Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Women, work hours and liberation Women are an ever larger part of the Australian workforce: about 45 per cent, compared with about 38 per cent two decades ago. Women participate more, but pay falls further behind men’s: from $229 in 1996 to $311 in 2001. Full-time jobs are up by 15 per cent on 1991, but part-time jobs grew by 62 per cent. Women fill these jobs –more than 70 per cent of part-time and more than 60 pr cent of casual jobs - work that is often insecure, low status, non-unionised and clustered in clerical, sales and service jobs. Only 54 per cent of women have full-time jobs, 85 per cent of men do (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics). Women fall behind because they are relatively powerless in part-time, casual jobs. Recent research by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology shows casual and part-time workers are not getting the hours they want, are pushed to work harder and are clustered in the lowest job classifications. Women who do work full-time and return to work part-time often find pay rates reduced (‘Part-timers and casuals lose ground’ Sydney Morning Herald 28.4.05). The Howard government’s industrial relations proposals — to impose individual contracts, abolish awards, allow unfair dismissal and restrict unions’ rights of entry and representation - will hit women, as the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers, hardest. Howard’s lip service to family values doesn’t extend to women who must work to support their families. Women in the global workforce Women in wealthy, ‘modern’ Australia, similarly to women world wide, face a pervasive, deep, discrimination in all areas of economic and social activity. Women, about 40 per cent of the global workforce are paid 30-60 per cent less than men, work mainly in low skill, undervalued, insecure jobs and still do most family tasks. Many, as migrant workers, toil in some of the planet’s least protected and most exploited jobs. Slave trafficking, for illegal employment and prostitution, is increasingly common. The international trade union movement sees the concentration of women in such work as a symptom of deeply-rooted oppression that unions must address directly. A working solution? Some couples decide they will both work part-time and each care for the children while the other is at work (‘Parents are working less and caring more’ Sydney Morning Herald 23.1.05). But even higher income couples, those most likely to use this option, find workloads may not reflect reduced hours & salaries. They also suffer the normal career disadvantages of part-time work. The ACTU sees growing casual and insecure work as a crucial gender equity issue and campaigns to bring more rights to part-time, casual work. This may remove some of the disadvantages of insecure work, but does not address the question of equity and full economic citizenship for women, while ever such great disparity exists between men and women in how they share paid work and non-work time. To do this we must significantly reduce the hours in a standard, full-time work week: * A reduced work week moves the hours (and pay) of current part-time jobs closer to those of a full-time job: a 20 hour week is half a 40 hour work week, but 2/3 of a 30 hour work week; * a shorter work week also spills hours from full-time jobs, many of them higher paying positions, to part-time, casual workers, who are often seeking more hours; * it more equally shares work & ‘leisure’, so both men & women can be ‘full economic citizens’; * it is an economic precondition for liberty: both men & women can use new found free time to better manage life in all its fullness — as workers, as family, as community & citizens. It puts people not profit at the centre of the system so it works for people, not the other way round. Pilots have demonstrated its benefits and practicality (but employers vetoed its extension). Europe’s left calls on the international labour movement to take it up as a visionary goal. |