Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to begin by commending the report from the Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations entitled Making it fairwhich was only tabled yesterday evening, so in my contribution tonight I am not going to do full justice to the very comprehensive overview of this very critical issue. But I do want to say that I think this report will stand the test of time and that it will be another milestone in that eternal quest for pay justice for women. I did read the foreword, in which the chair writes:

Pay equity or the lack of it was one of the issues that sparked my interest in politics and social justice. As a young woman I was outraged that someone could or would be paid less for their work because of their gender.

It angers me that over 30 years later, despite some progress, this is still the case.

I think in those words the chair of the committee, the member for Hasluck, has summed up the feelings of many women who have campaigned for a long time about this critical issue. I must say that in our previous lives before we were elected as members of this parliament both the member for Hasluck and I had lots of ongoing campaigns about this very important issue.

I think the fact that we now have this report kind of opens a new era in terms of looking at some proactive strategies for the future, because we have realised some of the limitations in the approach that up until now had placed a lot of the emphasis on trying to secure justice through the IR system. So I want to commend her and members of her committee in producing a report of great substance. There is a wealth of information in there that will make for fascinating reading. I think it is very important that the issue of pay equity is now on the mainstream national political agenda.

The report has 63 recommendations. I have only had the opportunity to skim through them but I have found them to be very comprehensive, strategic and yet very practical. It is clear that, 40 years on, we need a wide-ranging proactive strategy to end this historical injustice that remains so entrenched despite our best efforts to deal with the issue over four decades and more. As the member for Moreton said, it is probably now the third wave of feminists who are looking at this issue with fresh eyes. I think the committee has done a fine job in raising the profile of this issue onto our national agenda.

We all know that 40 years ago the first federal equal pay case was prosecuted by the ACTU and it established the principle of equal pay for equal work. We all thought that was going to be nirvana. Despite our hopes that it would put an end to the enshrined inequities that have plagued our wage-fixing system, we saw over a period of time that the narrow definition of ‘equal pay for equal work’—how do you define ‘equal work’?—was not going to be the big breakthrough that we all hoped for.

It is interesting though that, during the war, the contribution of women was recognised and their wages were raised from 54 per cent to 75 per cent of the male basic wage. It was suddenly realised that women were an integral part of our economy, but when the war was over the injustices resurfaced. I was lucky in that when I began teaching in 1969 I was the beneficiary of an earlier ruling by the New South Wales commission in 1958 that provided equal pay for teachers. I had always been in a profession where if you were doing equal work you were remunerated equally, but it did not compensate for the fact that all the women were congregated on the lower levels of the pay scales and all the top hierarchy were men—a very common situation in many professions.

When it became clear that the principle of equal pay for equal work was unable to advance the interests of women across the board, because they were congregated in female dominated occupations, it became clear that the narrow definition of ‘equal work’ became a barrier in our quest for wage justice, so that principle was expanded in 1972 to the concept of equal pay for work of equal value. Yet again we found in practice that the IR system had difficulty in defining objective measures by which to assess work of equal value, for it was a fact that historically women’s skills and experience had been undervalued and not given the same accreditation as those of men.

I remember thinking at the time: how did one explain why a skilled female machinist earned substantially less than a male who fixed the machine when it needed repairing? Why was one set of skills credentialled, given recognition and well remunerated at the end of an apprenticeship and the other set of skills—those of the female machinist—not valued because they were never formally recognised through our vocational system? Even today I find it hard to find an explanation for why an apprentice hairdresser is earning $80 a week less than an apprentice builder.

Pay inequity was an entrenched fact of life embedded in our awards and in wage relativities prior to the 1970s. However, ironically, when we looked at how we were faring against comparable OECD countries, the fact that we had a fairly regulated centralised IR system underpinned by awards meant that we as a nation were able to claim that our outcomes were pretty good in comparison to those of other countries. So we did well in closing the gap at the minimum rates of pay.

