Accord promises
With the Labor-ACTU Accord strategy looking near collapse, it is worth asking: what have Accord-based unionism and politics done for women workers?
Back in 1983, it was argued that a centralised strategy of wage restraint in return for improvements in the "social wage" — child-care, education, health — would benefit all workers.
Meanwhile, the lowest paid workers with less industrial strength would benefit from wage rises that would be gained on their behalf through tripartite (employers, unions, government) deals.
At the same time, Labor announced that it would introduce affirmative action legislation which would enable women to move into higher paying non-traditional areas of work: into management, for example, or work that had been classified as "male."
Expectations were high: in the 1983 election, for the first time in history, more women voted Labor than men.
At the recent Socialist Scholars Conference in Melbourne, Catherine Brown, a member of the Australian Railways Union West Australian branch executive, used the situation at Westrail, where she works as a guard, to compare the promise with the reality.
The overwhelmingly sex-segregated nature of the Westrail workforce had hardly changed during Labor's term in office, she said. Of 5500 employees, 312 are women, and of those, only six work in non-traditional areas. One of these is a gang worker, and the other five guards. The other women are employed as cleaners, caterers and clerical workers, all classifications with lower rates of pay than "male" jobs with, it could be argued, comparable levels of skill.
The affirmative action legislation, with no quotas or penalties for non-compliance, and asking employers to do no more than submit yearly assessment reports on women in the workplace, had had virtually no impact at Westrail. Talk of comparative worth — paying "women's" jobs in line with comparable "men's" jobs — had evaporated by the mid-'80s.
Instead, wage rises were meant to come through award restructuring and skills audits, and career paths were to be identified. It all looked very nice on paper, said Brown, but wages were not rising, and, in terms of promotion, women seemed to be
going nowhere.
Cutbacks in the public sector (in the past five years 90% of all new jobs have been created in the private sector; in the last two years, all net job growth has been in the private sector) meant that many rail workers were fearfully holding on to the jobs they had, and possibilities for advancement were virtually nil.
"You might broaden your skills so that not only can you clean the platform, you can clean the toilet as well", said Brown. "But if you've got no job at all, that doesn't mean much."
After eight and a half years of wage restraint and dampened union militancy, real wages for women and men were down between 17 and 26%.
"You'd have to say the accord approach has been a disaster for women workers and workers in general", said Brown. "Today we are less able to defend ourselves, particularly in a period of growing unemployment. We have to reassert the need for struggle."
By Tracy Sorensen