By Jennifer Thompson
John Howard's July 10 comments to Sydney radio interviewer Alan Jones, supporting a "homemaker's allowance" to encourage women to drop out of the labour force have been linked to a "white picket fence" view of Australia and a nostalgic harking back to the 1950s.
Like government funding cuts to child-care and industrial relations changes, financial incentives to move women back into the home have been promoted by government members as giving more "choices" to women. However, the effects of the government's policies are reducing real choices, and that at a time when two incomes are a necessity for many working-class households.
Howard's nostalgia for an earlier period of Australian history recalls the description given by US journalist and feminist Betty Friedan to the "problem that has no name" that afflicted working and middle class women alike.
Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminist Mystique, charts her seeing in a "strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breast feeding; suburban conformity, and the new neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by doctors ... We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home'."
This awakening was echoed in Australian Anne Summers' 1974 book Damned Whores and God's Police, which described the spectacular rise of the '40s birth rate and the opening of large housing estates for families "seeking a privatised suburban life" which became idealised as the most desirable and the best environment for raising children.
Like the romantic "white picket fence" recollection of the '50s, the idea of a mass of working mothers unwillingly participating in the labour force doesn't ring true.
A 1994 study by Australian Institute of Family Studies researchers Helen Glezer and Ilene Wolcott, published as a booklet Work and Family Life: Achieving Integration, found that most women, amongst the 75% of women with children who wanted to be in the labour force, preferred to work part time.
January labour force figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicate that, of women part-time workers, around 20% of married women and 30% of all women would prefer to work more hours. According to Glezer and Wolcott, "the majority [of mothers] prefer to be combining child rearing and being in the work force".
A November ABS report on career experience indicates that while many women and some men may take a break from the labour force while their children are very young, the great majority return to work.
Women were 67% of those taking a break, and 98% of all those who had taken a break for family reasons were women. Women made up 95% of workers who had left the labour force when their youngest child was born; 34% returned to the labour force when the child was between six and 12 months and 45% when the child was older than a year.
Despite the measures of women's aspirations to be in the work force, the ABS June labour force survey confirmed an alarming downward trend in women's full-time and part-time jobs. Of the 17,000 decline in full-time jobs over the month (66,000 since January), 23,000 women's full-time jobs were lost and 5000 men's jobs were gained. Over the same period, part-time women's jobs increased by 20,000 and part-time men's by 9000.
Total employment dropped by 25,000 since January, with the June fall in the jobless rate to a seasonally adjusted 8.5% reflecting a sharp drop in participation.
The number of full-time jobs in Australia fell to 6.235 million, the lowest since June '95 and the lowest as a proportion of all jobs (74.3%) since 1978, when the ABS survey began.
According to Sydney Morning Herald journalists Paul Cleary and Diane Stott, since the Howard government's election, only five of the 17 sectors of the economy, mainly service industries, have substantially increased full-time employment.
The biggest full-time job losses have occurred in the public sector and industries related to government funding — education, health and community services. The biggest growth areas of part-time work are in retail, accommodation, the public sector and services.
The Workplace Relations Act, among other things, further deregulated part-time work and made it easier for employers to introduce individual contracts. Both factors have reduced women's ability to work sociable hours, receive penalty rates and have a regular work schedule.
Business has been quick to adopt the "flexible hours" rhetoric of helping parents to balance their family responsibilities. Employers' "flexibility", however, has generally meant workers being required to work whenever bosses find it convenient.
The overwhelmingly economic reasons for the reduction in jobs held by women were highlighted by ANU Centre for Economic Policy Research's Jeff Borland, who has compared the trends in jobs held by women between the 1980s and 1990s economic recoveries.
While the pattern of growth in female employment in both recoveries (1983-1989 and 1993-1997) started similarly, over the past six quarters female job growth has slowed considerably, adding only 20,000 extra jobs, compared to 215,000 in the comparable stage of the last recovery.
The reason is a weaker economic recovery, particularly in a small set of industries employing women workers. Between November '95 and May '97, 50,000 extra jobs were created in retail, finance/insurance, property and health and community service industries, compared to 145,000 in the same phase of the '80s recovery.
"The message appears to be that women have been particularly badly affected by the depressed retail sector, by downsizing in the finance/insurance industry [put at 40,000 full-time jobs over the last five years by the Finance Sector Union], and by public sector cutbacks in health and community services."
Another result of this situation has been a reduction in the number of women actively looking for work. According to Borland, the unemployment rate would be around 11.5% if the slowdown in women's job growth hadn't been matched by a deceleration in women's labour market participation.
The economic and ideological factors pushing women out of the work force will be exacerbated by government policies that are yet to bite: rising child-care fees; attacks on working and maternity leave conditions; and financial incentives to leave the work force, like the paltry family tax initiative and potential "homemaker's allowance". Women with the least choices and earning capabilities will be worst affected.
Professor Belinda Probert, of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, has pointed out that the government allowances at this stage are so small they make no difference, except to the poorest women. "And with 40% of marriages ending in divorce, women with the least skills and education are made even more vulnerable ... we are trying to get single parents back into the labour force because it is the only way out of poverty."