Then we had award restructuring and the minimum rates adjustment, which for the first time allowed us to compare women’s wages in certain occupations to others. The metal industry award was then set as the standard. But, regrettably, there were too few cases pushed under those principles. I do recall at the time that librarians and childcare workers used the opportunity to win good increases for their members.

Unlike in other countries, pay equity issues in Australia to date have largely been addressed by wage-fixing tribunals within the IR system rather than by direct legislative measures. However well we did within the scope of the regulated industrial relations system, it was once you stepped outside that area of regulation that the gap really became very problematic.

So where do we stand 40 years later? The last lot of data I looked at by the ABS for average earnings for women showed that it was $729.80 a week compared to men’s earnings of $1,110. That is $380 more for men or almost $20,000 over the course of the year. It adds up, as the report says, to a 17 per cent wage gap between men and women. In traditionally male dominated sectors like mining, manufacturing and construction you would expect that men would do better but what really shocked me was that even in female dominated sectors like health and community services and education the progress has been appallingly slow. In education—the field that I came from; a female dominated sector—women’s average weekly earnings in May 2009 were $841 compared to men’s $1,055.

So even in those sectors things are really bad and, as the report points out, the gap between men and women’s wages at ordinary-time earnings are now at the highest level they have been in 21 years. That is a consequence of the deregulated system that we had under the Howard government and the focus on individual contracts. So it is clear to me that there are factors outside of the control of the IR purview of wage rates. There are factors that need to be addressed beyond the IR system alone. It needs more than test cases—as important as they can be—to address wage inequity. And that is why the recommendations in this report are so important.

I do not want to underestimate the importance of historical test cases and I do want to commend our government for its support of an impending major test case on pay equity for people who work in the community sector. This sector employs more than 200,000 employees—87 per cent of whom are women. I cannot think of a more deserving group of workers entitled to substantial wage justice. These are the workers who keep our communities together but, to our common shame, they have been poorly paid for what has now become for many a labour of love.

These are the workers who provide accommodation and support for people with disabilities and who run crisis accommodation, counselling services, and home and family day care. It is scandalous that these workers at the coalface, working for our communities, currently can earn up to 30 per cent less than those people in the public sector and the public service doing comparable work. So to that extent I think this impending test case will be another important historic step along the path. But the report rightly points to a whole range of factors that need to be addressed in a comprehensive strategy. We all know that women’s skills—particularly in the caring occupations, because somehow that is seen to be women’s work—are not properly valued.

We know that women receive a lower share of discretionary payments, like overtime and bonuses, that have been outside the scope of industrial regulation and despite our best efforts we do not seem to have made any substantial inroads there. We know that occupational industrial segregation has an impact. We know the impact of family responsibilities. We know that because women work in part-time and casual employment that that has a bearing. I think the report also shows that the issue of the invisibility of the pay gap at the workplace level is an important factor, and that is addressed in one of the recommendations, which suggests that government ought to lead the way by doing regular workplace audits.

So there are a whole host of factors that need to be considered. In the chair’s foreword she says:

From the outset of the Committee’s Inquiry we agreed that we needed to go beyond past reports because we wanted substance to our recommendations, to recommend legislative reform if that was required, to use best practise examples that worked and to build on successful initiatives in states, territories and individual workplaces and internationally.

To the chair and the members of the committee I want to repeat, as someone who has spent a lot of years of her life actively involved in the eternal quest for justice for women, the chair’s own words:

Some will say that we should wait – for what I am not sure, divine intervention?

It got to the stage where it seemed that nothing we had tried, while we were making progress at a snail’s pace, comprehended the totality of factors that contribute to this historical legacy of inequity. I want to say to the member for Hasluck that this is a seminal report. It will open a new chapter in the quest for equal pay. I am sure that many groups, particularly women’s groups, are really looking forward to reading this comprehensive report, full of incredible data, historical context and practical, strategic and proactive recommendations. As I said, I have only had time to glance at it in a very cursory manner, but it is going on my pile of Christmas reading. I am looking forward to reading and digesting the contents of this substantial report. I thank all our colleagues for placing this critical issue on the national political agenda.

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