By Pat Brewer
A study of wages in Britain throws an interesting new light on the question of how best to fight for equal pay for women.
In Australia, women's wages are still on average a third lower than the men's. There has been an ongoing debate in the women's movement about what causes this wage lag and what strategies are needed to rectify it.
One strategy, advanced by Bea Campbell in England in the mid-'80s, after the defeat of the miners' strike, argued that the interests of women and men in employment are contradictory. If women were to win improvements in their wages, this would require restrictions on the earnings of higher paid, male workers and the ditching of collective bargaining and other united procedures.
In Australia a similar logic supported the Accord. It assumed that there is a limited "wage cake" and that male workers should hold back in order to let disadvantaged female workers get a larger slice of that cake.
However, the British study of women's pay since 1968, by Megan Dobney and Anne Kane, found that women's pay, as a percentage of men's, improves when the total share of wages in gross domestic product increases. In other words, there is not a limited fund to be shared between workers. Rather, when the "cake" increases, women's wages increase faster than men's.
The study demonstrates that there was an initial improvement in women's wages following the implementation of equal pay legislation, but the sharpest fall in women's pay relative to men's was in 1977-79, under the Labour government's incomes policy (which served as a model for the Australian Accord). This was followed by a gradual rise to 78% of men's average pay.
When Dobney and Kane examined women's wages in more detail, going beyond the average trend, they found a deterioration of the earnings of low paid women workers. Since 1979 inequalities in pay have widened both within the working class as a whole and between male and female workers. Broadly speaking, all manual women's wages have fallen relative to male median earnings since 1979, while non-manual women's wages have risen.
Those hardest hit were the bottom 25% of manual women workers. In 1988 their earnings for the first time since 1974 fell below 50% of male median earnings. In 1991 they earned 47.7% of the male median earnings, compared to 58.2% in 1977.
Dobney and Kane's analysis refutes the notion that women have some basic conflict of interest with male workers in terms of improvements in earnings. They found that the pattern of women's pay over the past 20 years shows that only an alliance with the trade unions and the overall struggle for higher wages stands any hope of improving the situation of women.
They conclude that women therefore have the utmost interest in the progress of wages as a whole. What is required for women workers is y for the trade union movement. This means a rejection of deals which reduce wage gains, and support for free collective bargaining. This strategy is even more necessary for the lower paid manual worker.
Dobney and Kane sum up: "The first and most fundamental factor affecting women's wages, therefore, is the success of the labour movement in advancing working class incomes and living standards as a whole. And this means rejecting incomes policy."
Their conclusions also include taking up special measures in women's interest like the Equal Pay Act, a national guaranteed minimum wage and comparative worth cases.