By Trish Corcoran
At a time when business profits are up, women's wages and work conditions are on the way down. According to the head of the Affirmative Action Agency, women and their dependent children make up 70% of those living in poverty. But we are still being fed misinformation about the real situation.
Australia's "female:male earnings differential appears to be second lowest in the world ... many employers, in both the public and private sectors, have gone far in their efforts to redress inequalities between the sexes. The big changes now have to come in Australian households." These were the arguments presented by David Clark, of the School of Economics, University of NSW, in the February 21 issue of the Financial Review.
Clark argues: "In the mid-1960s, average weekly earnings of females were only about 62% those of men. A decade later, the figure was 82% ... The earnings differential then widened a little in the early 1980s, narrowed a little in the mid-1980s and continued to narrow since then."
But the article doesn't specify what figure he is using as the current wage differential. Calculations of this vary widely, depending on what criteria are used: Paul Keating claimed that women earned 95% of men's earnings, but the figure could be less than 50% if you take into consideration women's unpaid work in the home.
Generally, the lower estimates of the wage differential — putting women's wages at 80-95% of men's — don't take into account above-award payments, overtime or loading for shift work, and they disregard the concentration of women in part-time and casual work.
Since enterprise bargaining was introduced, the wage gap has widened. Part-time and casual positions are commonly prone to manipulation and exploitation because these workers are usually not well organised; enterprise bargaining leaves these workers with little industrial strength. Women are concentrated in these occupations because they still take primary responsibility for child-care and unpaid work in the home.
Clark believes that women have never had it so good: "Clearly, women workers are no longer the greatest victims of recession". This is apparently because over the past decade the number of jobs done by women has increased 10.6%, while male jobs have increased only 5.5% He makes no mention of the fact that restructuring has dramatically increased the number of part-time and casual jobs, and it is these jobs that women are filling. That is, women are providing a cheap, flexible and expendable source of labour.
Of full-time female employees, 39% are clerks and 3% are in trades. In contrast, 20% of male employees are in trades and 9% are clerks. Opening non-traditional occupations to women, challenging the stereotypes of male and female work, is central in breaking down the wages gap. Clark makes no acknowledgment of this, instead asking, "Can earnings gaps ever be eliminated between females and males given biological and sociological imperatives?".
Enforced inequality
In 1907, a basic wage was set for a society in which the survival of family units relied upon the "male breadwinner". The male wage was based on the needs of a family.
Because it was assumed that working women would not have dependents or would be able to rely on their husband's higher incomes, in 1919 the female wage was set at 54% of the male rate. With this ruling, single working women had to accept their status in society as poor and highly exploited workers, and married women's economic dependence on their husbands was upheld.
These wage structures stayed in place until the 1960s. Under the pressure of the rising women's movement, the principle of equal pay for women doing the same jobs as men was adopted in 1969 by the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (now the Industrial Relations Commission). This advance was extended in 1972 with the adoption of equal pay for work of equal value — a great victory for the women's movement, which resulted in real changes to working women's lives.
However, this wasn't sufficient to eliminate wage differentials, because of the concentration of women in a few job areas. During the mid-1980s there was therefore pressure for the IRC to adopt the principle of comparable worth — traditionally female-dominated areas would have their wages aligned with traditionally male-dominated areas. But the IRC rejected comparable wage justice.
Women serve as a reserve pool of labour, and a cheap one at that. During periods of war, for example, women have been brought into the work force en masse, and their lower wages have resulted in huge profits for big business. But it is not only during wars that business profits from women's participation in the work force: women workers' greater exploitation relative to men is a constant source of extra profits. It is not surprising therefore that the IRC, established and operating in the interests of Australian capitalism, would reject comparable wage justice.
Backlash
Clark's analysis has many flaws, but perhaps the most infuriating is his conclusion that employers are the good guys and the problems lie within Australian households.
It was not Australian employers who, out of the goodness of their hearts, granted equal pay for equal work to women. It was Australian women themselves who organised and fought for wage justice.
The Financial Review article makes a pretence of being concerned about wage disparities, and searching for answers to the problem, but nowhere does Clark suggest that child-care facilities (or the lack of them) may have some impact on women's ability to participate on an equal basis with men in the work force.
The second wave of the women's movement made many advances for women, including narrowing the wage differential between men and women. However, the battle is not over; in fact women are once again losing ground.
Clark is on the side of the backlash against women's rights, arguing (albeit in a more "sophisticated" way than most) that the situation of women is really not that bad and any further advancement is the responsibility of individuals, not society. Individualising the problem undermines the ability of public campaigns to demand that governments and employers take social responsibility for issues like equal pay and child-care.
Equal pay has not been won; we are a long way from it. Part and parcel of achieving it is the provision for women of work-based and funded child-care services, affirmative action programs, encouragement and training to enter non-traditional occupations, paid parental leave and job security during such leave.