By Karen Fredericks
Paul Keating distorted the truth more than once in his speech to launch the New National Agenda for Women on February 10. Probably the biggest whopper was his assertion that "women's earnings are now 93% of men's." The real figure, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures as at August 1992, is 66.5%.
Keating's figure referred to female vs male award wages, not average weekly earnings. His figure masks the fact that there remains a 32.5% differential between men's and women's real earnings.
Women are still less than a third of the full-time work force (1,928,700 women as opposed to 4,002,600 men in January 1993). Working women's over-award payments are less than half those of men, and they receive only 20% of men's overtime earnings.
The Australian work force remains the most sex-segregated of all OECD countries, with women concentrated in the weakest, least strategically important, most geographically diverse and lowest value-added areas of the economy.
The policies of the major parties in this election are set to make the situation even worse. Both promise much the same thing, if by slightly different routes: labour market deregulation. The ALP promises to push ahead with enterprise bargaining, chipping away at award conditions over time. The Coalition offers an outright abolition of the centralised wage-fixing system and an immediate shift to contracts negotiated directly between employers and employees. Both policies will reduce wages and conditions overall, and women's wages in particular.
Enterprise bargaining has been an official feature of Australian industrial relations since its adoption by the Industrial Relations Commission, under enormous pressure from the ALP government, the ACTU and employer groups, in October 1991. Although centralised wage fixing under the Accord delivered the biggest wage cuts of any OECD country during the Hawke years, employers in the 1990s have demanded more — the right to use the current recession to drive down wages and "increase productivity" even further.
The IRC decision allows employers and unions to make agreements governing wages and conditions in specific enterprises, subject to requirements such as that all wage rises must be linked to real productivity increases, and that ordinary time earnings must
not be reduced.
These requirements do not adequately protect workers, although they are just about the only thing separating the ALP's enterprise bargaining from the coalition's Kennett-style free for all.
Most particularly, though, the IRC's limits on enterprise bargaining do not protect women workers. At best they enable the strongest, most unionised, most strategically placed sections of the work force to strike productivity deals, gaining or increasing over-award payments in return for productivity measures in industries manufacturing for export.
But how do you even measure the productivity of workers in service industries and other sectors in which women predominate? Are employers even interested in the "productivity" of workers such as teachers and nurses, since they are unlikely to contribute to the bottom line in the struggle to become "internationally competitive"? As the Kennett extreme shows, the productivity of these workers is important only in the sense that, as far as employers are concerned, the fewer of them the better.
The IRC condition forbidding deals for wages below ordinary-time earnings is, likewise, of little assistance to women. As Keating said in his National Agenda for Women speech, ordinary-time award wages for women are now 93% of those of men. It is not here that the major inequality arises, but in over-award and overtime payments and allowances.
The inequality in the participation of women in the full time work force will also be unaffected by the IRC's brakes on enterprise bargaining. Despite protestations to the contrary from ACTU and trades hall women's officers, employers do not consider measures to improve participation of women in the full-time work force, such as workplace child-care, a method of increasing productivity.
These factors were recognised by the IRC itself, six months before approving the enterprise bargaining system, when it said, "We cannot predict the extent of the disadvantage female workers will experience if the commission gives its approval of a scheme of enterprise bargaining. We do accept, however, that enterprise bargaining — especially for overaward payments — places at a relative disadvantage those sections of the workforce where women predominate."
Similarly, at its 1985 congress, the ACTU declared that "industry and enterprise bargaining disadvantages less organised and less industrially powerful groups" and that
productivity bargaining "disproportionately affects women workers who are clustered in service industries, the public sector and low value added manufacturing areas".
Even the early stages of the enterprise bargaining regime have proved the truth of such predictions. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in February that Australia in 1992 recorded its lowest wage growth for any year on record, with average earnings and award wages alike up by only 0.8% over the year. In the nine months to December, average earnings for all workers actually declined by 0.6%. Most interestingly, men's wages actually rose by a measly 0.1% in that period, but it was the fall of 0.75% in women's wages that dragged the figure down overall.
Thus begins the process everyone, including the architects of enterprise bargaining, had predicted: the further erosion of equal pay for women.
In 1907 the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration defined the first "basic wage" as a wage sufficient to meet the needs of a man to support a wife and three children.
Women's wages were considered for the first time in 1912, when a women's minimum wage was set at a level thought sufficient for a single woman to support herself. In 1919 the basic wage for women employed in occupations designated "female" was fixed at 54% of the male wage. In occupations designated "male", a woman was to be paid at the same rate as a man in order to protect men's jobs from competition from cheaper female labour.
During World War II, women were called on to fill "male" jobs, and the basic full-time wage for females rose to around 75% of that for males.
It was not until 1974 that the commission abolished separate male and female minimum wage standards based on the old "family needs" concept. Women's full-time earnings rose to the level at which they remain today, around 80% of male full-time earnings.
Under a Coalition government we could expect to see a sharp decline in wages in general, and an even sharper decline in women's wages. The future may be glimpsed in a country like Japan, where enterprise level unions predominate and where women earn a staggering 44.3% less than men.
Under the ALP the process will be more gradual, but without a strong intervention by the union and women's movements, both at an all time low, it will happen just as surely.
Today only 40% of Australian workers are unionised, down from 46% in 1986. Union membership fell by 7.9% last financial year. Unions have become bureaucratised, under the leadership of the ACTU, to such an extent as to become irrelevant to workers — practically another arm of the ALP government.
If there is a need for the union movement to break free of ALP control and make itself relevant to the day-to-day concerns of workers, then there is also a need for an independent women's movement to do likewise.
When the ALP was campaigning for approval of enterprise bargaining from the IRC, the minister for industrial relations, Senator Peter Cook, attended a "Women in Management" conference in Sydney to put the government's position. He began by acknowledging that women may suffer under the system.
"If the position of women workers in the enterprise-level bargaining process is as limited and marginal as it has been in the past, we run the great risk that the inequalities of the past will be entrenched rather than eradicated."
The solution he presented was the establishment of an "Equal Pay Unit" within the Department of Industrial Affairs to "keep a close watch on all developments affecting women as enterprise bargaining proceeds".
"I want to make sure women workers are advantaged by enterprise bargaining, not hurt by it", he said.
But, predictably, the Equal Pay Unit has been nothing more than an efficient little propaganda machine for the government. Its first four newsletters and two discussion papers sing the praises of the government's "social justice strategy", "commitment to pay equity" and "improvements to the social wage" at every opportunity. These documents are its only achievement.
When Green Left contacted the unit for information on the latest ABS figures, the first evidence of a clear increase in the earnings differential between male and female workers, we were advised the information would not be available until after the election because the government was in "caretaker mode".
Women can't afford to place any reliance on the women's units, consultative groups or inquiries set up and controlled by government. The struggle for equal pay may have stagnated since 1974, but we have now actually begun to lose ground, and we will continue to lose it until we fight back, as workers and as women.