After 14 years, the landmark Jobs for Women campaign against BHP has formally drawn to a close. Each of the more than 700 women who filed sex discrimination claims against the company for its employment policies of the 1970s and '80s has received some monetary compensation, and BHP's image makers now work hard to promote the big Australian as an "equal opportunity employer". But, as KAREN FREDERICKS reports, BHP's financial might and flaws in New South Wales' anti-discrimination legislation have combined to make this final "victory" more bitter than sweet.
"I am just glad it's all over", Mara Goluza, a Croatian woman who took a leading role among the women with whom BHP has finally reached a legal settlement, told Green Left Weekly. "I'm not happy what I got, many of us not happy what we got, but I am happy for all those ladies who thought they would never get a cent. And in the end I'm happy everybody gets something. Most of them they think they would never get a thing. I said to them 'Look, if we don't try to do something, to do what's right, if we didn't start it, who else would?'. Bloody hell, we have to live too!"
When Mara Goluza went to the BHP subsidiary Australian Iron and Steel to apply for a job in the steelworks at Port Kembla in the mid-'70s, she thought she was in with a chance.
"There were so many people waiting there [in the employment office] and between all the people, they called me. I was speaking a little bit English. I was reading English too. They called me in and they gave me a big piece of paper to read it in front of them. So I did. They said, 'there's no reason why you can't get a job'. Everybody was saying 'Oh my God, you got a job, you got a job'. How they sounded, I was expecting to hear from them in two days, but I never heard."
Mara's name was added to the special AI&S waiting list for women. In a period in which male workers were being put on at the rate of 30 to 40 a week, women like Mara were being told there were "no jobs for women". Between June 1977 and April 1980, the company put on more than 4000 ironworkers, of whom only 58, or a little over 1%, were women. In 1980 AI&S had more than 2000 women on its "female" waiting list, some of whom had been there for seven years. On the male waiting list there were only 47 names, and the longest any of these applicants had been on the list was 10 weeks.
BHP's idea of "jobs for women" in the steelworks was then restricted to cleaning, typing and working in the canteen. But it had not always been so. During World War II, when labour was short, many Wollongong women had worked in heavy industry, including in the BHP subsidiary, Lysaghts, where they made munitions.
"My sister worked in heavy industry during the war", a local trade unionist told Carla Gorton, author of Jobs for Women: Campaigning for Women's Right to Work in the '90s, "at Lysaghts where they made guns. She worked there for years and she loved every minute of it because before that the only other job available for her was housework, other people's housework. They only got 72% of the male wage and that was a victory to get that. Then the men came home from the war and all the women were put off."
In the early 1970s the economic boom created such a labour shortage that BHP asked the ALP government to increase its immigration program to provide the steel industry with more workers. The women's movement was then in its early stages in Australia, and in Wollongong feminists chained themselves to the gates of the Port Kembla steelworks to highlight that there were jobs available and that women should be given the right to fill those jobs.
Some women were hired by the company in the early '70s, but they were often deliberately put into positions from which men had been transferred. In this way, the women became isolated from their fellow workers and from the union. When the recession came in the mid-'70s, the women were easy targets for lay-offs.
With the onset of the recession in 1976, AI&S closed its gates to women, except for a tiny number of cleaners, cooks and secretarial workers. In addition, by 1980 the few traditionally female workplaces in Wollongong — clothing and textile factories — were either closing down or laying off. It was common to see queues of hundreds of women for part-time shop assistant positions.
Australia has one of the highest levels of occupational sex segregation in the world, and despite the increased participation of women in the work force, the degree of sex segregation has hardly changed since the early 1900s. In 1911, with 20% of the total labour force female, 84% of women worked in disproportionately female occupations. In 1985, when women were 38% of the total labour force, 82% of women workers still worked in traditional female occupations.
In Wollongong, the archetypal steel town, the impact on women's employment prospects of occupational sex segregation has been, and remains, devastating. When the steel industry is the major employer in town, and women can't get jobs in the steel industry, the result is massive female unemployment.
With female unemployment in Wollongong at nearly 40% by 1980, the small operations which did employ women, part time, casually or as pieceworkers, were free to exploit their employees to their heart's content. The women were not unionised. Many of them were migrants with little or no English. They worked in small businesses, shops and sewing factories.
"I was happy to have my own machine and work", a Macedonian woman told Carla Gorton of her job in a sewing factory, "but the rules, the pressure, pressure, the supervisor, inspectors, bosses and the time. You got to fight the time. Seven minutes for break until 12 o'clock, we had a twenty minute break for big lunch and then you can't go to the toilet ... It was like prison there."
