Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to talk about 27 August being Equal Pay Day, which has been so named by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, EOWA. EOWA is calling on all employers in our country today, 27 August, to conduct a pay audit in their workplace. They have provided a tool on their website which will help employers and their workers to see what is happening in their workplace today in terms of fair pay, equal pay.

We know that today in 2008 women earn about 84c for every dollar earned by men. Women have to work effectively longer—and I will not say harder because it would be unfair—to match their income rates. That is why 27 August has been picked, because this is the day when women’s average salary catches up with what men would have earned on 30 June 2008. We are making the statement and saying to employers, ‘Have a look at what is happening in your workplace.’

If all workers did that we would then, I think, put in place what we thought had been achieved through years and years of struggle in the 19th and 20th centuries over a number of wage cases, which effectively said that equal pay for equal work had been achieved in this country. But we know it has not happened. On the EOWA website there is the tool and the EOWA aim, which states:

With a vision to create an Australia where every woman can achieve her greatest potential in the workplace, EOWA inspires Australian employers to take action to improve outcomes for working women. It does so by delivering practical solutions to employers for advancing women, by building strategic partnerships with employer organisations and—

I emphasise ‘and’—

by leading public debate to increase the rate of change.

A well-known comment made by Justice Mary Gaudron many years ago was that women won equal pay, then we won it again and again and again. It is a great quote but I think it actually reflects a degree of sadness. By saying that, Justice Gaudron has reflected the real problem that, while the clear gap has been identified, stated and reviewed, not much has changed.

In Queensland in the 1890s there were reviews of workers’ conditions in Brisbane across a range of industries which looked at people working in shops and seamstress areas. They were able to identify in the 1890s that women’s labour was not effectively valued and that the same work done by someone who does not identify as a woman is better paid. This was 1890—further reviews by commissions in my own state of Queensland in the early 20th century reinforced this issue. We have a time line that shows a number of cases, a number of industrial relations processes, over the years which again identified the gap and showed that women’s work was not effectively valued. This is not just about dollars and cents; it is about more than just the money in the pocket. It includes discretionary pay—where employers can make decisions amongst workers in their workplace—and allowances. We consistently see that allowances for extra work or different processes are not equally shared with all workers in the workplace. It is about performance and performance assessment. We yearn for a time when sheer merit will be assessed effectively and rewarded. A core element of that is getting the performance processes identified.

It has almost come to the stage where the very word ‘merit’ has lost its meaning, because the question is: who determines the merit and on what basis? What we have seen is that women’s work, individual women’s labour in the workplace is undervalued—and we will not get into the very vexed subject of the double workload of women working at home. Today I am concentrating on women in the paid workforce. I will come back to you about women working at home. What we need to understand is that not just in one area but across the board there has been a genuine economic gap for women in the workforce, and that is a shame.

How we can stand here on 27 August 2008 and accept that that is a reality continues to astound me. The 1972 arbitration decision said that there would be equal pay for equal work in the workplace. We won equal pay in 1972. In 2008, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures indicate that, on average, there is not equity and that there is a 15.6 per cent gender wage gap, so we are under-evaluating women’s work. This is such a disappointment for so many women and men who support equity in our community. Over the years there has been clear evidence presented. Detailed cases have been made before a range of arbitration courts at the federal and state levels resulting in inches of evidence, which can be seen in libraries throughout this country, taken not just from industries but from employers and employees who have had the courage to come forward and explain their own situation. Consistently, at the end of this process it has been determined that, while there may have been some advances at different times, the end results mean that what we thought had been achieved in the early 1970s has not in fact been achieved.

We had a House of Representatives inquiry in the early 1990s which looked exclusively as this argument, and I do ask people who are interested in this topic, and I hope we all are, to have a look at that House of Representatives report to see the kind of information that came forward. One of the exciting things, if we can talk about excitement in a process where there is such genuine inequity, is that the House or Representatives is conducting a current inquiry—and, coincidentally, the submissions for that inquiry are due to close later today—that is looking specifically at what is happening now. The terms of reference of that inquiry look very clearly at the kinds of issues I am talking about. The inquiry will look at:

The adequacy of current data to reliably monitor employment changes that may impact on pay equity issues;

The need for education and information among employers, employees and trade unions—

and the community generally—

in relation to pay equity issues;

Current structural arrangements in the negotiation of wages that may impact disproportionately on women;

The adequacy—

Adequacy is such a sad word, isn’t it?—

of recent and current equal remuneration provisions in state and federal workplace relations legislation;

The adequacy of current arrangements to ensure fair access to training and promotion for women who have taken maternity leave and/or returned to work part time and/or sought flexible work hours; and

The need for further legislative reform to address pay equity in Australia.

