I’ve seen a number of commentators around the shop refer to the fact that women are more likely than men to have concerns about WorkChoices. That stands to reason – women are also more likely to be in casual work than men, and low pay sectors (retail, hospitality, services) employ lots of women. Women working in the private sector are also less likely to be unionised.
The difficulty with analysing the impact of WorkChoices is that the government doesn’t want us to. The OEA does not make available comprehensive information on the content of AWAs (whereas awards and enterprise bargaining agreements are public documents), though a sample of 250 was presented to a Senate committee last year. Their secrecy is one of the problems for gender equity as well – in that there’s no way of knowing whether men and women doing work of equal value (the legal test) are being paid equally, and thus no recourse if the law is broken. However, it’s possible to pull together the data that is in the public domain and analyse it, which a number of academics have done.
Both Tim Dunlop and Trevor Cormack link to a paper by David Peetz [pdf] (Cormack notes that Hockey’s only response to this research was ad hominems and lies).
There was a flurry of coverage last week of an academic paper presented by Professor David Peetz. In Brave New Work Choices (pdf), Peetz argues that WorkChoices has led to a loss of conditions, lower wages, and no discernable productivity increase. He says women have been hit hard, taking a pay cut even as businesses post higher profits:
“Their real ordinary time earnings fell by 2 per cent in the private sector in the first six months,� he said.
“By contrast, the profit share has never been stronger. In the September quarter 2006 it was at 27.5 per cent, that’s 0.5 points above the previous all-time high.[�]
Trevor also links to another paper from Curtin University academics which demonstrates that the government’s figures are misleading because the OEA defines “non-managerial employees” differently from the ABS. Read more at his site.
In this paper we review evidence with respect to earning outcomes and, using the standard definition of non-managerial employees (as provided by the ABS) show that, notwithstanding the favourable claims from the Office of the Employment Advocate (OEA), women are likely to be significantly disadvantaged in a system where primacy is given to individual bargaining. Between 2002 and 2004 the gender wage gap amongst non-managerial employees on AWAs deteriorated by 19.6 percentage points to 79.6 per cent and was larger than the observed gender wage gap amongst non-managerial employees on collective (federally registered) agreements, equal to 87.5 per cent.
Aside from experiencing a widening gender wage gap, the data also show that female non-managerial employees on AWAs also experienced a deterioration in their real wage between 2002 and 2004 with absolute earnings (at current prices) falling over the period studied. Whilst it might be that earnings have been traded off for some benefit (eg annual leave), research elsewhere suggests that the employment conditions under most individual agreements covering non-managerial employees are inferior to awards.
It’s worth observing that the data for this research predates WorkChoices. While AWAs under the Workplace Relations Act 1996 had to pass a “no disadvantage test”, they no longer have to meet that test. And there’s evidence from the sample provided by the OEA to the Senate that many WorkChoices AWAs contain no tradeoffs for wage growth less than inflation. Many AWAs also now provide for no pay rise over the term of the agreement, except in some instances through managerial discretion. So the trends that the Curtin authors have picked up are likely to have accentuated.
Also: There’s a broader reflection from Peetz on WorkChoices in the current Griffith Review.
In WA when that state’s liberal government introduced its own version of individual contracts, women’s wages fell relative to men’s by 20% and wages fell overall. This is exactly what individual contracting is all about. It is designed to permit employers to unilaterally set the wages and conditions they feel like.
The low ‘no disadvantage test’ established by the federal government’s legislation permits awards to be effectively shredded. There was no need to ‘abolish awards’. Employers can do that effectively themselves by issuing individual contracts that are underpinned by a new ‘no disadvantage test’ which includes a bare five standards, excluding any reference to penalty rates, overtime payments, allowances and leave loading.
What do people expect? When you pass legislation that permits someone to reduce their costs, (in this case labour costs) which results in more income for them, why is anyone surprised when people take lawful advantage of the fact? The real problem is that otherwise quite smart people engage in a lot of complex debate about a matter which quite straighforward. The fact that those who are perfectly aware of the rationale for the legislation continually lie about about its provenance and purpose, should surprise no-one.. In this category we can safely put garbage peddled by paid shills in the mainstream press that simply cuts and pastes government lies and propaganda about the results of exactly the same approach to labour market regulation in WA.