The other spin-off from the endemic female unemployment was a noticeable increase in the occurrence and seriousness of sexual harassment. In 1980 a particularly severe case gained public notoriety. It involved the owner of a chicken shop who, in a six-month period, sexually harassed and abused 41 young women employees, aged between 14 and 17, holding the threat of dismissal over them to prevent their reporting his assaults.
When this case finally came to light, it was taken up by a group of women's movement and trade union activists who had formed a group around the Working Women's Charter, a campaign program which had its origins in Britain and which was taken up by the ACTU in Australia.
The original Working Women's Charter leaflet explained that the charter was "a vehicle for launching a campaign to break down the sexism within the trade union movement, to force unions to take up problems confronting women and to prepare the way for male workers to understand that sexism only divides and weakens the working class".
Several activists in the Wollongong Working Women's Charter committee were members of the Socialist Workers Party (now the Democratic Socialist Party). The party at that time was encouraging its members to obtain work in heavy industry and to carry out political work in the trade unions.
An SWP branch had been established in Wollongong in 1979, and the male members had found little difficulty getting work in the Port Kembla steelworks. Women members, like the 2000 women on the AI&S waiting list, had been told the plant had "no jobs for women". The party had then decided to launch "jobs for women" as a political campaign, almost immediately drawing support from women's movement, trade union and other left activists, especially in the Working Women's Charter Committee.
One of the first activities of the Wollongong Working Women's Charter Committee, in April 1980, was to hold a seminar on sexual harassment and unemployment, sparked by the chicken shop case. At this seminar, the Jobs for Women Action Committee was formed. The following day the women who were seeking jobs in the steelworks, inspired by the actions of the young women who had filed official complaints against the chicken shop owner, went to Sydney to file their discrimination complaints with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board.
The front page of the Illawarra Mercury the following day bore the headline, "Women in class action against AIS". Included in the article was information on how women who had been refused jobs at the steelworks could contact the campaigning group. The Jobs for Women campaign was under way.
Robynne Murphy was one of the first women to file a claim with the board. She was also a trade union and women's movement activist in Wollongong, and, like many of the women who first complained, a member of the SWP.
"Once we realised that the laws covered us and that we weren't going nuts, we were entitled to a job, we knew we were right", she told Green Left recently. "We knew we had a good case, but we also knew if we were going to fight for women's' rights we had to fight for the rights of migrant women. We knew that no case would be legitimate if migrant women weren't standing next to us.
"That was the beginning. We had no idea that 13
.5J243>1
55DJ0>/
.5>2
55D> years later we'd still be talking about it and that we'd see 700 women involved in the fight. I don't think it registered that we'd taken on one of the biggest companies in the world, and that we'd taken on laws that hadn't been tested. We just did what we saw we needed to do."
In the months following the filing of the first complaints, the action committee set about gathering community and trade union support. In particular it focused on getting support from women's groups, migrant communities and trade unionists. The women put out leaflets in community languages and went to dozens of meetings. The reception they received was overwhelmingly warm.
"You've got to understand a company town", a member of the group told Carla Gorton of the early days of the campaign. "When someone bites the toe of BHP, you can see this little rippling effect throughout the whole town. People responded. Of course, a lot of people said, 'Oh, I don't know about these women's libbers — but they're having a go and that's all right', but when we took a bite of the toe and then grabbed the whole bloody leg people sat back and realised we were absolutely serious with this campaign, and we won a lot of respect in Wollongong because of that."
Before they launched into a full-blown public campaign, the group had been careful to ensure they had the support of the leadership of the union which would cover them if they were successful in obtaining the jobs they sought, the Federated Ironworkers Association (FIA).
"We went up to the FIA board of management", recounted one member of the group in Gorton's study, "and told them that we wanted to campaign for jobs and what did they think. Were they going to support us? And they brought up this story. They said, 'Well, in 1973 BHP employed some women and they transferred men out of the jobs and put women in the men's jobs' ... of course the rights of women is something that's not going to be learnt overnight by any union or by any man. But we did explain to the union — 'Look, we want our own jobs, we do not want men's jobs, we just want the jobs that are ours, and there's lots of them there! And because we went to the union before we even started a public campaign, we got that support ... because we had at the back of our mind, if we don't get the support from this union we've had it. Because if we got jobs and we got into trouble within the steelworks and we didn't have union backing we'd be isolated. It would not be a victory for women."
And the FIA did come in behind the campaign. "I think this Wollongong action committee has got a goal, a target, which will not only assist the women but will assist the working class to create a more united working class, and one which will obviously be more difficult for the boss to exploit", FIA secretary Nando Lelli told a public meeting in June of 1980. "On behalf of my union, I can say this: Whatever assistance we can give, our office is open."
