenticeships, low visibility, reliance on award by consent (the formation of industrial agreements for pay increases or working conditions, and their variation only with the consent of both the union or workers and the employer), service industries which are people-oriented with a high level of interpersonal and nurturing skills (traditionally undervalued in skills recognition and hence remuneration terms), and high levels of casual and part-time work.
Smith's study (a relatively conservative example of the impact of sex discrimination in pay equity since both occupations require a TAFE trade certificate and the motor mechanic occupation is relatively low paid compared to many male-dominated occupations) showed that the only significant difference between the two industries is that one is female dominated, yet there is a considerable difference in ordinary-time earnings between them. This difference is a result of hairdressing's lower rate of unionisation, industry regulation and recognition of qualifications and skills, particularly in the post-trade area. As well, motor mechanics are far more likely to receive over-award payments and paid overtime than hairdressers.
Discriminatory job evaluation
Another study from a very different industry was carried out in 1998 by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Belinda Probert for the National Tertiary Education Industry Union on gender pay equity amongst academic and non-academic university staff. The pay differential is quite startling: male academics earned on average $439 per fortnight more than female academics, and male general staff earned on average $264 per fortnight more than female general staff.
Revealingly, the most important factor in the academics' pay difference was the level of employment (i.e., whether they were a tutor, lecturer, senior lecturer or departmental head). The second most important factor in determining the pay of women employees was full-time equivalence (how many hours they worked).
The two most important reasons for women's employment at lower levels are that women are significantly less likely to have a PhD and have fewer years of experience in higher education than men, and women are far more likely to be working part-time, primarily because of the need to meet family "responsibilities". This research does not support arguments that this issues is simply a matter of choice for men and women; the executive summary notes, "... it is clear from the qualitative data gathered ... that women with dependent children feel they have very little choice".
Among general staff, while level of employment was the main predictor of income for men, for women, full-time equivalence was the main predictor, with years of full-time experience also being significant. Probert revealed that, regardless of qualification, men were at consistently higher levels than women with the same qualifications, as were men compared to women with similar years of experience.
When job content for men and women was examined for supervisory and budgetary responsibilities, (both criteria are used to measure the work value and hence remuneration for positions), a significant number of women at levels three or four were found to have similar responsibilities to women at levels six, seven or eight, indicating that the application of the job evaluation system was gender discriminatory.
Gregory, Smith and Probert identify many of the factors that cause women workers to be paid less than men, both between and within industries and occupations: the industrial relations and regulatory environment; the broken and/or part-time employment records of women who have children; and the overtly discriminatory valuation of work performed by women. Women's waged work is persistently treated and remunerated as secondary to their unpaid work in the family home, a fact regardless of whether they have children and/or live in a traditional family structure.
Part-time and casual work
The relative growth in part-time and casual work has affected both women's employment levels and earnings.
According to the ABS, between 1986 and 1996, women as a proportion of the total work force increased from 39.6% to 43%. In that decade, the number of women in work increased by 30%, compared to only a 14% increase in the number of men in work.
By August 1998, 45% of women workers were part-time, compared to 12% of male workers. Part-time work has allowed women to enter the work force because it enables them to cope with the double burden of family responsibilities and waged work, a burden which is increasing as the provision of affordable social services is cut. However, the increase in the number of part-time and casual workers has overwhelmingly been of benefit to employers.
Gregory, in an article in Australian Economic Review, pointed out that a deregulated labour market disproportionately affects low-paid women, while high-paid women are largely independent of the labour market institutions in Australia, the US and the UK. He concluded that in the UK, labour market deregulation has contributed to the decline in the position of the lowest paid women by 5% in relation to male median earnings.
Part-time work, performed disproportionately by women, has its own impact on pay equity. It is not only differences in hours worked, but also the different hourly earnings of full-time and part-time work that is increasing the gender wage disparity.
Part-time and casual workers' earnings are not keeping pace with full-time earnings for many reasons, including that part-time workers are often grouped into areas which do not offer promotional opportunities, they may not receive penalty rates or other loadings (the WRA's redefinition of hours in excess of three as part-time, rather than casual, work eradicated penalty rate payments for many workers) and they may be employed to provide organisations with numerical flexibility.
Pregnancy discrimination
Women's reproductive role is also having a major impact on their employment opportunities and security.
The executive summary of the pregnancy discrimination inquiry report, recently published as Pregnant and Productive: It's a right not a privilege to work while pregnant, quoted from the Women's Electoral Lobby submission: "Of great concern ... is the acceptance by a considerable number of women of the discrimination that they experience.
"It appears that they accept that pregnancy is a personal choice and you can't have your cake and eat it too. This clearly indicates that there is a need for public education about what women's rights are when they are pregnant. It is a sad reflection of women's status in Australian society that so many women are prepared to accept this discrimination as part of life".
