Justice is not a luxury
In the early days of the recession, there was a spate of articles in newspapers and magazines on the new moderation of the very rich. High society was cost cutting by selling off one or two cars and wearing evening gowns more than once.
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 25 revealed another, less welcome, area of cost cutting: company affirmative action programs.
According to Sydney-based Affirmative Action Agency director Valerie Pratt, there is evidence of a backlash against affirmative action, with companies cutting back their equal opportunity programs and loading down affirmative action officers with other work.
While the impact of the women's movement and the entrenchment of women in the workforce seem to have turned around the traditional notion that women work for "pin money", women still earn two-thirds of the male wage.
They are still concentrated in lower status, lower paid jobs. In these crucial areas, real progress has lagged behind women's changed expectations.
Affirmative action, anti-discrimination legislation, the concept of comparable worth (making wages in "women's jobs" equal to those in "men's jobs" of comparable skill), and other measures of redress have all been canvassed in recent years, and some implemented.
Such measures have run up against three blocks: entrenched attitudes; fundamental structural arrangements (the system's reliance on the concept of a private family which looks after its own, thereby avoiding social responsibility); and money.
Those who have been prepared to take up the cudgel in the fight against the first and have a working understanding of the second, have found the third the most immovable. Discrimination saves employers money.
When the economy is relatively buoyant, some companies have been more open to arguments that equal opportunity could save them money in the long term: child-care, for instance, can keep women employees in a company longer, thereby saving costs involved with staff turnover and retraining. But when things get tough, as the Affirmative Action Agency has noted, most companies forget their enlightened long-term ideas and start paring budgets: a situation which is clearly unacceptable.
Then again, it won't do to get too excited about the moment of enlightenment that hit some personnel managers in the bull market eighties.
An awful lot of it amounted to beautifully presented annual reports sent to the Affirmative Action Agency outlining the situation for women employees and a few ideas on how things might change in the future — sent not out of enlightenment but to abide by the law. Under federal legislation, if nothing has changed (or if the situation sn't matter: all you have to do to keep within the law is send in a report about it.
This bare compliance with the law is what some companies now see as a "luxury" they can no longer afford.
It is heartening, therefore, that Pratt has announced a review of the legislation and the possibility of tougher penalties for failing to move seriously on discrimination against women (currently, non-compliant firms suffer the horror of being named in parliament). The task is to make these penalties an awful lot tougher, so that discrimination is no longer the cheap option: so that getting "done" for ripping people off would begin to outweigh the money saved by doing so.
By Tracy Sorensen