In July 1980 the Jobs for Women Action Group set up a "tent embassy", modelled on the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra, outside the steelworks for two days and nights. More than 2000 male steelworkers signed the women's petition, and many donated to the fighting fund.
Following distribution of a pamphlet among the workers, in five community languages and backed by the union, support came unstintingly. During shift changes men queued to sign the petition and delivered messages and food packages sent by their wives. Supporters joined the women as they stood by their fires, drinking coffee and discussing the issues. Many more women, especially migrant women, were added to the list of complainants.
"The tent embassy was one of the high points of the campaign", says Robynne Murphy. "We all got windburnt and were sick for days, but it was fantastic, knowing that you had that support, from the steelworkers and from the community."
The campaign gathered strength, and supporters, throughout the year. While the counsellor for equal opportunity, Carmel Niland, conciliated with representatives of BHP and the FIA, the women continued their action campaign, picketing the steelworks, organising a street march and a massive fundraising campaign. In November 1980, BHP agreed to employ all the women complainants.
"This is the easiest and best-paid job I've ever had", one of the women told the SWP paper, Direct Action, following their win.
The majority of the women employed were migrant women who had never had such steady, permanent work before. To them, sick pay, holiday pay, long service, meal breaks, award conditions and union coverage were all a new, and most welcome, experience.
But the experience was not to last long. By March of 1983, 2300 workers had been retrenched from the steelworks, despite record profits, on a "last on, first off" basis. The process had begun of "downsizing" the work force at the steelworks, which was to reduce the number employed from over 23,000 in the 1970s to the fewer than 7000 currently employed. The women who had been employed since the 1980 victory saw that they were next in line, and began to prepare for a fight.
Sure enough, in the next wave of retrenchments most of the women lost their jobs. The Jobs for Women Campaign again went into full swing, and the women lodged new claims with the Equal Opportunity Board, claiming compensation for the years they had been on the company's waiting list but not employed because of discriminatory hiring practices, and alleging indirect discrimination in their retrenchment, since they had missed out on seniority only because of the original discrimination in hiring. Again they mustered community support and the support of the Port Kembla branch of the FIA.
This time conciliation meetings between the EEO counsellor and BHP failed to reach agreement, and the case went to court.
Despite a massive fundraising effort, the women could not have afforded the cost of a court battle. Legal aid was denied on the basis that theirs was a groundbreaking case in which victory could not be assured.
A two-year campaign ensued in which the women brought immense political pressure to bear upon the NSW government, pointing out in every possible forum that anti-discrimination legislation which women could not afford to use was not worth the paper it was written on. Finally, when the women descended upon the premier, Neville Wran, at a Women's Advisory Unit seminar in Wollongong, Wran intervened and aid was granted two days after the hearing had begun in the Equal Opportunity Tribunal at the end of 1984.
The 34 women complainants won their case in the tribunal and were awarded damages totalling over $1 million in September 1985. BHP appealed in the NSW Court of Appeal and lost on May 18, 1988. In May 1989, the company appealed sections of the decision in the highest court in the land, the High Court; in December of that year the appeal was dismissed.
Following the victory of the original 34 women, a representative class action was launched by the action committee, represented by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, in the name of Robynne Murphy. The first case had already established BHP's liability for discrimination in Murphy's case. Thus the women in the second case had only to prove that they were part of the same "class" as Murphy.
In this second action there were 238 women complainants, including Mara Goluza, who had learned of the campaign and filed claims regarding their own experience of BHP's discriminatory hiring practices, during the 1980s. A mediator was appointed last year for this second group of cases, and other women's complaints were taken up at the same time. An out of court settlement was announced on February 23.
The terms of the settlement for the second group were not what the women would have hoped, for a number of reasons. First is the shortcomings of the legislation itself. Under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act, a complaint must be lodged within six months of the discriminatory act.
For any woman unfamiliar with the exact workings of the law, but especially for migrant women (and the vast majority of the second group were migrant women), this requirement is virtually impossible to fulfil. Every member of the second group of complainants did not discover that the discrimination to which they had been subjected was covered by the law until it was brought to their attention by the Jobs for Women Campaign many years after the event.
In settlement negotiations, BHP argued that the women's complaints were "out of time" under the legislation, and thus unlikely to succeed. The amounts it offered in settlement were discounted according to when the women lodged their complaints. The later the complaints were filed, it argued, the less likely they were to have been successful had the case gone to court, and therefore the more their compensation should be discounted.
