Affirmative action under attackAffirmative action under attack
Having already made policy changes last October to limit the power of the Affirmative Action Agency to enforce the 1986 Affirmative Action (Equal Employment for Women) Act, the Howard government is now exerting political pressure on government departments to stop encouraging private sector compliance with the act.
According to a report in the Australian last week, a confidential letter dated April 30 from administrative affairs minister David Jull tells cabinet members that their departments do not have a role in advising businesses of their obligations to comply with affirmative action law. This task, he says, should be left to the Affirmative Action Agency — what's left of it.
Under the act, in order to qualify to supply federal government contracts or receive industry assistance from the government, businesses are supposed to comply with the Affirmative Action Act by developing an internal policy to ensure that women have the same chances in employment as men. The Affirmative Action Agency is mandated to check that such procedures are in place, but since the government's changes last October, it has had no power to take action against or even publicly name companies that fail to comply.
The withholding of government contracts and industry assistance grants is the only sanction the government can apply against employers who fail to comply with affirmative action legislation.
This is a grossly inadequate measure to redress the systematic discrimination women face from employers in Australia. But in a context of rapidly increasing outsourcing by government departments (Drake International estimates that 70% of public sector agencies and departments now contract out part of their operations), any weakening in the application of these sanctions is a blow to women's right to equality.
For the moment, there are still many people around who remember the hard struggle required by the women's liberation movement to force the government to legislate for affirmative action, and who are still committed to the principle of positive discrimination for the disadvantaged. If the Coalition were to abolish the affirmative action law outright, it would pay a significant political price.
So, instead, it has decided to achieve the same goal indirectly — weaken the application of the act to the point where it is irrelevant.
The gains made by women workers as a result of the affirmative action laws and agency in Australia have been small and confined largely to women with above average education and work skills. But the fact that women are still concentrated in the least secure, lowest paid, least skilled and least protected jobs attests to the need for more and stronger affirmative action for women in employment, not less.
Unless feminist organisations and the trade unions launch a serious campaign to force the government to maintain and enforce affirmative action policies, the gap between the wages and conditions, skills and employment opportunities and prospects of women and men in the Australian work force will grow again. That campaign will need to be as large, active and unequivocal as that which won the legislation in the first place.
There is a lesson to be learned from the Howard government's attacks on affirmative action. It is that the gender gap in the work force will not even begin to be reversed until both the women's and workers' movements mobilise such broad public support for actual equality and justice that governments will be forced not only to retain, but to strengthen, affirmative action laws.
By Lisa Macdonald