As mothers, partners, carers and breadwinners, women often face different pressures to men. In turn, their specific needs are often also different. The ongoing contribution that Australian women make to the workplace and to households across this country must certainly never be underestimated or undervalued. Despite the critical role they play in both the family and at work, women have always had to fight for their rights to social and economic parity. The women who are most susceptible and most vulnerable to the government’s extreme Work Choices legislation are those who remain socially and financially disadvantaged and disempowered in our community. It is therefore our responsibility to recognise their plight and to fight for their rights.
This government refuses to recognise the enormous damage that its Work Choices legislation is doing and the additional difficulties that countless Australian women now face as a result of this legislation. If it were ever fair dinkum about helping women balance their work and family life in a way that protects the health and wellbeing of their families, then it would never have introduced this piece of extreme legislation and it would immediately restore employment protection for women adversely affected by the grossly misnamed Work Choices.
One of the most damaging aspects of Work Choices is the introduction of AWAs that erode security and protection in the workplace for workers, both women and men but particularly women. Under Work Choices, employers can force workers into accepting AWAs that remove conditions and safety nets from awards negotiated and fought for over a period of many years. Evidence of this can be found in ABS statistics released in June this year which show that some 90 per cent of AWAs struck since this government’s IR changes began involve the removal of at least one condition and require longer working hours, meaning less time for family and less room for women to balance the different demands of work and family life. Such is the skewed nature of the Work Choices legislation that employers are now able to impose terms and conditions and to bully and threaten their workers into accepting these terms and conditions that make balancing work and family commitments increasingly impossible.
Research shows that women are more likely to accept pay and conditions without negotiation, are less confident about negotiating individual contracts and are more likely to be forced onto AWA’s because they leave and re-enter the workforce more frequently than men due to family responsibilities. As women are largely concentrated in retail, clerical, hospitality and community services industries, Work Choices will have a disproportionate impact on them through the process of removing award conditions and reducing pay in what are already lower paid jobs. Under AWA’s, penalty rates are often lost, annual leave and sick leave are traded off, very few agreements make provision for paid maternity leave and the gender pay gap is widened, with women on AWA’s receiving only 80 per cent of the hourly rate of men. Equally troubling is the way protections against discrimination are now at risk of being undermined by this legislation. The privatisation of employment contract details in AWA’s will make it much harder to determine whether sex discrimination in pay practices is occurring, either directly or indirectly, through the use of job classifications that isolate women in lower paid positions.
It must also be recognised that when women who are working mothers are detrimentally affected by this legislation it is also the children of those women who are affected. This was made clear to me at a community summit I recently hosted in my electorate. Representatives of the childcare industry were scathing of the effect this legislation was having on working mothers in my electorate who felt compelled to work longer hours and to effectively be on call for work at short notice. For working mothers this often means arranging child care at very short notice. Given the irregular hours and the shortage of child care across the country, this is not always possible. The childcare workers who spoke at the forum told how this affects not only the working mothers but also the children.
Working mothers who relied on family day care increasingly felt pressured to work whatever hours their employers demanded, knowing that they had no recourse open to them if they lost their job. Irregular patterns of care meant that their children were increasingly unsettled. One clear example given was of children not knowing who was picking them up from school, as they may have met their carer only that day. How settled is a child expected to be at school if they do not even know who is picking them up afterwards? How settled is a working mother expected to be at work when their child is with a carer they barely know? This is the reality of this government’s Work Choices legislation. Working women make a great contribution to the workforce and to households—