Mara Goluza's compensation was discounted by 60%. Some women fared even worse, and some received pay-outs of around only $1000. The differences in payments received under the settlement have even caused some divisions and resentments among the women; both Robynne Murphy and Mara Goluza told Green Left that the end result has left a slightly sour taste in the mouths of many of the women.
The Justice and Jobs for Women Campaign is currently preparing a submission to the NSW government recommending amendment of the legislation on the issue of the time limitation, with special emphasis on the extra disadvantage it causes non-English speaking women.
The case has also drawn attention to other problems with the act, such as the $40,000 ceiling on compensation which may be awarded, and the provisions which render it easy for a rich litigant, such as BHP, to delay resolution of a complaint with little or no injury to itself, but considerable injury to poor complainants such as the Wollongong women. All BHP's litigation costs, for example, are tax deductible under federal law.
Enormous practical and political problems also assailed the second group of Jobs for Women complainants. While the first group contained many experienced political activists who were Australian-born and spoke English as their first language, the second group were overwhelmingly migrant women with little or no experience of political campaigning.
"This second group wasn't a political campaign like the first group; it was more a legal compensation campaign", Robynne Murphy told Green Left. "It was run by the solicitors."
Murphy believes it was the commitment of the original action committee to political campaigning which brought it victory on so many occasions. In the case of the first group, she points out, the six-month time limitation was waived because the case was such a hot political issue. The second group had so few options, she says, they were caught in a legal trap. Legal aid would almost certainly have been cut off if they had rejected BHP's offer, and then they would have got nothing, after so many years of work.
"Probably the most important thing that the second group did was to go up to Sydney and picket the shareholders meeting", Murphy says. "That, I think, broke the back of BHP management, because the shareholders were horrified that they were part of giving BHP the go-ahead to not do anything about it, which is basically what BHP has been doing since 1989, stringing it out over stupid little legal battles and passing letters between solicitors. The women have to be congratulated for sticking it out.
"We'd go for a walk around the steelworks yelling out slogans just to remind people we were still there. Those were the better parts of the campaign, when we mobilised and we stuck together as a group. The legal part of it was just really disillusioning for a lot of women, because of the problems of trying to explain a law which, in itself, is unfair"
Even getting the complicated legal information across was an ordeal, she says.
"With the original group of 34 it was a lot easier, but with the 300 it was so hard. Maybe 150 of them spoke Macedonian, maybe 70 another language, 10 another, five another ... The meetings just take an incredibly long time. Each language group would have their own interpreter.
"When we were 34 we used to have different groups sit in different places with their interpreters and then quietly talk amongst themselves. You can't do that when you've got meetings of 300 women. Each interpreter has to get on a microphone because otherwise they wouldn't be heard. The meeting takes five times as long. When BHP made this offer, it was such a long meeting, and we were only explaining very basic things."
AIS Pty Ltd v Najdovska and Others will be remembered as a landmark case in Australian legal history. But the Jobs for Women Campaign has made an even deeper mark as a political campaign for women's rights which went right to the heart of women's oppression and reached further, beyond a purely feminist struggle. The campaign, at its height, struck terror into the hearts of Australian, and even international, employers, and it continues to inspire working-class activists, both women and men. Despite the best efforts of BHP's silks, its significance will not be confined within the dusty covers of law reports.
Meanwhile, BHP works ever harder to cultivate a reputation as an "equal opportunity employer" while all the time reducing its work force and continuing its sex-segregation policies on the factory floor.
"There are a lot more younger women employed there in professional positions", says Robynne Murphy, one of the few women BHP still employs at the Port Kembla steelworks in a "wages" position. "Young women engineers, computer and electrical engineers, women who have got a trade or who have done a university degree. It's really inspiring to see them coming in, because there were no women on staff when we started.
"But BHP is changing a lot. With the new technology there tend to be more professional staff running the computers etc, and a lot of the unskilled jobs are disappearing. There were about 23,000 waged workers when I was trying to get a job in the steelworks; there are about 7000 now.
"The women who are working there on wages are almost all migrant, except for me and a handful of others. There are only a couple of hundred waged women, in comparison to 7000 men, and they are more or less still centred in these really boring, monotonous jobs on the tin belt, sorting tin. There hasn't really ever been any attempt by BHP to encourage those women to broaden their job possibilities.
"They certainly are trying to change their image. They really go gung ho to change it, but what they say and what they do are just totally different. Their image was just totally stuffed up as a result of our campaign. They had to bend the stick the other way, to make like they were equal opportunity employers, so what they did was they encouraged women to come in on staff, not on wages. They haven't been employing many ironworkers anyway. But they never really dealt with the problem of the women who were already there."