We know what happened there, quite conclusively. Why would it be any different five or six years later? The principles are exactly the same, only the scale is different.
A government has an opportunity to give its real support base some concrete lolly, in the form of increased share of overall output, and its long term political prospects a boost by destroying the capacity of its political enemies to leverage organisational capacity for political mobilisation. The question is not the results of what they did, but why anyone bothers to wax indignant when the legislation is found to be working exactly in the way it was designed to do!
Agree with all of that, amused. The WA experience was used extensively in analyses prior to the passage of WorkChoices to make that point. Of course the legislation is about holding down wages relative to profit, particularly at the lower end of the labour market where bargaining power is in any case weak even for workers on collective agreements. But it’s still worth countering the government’s lies and distortions and pointing to what’s actually happening.
And you’re probably thinking of 01 with Mayo when Downer almost lost.
Let’s remember that the polls only measure perceptions at this stage of the game, not what will happen on polling day. But Bennelong has become a marginal, and it’s moved further into the marginal column by the redistribution. If Labor can get a decent swing going in NSW, its loss would be a possibility. Many psephologists expect it to become a Labor seat when Howard goes. I wouldn’t expect Howard to lose it if the Coalition retain government, but it could happen. In any case, it’s always a matter of finite resources – the Libs having to spend time and money defending Howard’s seat reduces the resources that can be put to work in other Lib marginals and Labor marginals.
As the election gets closer, we’ll know what the Libs’ own perception of their chances is by looking at whether or not they run serious campaigns in Labor marginals.
The debate between Hockey and Gillard on the 7:30 Report the other night was quite interesting. Hockey really came across badly (in my opinion), while I thought that Julia Gillard did pretty well.
I don’t imagine that the government will actually release any information about the impact of Work Choices. Why would they give the Opposition that kind of ammunition?
I don’t know if it is just my impression, but it does seem as though the issue has lost a lot of its potency in the electorate too, which is sad. Unfortunately, in the absence of that information, it does appear to be quite difficult for the ALP to make any rigorous criticism of the impact of the legislation in order to put it back on the agenda…
There was a fair bit of debate on the debate at Troppo last week:
http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/2007/02/15/hockeys-shtick/
I still think WorkChoices has some salience as an issue. The $28.5 million fighting fund the ACTU has raised and the move to put 16 full time organisers into federal electorates (including some that are not marginal – for instance Nationals held seats in regional Queensland which have some of the lowest wage numbers in the nation) is a wild card in the election.
But I also think that WorkChoices plays to concerns about security which are around in an age of constant workforce transformation and to concerns about fairness. Rudd and Gillard have been picking up on these, as they should.
The test will be how WorkChoices plays among the so-called “Howard battlersâ€? (many of whom aren’t the proverbial aspirational independent contractors – whose numbers are overstated anyway – Productivity Commission figures from 2004 put them at less than 10% of the workforce whereas the figures journos and the government use collapse sole professionals in non partnership arrangements and some small business owners in with contractors. In addition, many contractors don’t meet the adapted common law test which the ATO applies – that is, they have only one “customerâ€? for 80% of their income. Most of these folks are people like cleaners and call centre workers who are being paid less than award wages. One of the most significant changes in WorkChoices was to remove the power of State Commissions to declare that such contractors are really employees being deprived of employment rights).
Rod Cameron on Lateline last Friday estimated WorkChoices might shift half a percent or a percent of the Liberal vote across to Labor. That doesn’t sound like much, but few “issues” have that much salience and remember that we’re talking about swings in the order of 3 to 4 percent for Labor to win (depending on whether Labor can get a majority or whether Independents will hold the balance of power).
The fact that the OEA will not release information on AWAs is certainly a matter of political protection for the gov’t. But it really is outrageous that significant public policy changes cannot be evaluated, and that transparency and accountaibility are junked for electoral advantage.
I agree Mark that it is ‘outrageous’, but to be honest, this is but one, albeit very important example, of the government ensuring that the ‘facts’, as opposed to its ’spin’ are not permitted to sully public debate.