Most pregnancy discrimination complaints concern employment matters and 15% of complaints accepted under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 were related to pregnancy discrimination. Despite the fact that working mothers make up 44% of Australia's work force (ABS, 1997), for the 30% of women in casual or seasonal employment, there are no standards for maternity leave, no guarantee of continued employment, let alone flexible working arrangements or provisions for breast feeding, and the WRA excludes them from parental leave provisions.
The standard requirement of 12 months' continuous employment for the granting of 12 months' unpaid maternity leave (the standard set by the WRA) excludes many women: according to the ABS in 1994, 24% of employed women had been in their jobs for less than 12 months. At present, the provision of 12 weeks' paid maternity leave is available to only 20% of Australian women: 59% of public sector workplaces and 21% of private sector workplaces.
The WEL submission also highlights how the enterprise bargaining process has favoured the trading off of conditions — including leave or shorter working hours, which are of particular benefit to pregnant workers or working mothers — in return for pay rises.
Pregnant and Productive noted that the number of babies being born in Australia is decreasing and that mothers' childbearing ages are increasing. The report concluded that more women are deferring or rejecting childbearing in favour of waged work, particularly those women in better paid jobs or careers, who have the most to lose from a break in their working life.
'Equal' opportunity
The 25-year austerity drive in government spending has significantly reduced the availability of many social services and the introduction of more and more user pays arrangements have meant increasing costs for working-class people. At the same time, real wages have declined and taxes on low- and middle-income earners have risen substantially in real terms with tax bracket creep. This will be compounded by the introduction of the GST.
The increasing cost of social services is putting much more pressure on families, and women in particular, to provide services such as aged care, health care and child-care. This is rapidly becoming evident in the area of child-care, especially, where the reduction of subsidies and increasing fees for public child-care facilities in the last few years has forced many parents to partially or fully withdraw their children from day care.
Working-class families need women's income to maintain themselves in the face of declining real wages. This is borne out by the ABS's assessment of the employment status of both "couple families" and in general — in virtually every case, women's participation, be it in part-time or casual work, is at a higher rate where there are children in the family. A 1999 study by Ann Harding and A. Szukalska found that paid employment of mothers has been one of the biggest contributors to reducing the incidence of child poverty.
Thus, while more household income is now needed to maintain living standards, the barriers to the "secondary" wage earner finding and keeping stable, sufficiently well paid work to make that possible are mounting.
Based on the idea that women are second-class workers, their formal equality in the work force, always elusive, has worsened. Pregnant and Productive offers one example of this, but the inquiry into the functioning of the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act is even more illustrative. The resulting report, Unfinished Business, was released in mid-December and the government simultaneously released its draconian response.
Commissioned by industrial relations minister Peter Reith in December 1997, the inquiry was aimed at reducing the regulation of affirmative action and its "cost to the community" where the benefits didn't outweigh the costs. Welfare, equity, economic and regional development, consumer interests, competitiveness of business and efficient resource allocation all had to be taken into account in measuring cost, particularly for small business.
It sounds horribly familiar. "The government agrees", it said in its response to the report, "that the objects of the legislation should emphasise merit, replace old union consultation requirements with a general statement of support for consultation and emphasise a facilitative rather than punitive approach".
The Australian National University's Marion Sawyer, in her article "The future of affirmative action", comments, "It's hard to think what this can mean considering [that] the whole approach of the act ... has been based on gentle persuasion, awards of various kinds and best practice models" and that the agency's educational role has already been severely curtailed by Coalition funding cuts.
In the new act, reporting requirements for business are to be reduced and the name of the act and agency are to be changed to remove the words affirmative action. This reflects that, now, the affirmative action that is essential to enable women to enter many areas of the work force, particularly non-traditional areas, won't even be mentioned, let alone implemented by quotas or preferential treatment designed to overcome traditional discrimination.
The Coalition government is fertilising the seeds sown by previous federal Labor government to make women's position in the labour market much more marginal. The capitalists do not want to drive women out of the work force entirely, after all, women are still cheaper to employ, less well organised and can be used to keep downward pressure on all workers' wages. (As the Metal Industry Trades Association's Bert Evans put it in 1995 in response to the ACTU's equal pay test case involving electronics companies HPM and Utilux, equalising men's and women's wages by raising women's and cutting men's wages to a median figure is the best solution because it would involve no cost to the employers.)
But capitalism does need to reassert the idea that women's wage is supplementary to men's (never mind if they don't live in a traditional family situation) if they are to ensure that women can be used as a flexible supply of labour and that social services can be increasingly re-privatised into the family.
The result is a massive increase in the burden on working-class people as women are forced to reduce their hours of waged work or to drop out of the work force entirely. For women specifically, the changes to industrial relations law and the way the work force is structured, and the government's ideological insistence on women as mothers first (regardless of whether they have children) mean not only lower living standards, but also less ability to be economically independent of a male partner. The consequences of economic dependency on women's physical and psychological health and well-being are all too evident in earlier periods of history — a history we must not allow to be reimposed by this reactionary government.