Recently, in Western Australia, a private employment agency associated with Centrelink wrote to Carewest (the organisation representing community based non-profit child-care centres) asking it to consider a proposal that work for the dole participants work in child-care centres. This scheme is already in place at the Lady Gowrie Child Care Centre in Victoria.
Carewest's coordinator Julia Eaton said its response was not to dismiss the proposal out of hand, but to insist on certain checks and balances, such as police checks, supervision and any such employees being clearly in addition to existing qualified staff.
Interestingly, when the same employment agency put its proposal to the business sector peak body, the Chamber of Commerce, it was rejected outright. Similarly, the Miscellaneous Workers Union, which represents child-care workers, has condemned the proposal.
So, although the West Australian newspaper publicised the proposal as if it was a real possibility, there is, apparently, enough hesitation in some sectors to prevent the immediate implementation of the proposal. The goal for parents, child-care services, feminists and the trade union movement should be to prevent its implementation for all time.
The intrinsically destructive nature of the work for the dole scheme is that it undermines basic wages and conditions in the affected industry. Ruth Ellis (the women's officer with the State School Teachers Union) makes the point that the "free and unqualified" placement of work for the dole participants in any industry competes directly with the availability of traineeships and educational opportunities related to this area of work.
Child-care is typical of the welfare sector in that its workers are underpaid, their skills are generally unrecognised and there is predominance of female workers in the sector.
Workers in this industry need an increase in social recognition of their skills, and better wages and conditions, not the introduction of schemes which directly undermine their own. Rather than devaluing and undermining the professionalism of child-care services, the government should be providing funds for more skills training at TAFE and other relevant institutions.
To propose the placement of untrained workers in child-care services implies that this industry is "unskilled". This comes as no surprise: governments, and society in general, do not recognise the skills involved in parenting and other work that is generally perceived as "women's work".
The idea that women's work is not "real" work is reinforced by the privatisation of child-care - that is, child-care is not work to be taken on by society as a whole, but rather should be carried out mainly by individual parents within individual homes. The very real and hard work sometimes done by men, but predominantly by women, within the four walls of the family home is seen as menial work.
The unpaid, unrecognised "mother" - capitalism's silent and suffering martyr - is the standard against which child-care workers are assessed.
Access to child-care services underpins women's ability to exercise their right to work outside the home. Indeed, women's demand for professional, high quality, fully funded child-care services, both in the workplace and outside it, tends to question society's main notions about woman's "proper" roles.
In order to both recognise the choices and skills associated with parenting and liberate women from the sole, pre-determined role as mother, the trade union movement needs to work with feminist and community organisations to rebuild people's understanding of the need for high quality, accessible public child-care services, and campaign for the government funding to provide them.
By Julia Perkins