Back to business
Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on April 27 show that while nearly 60% of male workers earned more than the average wage of $510.20 per week last year, over 70% of women workers earned less. The figures are no startling revelation, although they serve as further proof that Keating's claim — made at the launch of the National Agenda for Women in February — that Australian women now earn 93% of what men earn, is a falsehood.
The reminder comes at an appropriate time. The architect of Keating's appeal to women voters prior to the election, Anne Summers, has left the PM's employ to take up a job with Conrad Black as the editor of the weekend newspaper supplement The Good Weekend, and it's back to business as usual in Canberra. There will be no more talk of child-care as a fundamental economic issue.
Back to business indeed. Keating's speech to the Institute of Australian Company Directors on April 21 dropped at least two giant bombshells for Labor's "true believers" and the "women of Australia" he thanked so warmly for his election victory just over a month ago. First, he confirmed that high unemployment is here to stay, and that the long-term unemployed are set to remain so. Second, he announced what amounts to the dismantling of the federal award system, to be replaced, 100%, by workplace productivity bargains within the next three years. When the applause from the business sector had died down, Hewson hit the media complaining that Keating had stolen his Fightback! policies.
Meanwhile, the body set up by the government to look after the interests of women, the Equal Pay Unit in the Federal Department of Industrial Relations, continues to churn out propaganda to counter the few voices raising the alarm about the effect enterprise-level productivity bargaining will have on Australian women's wages and conditions.
The April issue of the unit's newsletter contains an article about government initiatives to help community organisations bring their workers
within award provisions.
"The Government recognises and supports the critical role of the national award system which protects workers' minimum wages and conditions", it states reassuringly. But how can this be true when almost contemporaneously with the publication of the newsletter Paul Keating told 800 captains of industry that enterprise agreements must become total substitutes for awards within the next three years and that the government will be enacting legislation in September to ensure that this comes about?
On a more practical level, the unit provides advice to women working in clerical jobs on how to describe their job skills when the boss does a "skills audit" in preparation for productivity "negotiations".
Rather than saying that your task is word processing, for example, they suggest that you say, "I produce documents from standard abbreviated forms drawing on my knowledge of the subject matter to ensure that they are appropriate and consistent with professional conventions". That's guaranteed to win a pay rise — at least if you work in a jargon factory.
Naturally a government department is obliged to take government policy as a given and obfuscate from there. The misnamed "Equal Pay Unit" is doing a fine job of that. If we rely on them, and on the multitude of women's units attached to government departments around the country, to look after our interests, then we are sunk.
By Karen Fredericks