...and ain't i a woman?: Every worker's right
On August 23, a strong campaigner for equal opportunity for women in the workplace died of cancer.
Clare Burton's research and writings — some of the most influential of which are collected in The Promise and the Price: The Struggle for Equal Opportunity in Women's Employment (1991) — were central to the development of employment equity programs in Australia in the 1980s and early '90s.
To the extent that progress was made last decade in forcing governments, and consequently private employers, to acknowledge gender inequities in the workplace and adopt policies and programs to address them, it was due to those thousands of feminists like Clare Burton who refused to accept that lower pay, worse working conditions and fewer career opportunities are "women's lot" or "her choice" as the "secondary" breadwinner in the family.
Despite Clare Burton's and others' hard work, however, women workers in Australia are still a very long way from equality with their male counterparts. Not only has progress been slow, but much of the little progress that was made in the '80s has been taken back in the '90s.
Despite the path-breaking equal pay cases in 1969 and 1972, women workers are yet to receive equal pay in practise. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures included in a submission by the NSW Labor Council to the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry in March, female earnings still average only 78.8% of male earnings. This is down from 80.2% in 1995. When overtime earnings are taken into account, the figure drops to just over 60%.
Despite the passage in 1984 of the Sex Discrimination Act, women's participation in the work force has stalled at 52%, and still the majority of women workers are employed on a part-time or casual basis.
Despite the 1986 Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act, women are still concentrated in the bottom end of the pay scale within occupations and are also still concentrated in low-waged occupations (more than 50% all women workers in Australia are employed in just four job categories: nursing, clerical, teaching and services).
Despite decades of official acknowledgment of the gender segregation of the work force, not one industrial relations court judge has been prepared to rule in favour of women in an equal pay for work of equal value case.
And where such an outcome looks even remotely possible, employers have moved quickly to sabotage the case. In August, for example, HPM Industries' in Sydney simply sacked 20 male employees whose work value was being measured by the Industrial Relations Commission as part of an equal pay for work of equal value claim made by the lower-paid women workers at HPM.
The take-back of the employment equality gains made last decade is escalating under the Howard government.
Under the previous federal Labor government, the introduction of enterprise bargaining severely disadvantaged women workers, whose degree of unionisation and bargaining power is less than male workers.
Today, under the Howard/Reith/Kernot Workplace Relations Act, the stripping of awards to 20 "allowable matters" has removed all provisions relating to equal opportunity and affirmative action, leaving women workers even more exposed to workplace exploitation.
Just before she died, Clare Burton made a submission to the federal government's review of the Affirmative Action Act. She would have recognised that the review is a serious setback for women.
The business-stacked review committee was directed to examine "those parts of the legislation, and its administration which have the potential to restrict competition or which impose costs or confer benefits on business".
Its soon to be released report will almost certainly recommend the abolition of all affirmative action measures (preferential treatment, positive discrimination and quotas) because they are "costly" for employers and therefore anti-competitive.
Without affirmative action to redress the systematic discrimination against women in society, and therefore in the work force, women will continue to suffer lower pay, poorer and more dangerous working conditions, less job security and a narrower range of employment options than men, or than is every worker's right.
By Lisa Macdonald