By Pip Hinman
In a landmark victory against sex discrimination, some 700 women who took up the fight against the Big Australian, BHP, have finally won their case. An out-of-court settlement was announced at a press conference in Wollongong on February 25.
While happy with the outcome, Robynne Murphy, a spokesperson for the Jobs for Women Campaign, pointed out that the case has also shown up inadequacies in anti-discrimination legislation.
The campaign took 14 years, involved hundreds of women (mainly from non-English speaking backgrounds), their supporters and many legal brains to win what is being described as a watershed case in Australian legal, industrial and social justice history.
According to one judge, the sex discrimination case against BHP's subsidiary Australian Iron and Steel is on a par with earlier decisions such as the "Harvester" basic wage case of 1907 and the equal pay cases of the 1960s and the 1970s.
The case was also a major impetus to reform of the old Factory Laws, which AIS cited in its defence. These excluded women from jobs on the grounds of weight restrictions, yet did nothing to protect men from unsafe jobs.
In the late 1970s, AIS employed a total of 4289 ironworkers at its Port Kembla steelworks. Only 58, or 1.35%, were women. The steelworks was the region's major employer, and at least 2000 women applicants, most of whom were never offered work, had their names on a waiting list. Male applicants were speedily employed.
When the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act came into effect in 1977, a group of women who had unsuccessfully applied for jobs decided to file an anti-discrimination class action. Some were hired, only to be retrenched a couple of years later on the "last on, first off" principle. Robynne Murphy lodged a representative complaint on behalf of all women who unsuccessfully applied for jobs.
By the mid-1980s, the Equal Opportunity Tribunal had found AIS guilty of unlawful discrimination and ordered it to pay the complainants over $1 million. AIS in 1989 agreed that it had discriminated against all women who had applied, or who had an application pending for ironworker positions between June 1977 and September 1981, but it did all it could to avoid a settlement.
Its appeal to the NSW Court of Appeal was dismissed, as was the next to the High Court. By 1990, more than 240 complaints have been lodged with the Anti-Discrimination Board, 42 of which were referred to the Equal Opportunity Tribunal. While AIS again tried to appeal, this time to the Supreme Court of NSW, the pressure was growing for it to pay up.
According to Murphy, the case was eventually successful largely due to the fact that the Jobs for Women Campaign managed to win broad support from unions, migrant and women's groups and male employees of AIS. The legal battle was won only because the women had galvanised so much community support. "Without the campaign, there would have been no victory."