Here in 2008 we are going to see whether there needs to be further consideration of laws to enforce what has already been achieved in a number of arbitration processes over many years. We have, on the law books, already achieved pay equity. What we have not done is all those things that the House of Representatives committee will be considering under its terms of reference. We have not achieved it in reality in the workplace and we have not ensured that the various work conditions and salary components are assessed quite clearly to then see how they operate on individual workers.

We have not won the argument with the wider community to make them aware of what I think many people seem to take for granted, because the issue of pay equity has, I think, been consigned to the history books. We value the work of women like Emma Miller in Queensland in the 1890s, of women like Meredith Bergman and others in New South Wales in the last century—as we can say now—and of various women and male activists across this country who have seen the inequity, have worked effectively to gain the evidence and have brought forward the information.

We have had it confirmed consistently by Bureau of Statistics figures that wages are not keeping pace on the gender gap. We have all this information but, in 2008, we still need to ask whether, for some failing in what has worked in the process and in the workplace, we need to implement new law. It seems to me that what we need to do is look at what is already there. We need to have a look at the range of processes that are in place now and take up the call from the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency and, workplace by workplace working cooperatively together, take the process through the tool. First of all, we need to define what pay equity is. Once again I think that people do not truly understand the concept. People are so caught up in the struggles of day-to-day existence—the various demands of budgeting and of survival, worthy as they are—that they have actually overlooked the issue of equity in the workplace, particularly when it comes to the male-female divide. So we need to work out together exactly what pay equity is. It actually defines work and defines the various allowances.

We then move on to a very necessary lesson in the history of the issue, because all too often struggles that have been taking place in our community over years on valuable social justice issues are forgotten. They are put away into the tomes of history and, unless there are people who are prepared to talk about it and to celebrate the struggles that have taken place, it is way too easy to forget the struggles of the many women and men. Many were involved in trade unions and many were strong employers. They are people who saw that injustices were occurring.

We need to look at the value of women’s work, at the remuneration for women’s work and also at the general area of work conditions so that they apply to the whole environment of the workplace. In that context, there have been struggles and we have had legal successes, but the end result is that we have not got what we all thought we had, which is pay equity.

But through using this tool and through working with your workplace, you can work through the process and do it locally so that it has much more meaning because, inevitably, when you can read about something that is in history or affects someone else, it is easy not to identify and to somehow conclude that it is somebody else’s struggle. To me, one of the very important things on the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency website is that they can give you effective links to other sites so you can get this information almost immediately and identify with what has happened in other places. It says—and I love this question—that after you have actually had the immediate discussion with your workers, the question is:

Is pay equity still a problem in Australia?

I am really encouraging workplaces to go through this process and come up with their own answers. But I am going to give them a little hint. The answer to that question is, yes, pay equity is still a problem in our country. When you see the Bureau of Statistics figures, no-one could actually look at the disparity and say that it is not a problem.

We also have a snapshot of what the current law is, because, again, unless you are caught up in the process yourself, normally at a time of crisis—because often when you actually discover inequity it is when you have been a victim in some way—you are not too certain about what law to seek out and from whom to gain assistance. That is one of the key elements of this agency in the government public sector. The Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency can provide forward information for where people can go to get the assistance they need.

You would expect that I would say something about the trade union movement. From the time that this issue became clear in the 1890s, when there was a struggle in Queensland about the formation of the first women’s trade union, there was some dynamic within the process about whether women coming into the workplace were going to take away some of the conditions and wages of their male counterparts. From that time, strong women trade unionists were at the forefront of this struggle, because it is not easily achieved. There needs to be a struggle. From that time, women like Emma Miller, May Jordan and all of us who have come after them have actually seen that true wage equity is a challenge for us and that the role of trade unions is to support all their members. It is not a contest. To achieve true pay equity for women does not mean that men must lose out in any way. Workers can—I hope as a result of working through the EOWA tool—together decide that pay equity is an issue for them and their workplaces.