Equal pay and Howard's IR bill
A comment by the chief executive of the Metal Trades Industry Association — the metal bosses' "union" — reveals employer thinking behind their hostility to paying women and men equal pay for work of equal value. Last December, as the ACTU launched an equal pay test case involving three companies, Bert Evans said that two — Sydney-based electronics companies HPM and Utilux — depended on exports for their business and that rises in labour costs would damage their ability to compete internationally.
Put another way, he could have said that to survive against companies — for example manufacturers based in Taiwan and Korea — which pay workers starvation wages, the Sydney companies needed to exploit traditional wage discrimination by paying women less than full wages.
While the landmark 1972 equal pay case overcame the idea that women's wages were only a supplement to those of their male partners, women's economic independence in reality has remained a distant goal.
For full-time workers, women's average weekly ordinary-time earnings, excluding over-award payments and bonuses, are 92% of those of men. Total earnings of women in full-time, non-managerial positions reached a high of around 84% but have been falling since the introduction of enterprise bargaining. The idea that women are in the main a second, supplementary, income earner for their family — and don't we all live in a regular happy family? — has persisted, however, with big advantages for bosses.
As well as benefiting directly from exploiting women, bosses have also used this cheaper labour to undermine full, "men's" wages. Thus Bert Evans suggested that one way to equalise women's and men's wages was to cut men's wages and raise women's.
Current industrial relations law — introduced in 1994 — specifically rules out cutting any worker's wage as a result of an IRC order to introduce equal pay. That's just the sort of thing the Coalition intends to remove from the law, along with the IRC's ability to make orders for equal pay.
The Coalition plans, amongst other things, are to reduce the jurisdiction of the IRC to their truncated, joke version of awards — the 20 minimum conditions that include only basic and overtime payments. These powers would not help the mainly migrant women process workers at HPM Industries, Hill Street factory. They are classified one grade higher on the metal industry award than the male general hands, but the latter are paid at least $20 more per week through over-award payments. Over-award payments are the target of the ACTU's current cases because women earn on average only 55% of the over-award payments of men.
The bigger problem of women's concentration in a few industries whose award payments are not compared to industries where men are concentrated is not being addressed at all.
The Coalition's attacks on unionism in its industrial relations legislation will also undermine women's pay. According to a paper presented by the National Pay Equity Coalition's Meredith Burgmann to the October Women and Labour conference, while a male unionist receives 8.5% more than a male non-unionist, a female unionist receives 25% more than a female non-unionist.
The Coalition's non-union Australian Workplace Agreements are intended to undermine unionism and collective bargaining, with the deliberate effect of reducing any scrutiny of agreements — to check for pay discrimination, amongst other things. Women workers, who are particularly concentrated in poorly unionised industries, are a major target of this legislation.
Women will never have the chance of economic independence until they are paid the same as men — full wages — and men's wages will not be safe from undermining by unscrupulous employers and their disciples in government until women receive equal pay. This means that the struggle for equal pay for women is a part of the struggle of all workers.
By Jennifer Thompson