On Richard Farmer’s estimate about the likely electoral impact of the legislation on the overall vote, I would have agreed with him this time last year, but I think it will be bigger than that. The issue of economic insecurity is playing larger than people might think, if all they read was Rupert’s various versions of ‘pravda in strine’.
The interest rate rises were a ‘wake up call’. It has made people receptive to a number of key messages concerning the future, particularly for those who understand quite well that their wages/salaries are what keep them in respectable company, as opposed to sliding down a slope that appears to have no ‘bottom’. Make no mistake, the IR legislation permits a raft of other issues and concerns to be given ‘airtime’ and none of it so far, looks good for the government. That does not mean of course that the government won’t craft messages and spend money to reassure, and it doesn’t mean they won’t be successful. The issue is that concerns about the IR legislation are rather wider than just ‘my wages and conditions at the moment’.
That it is the danger for the government, and don’t think they don’t know it, whatever the egregious Hockey says in public..
If the WorkChoices issue has lost any potency in the electorate, and I’m not sure that it HAS, that would be down to Howard’s hurried implementation of it as soon as he could after the last election. Knowing, as he would, what Australians’ political memory and apathy are like, and giving people the maximum possible time to “get over it”. He surely is a crafty and fully loathsome rodent.
Talking to a Telegraph only reader over the last few days, she said she would vote against the federal government solely on IR (she was pretty angry) but would vote Liberal for the state because even though she likes Iemma’s face, she, grrr, doesn’t like the Labor state government. She won’t consider voting for the Greens because they caused all the bushfires! My point is no matter how much guff she swallows from Rupert on other issues she will make up her own mind regarding her hip pocket. You can’t fool people into thinking they’re better off when they know they’re worse off, no matter how little detail you release. The issue remains, sitting quietly, waiting to take a huge chunk out of the government’s arse.
It is important to remember that the relative lack of detailed knowledge we have about women’s position in the workforce today is missing precisely because of the Howard and state Labor governments’ deliberate strategies to dismantle, gut and and block research and policy development relating to this andfunding for the government agencies that previously did it. We are have been made deliberately data deficient.
It is great that some academics are still doing invaluable work around this, but the gutting of previously well-resourced agencies like HREOC, and at a state level, industrial relations and anti-discrimination agencies, and in NSW, the abolition after the last election, of the Department of Women, plus the loss of funding for working women’s centres, et., all amount to a catastrophic loss and defeat of historic proportions.
It means we are flying blind to a large extent. It means unions and others have been hamstrung and rendered ineffectual and incapable of producing the demographic and industrial analysis needed to even approximate the story of what is happening economically to working women today – something that we were able to do much better even four years ago on a state level, though it has been ten years and more federally since we could.
The Queensland Government has continued to produce a lot of research about working conditions and IR:
http://www.dir.qld.gov.au/publications/subject/industrialrelations/index.htm#i
I haven’t checked the terms of reference, but I imagine the forthcoming report of the State IR Commission into the impact of WorkChoices will feature data on the impact on gender equity.
NSW Nurses are campaigning on a ‘Liberal Govt. in NSW could lead to loss of nurses in NSW because of changes to workplace laws’ ticket. Apparently nurses in NSW are currently protected by state labour laws which they think a Debenham liberal govt. could abolish leaving them open to losing their conditions and pay rates. Could be interesting to see if it has any effect.
I thought that was a clever move by the ALP. It gets one of the most important, powerful unions with the strongest community support for almost any profession explicitly on side with the ALP and will resonate with many other public sector workers, e.g. other health workers, teachers, public transport workers, etc., who are furious with the ALP, for good reason, but who need to be hauled into line to make sure the Libs, who would be infinitely worse, are not a temptation at the ballot box. Of course, it is precisely among these sectors that many are most likely to give their first vote to independents, above all, the Greens.
And yes, if there is one section of the female workforce which knows exactly what is going on wages and conditions wise it is nurses and their unions.
Debnam’s almost inviting people to see the NSW election as a referendum on WorkChoices. Bizarre.
Hi,
I realise this is a very old post, and this comment is unlikely to be seen.
However, I just wanted to correct some inaccuracy in the comments here. Specifically, I refer to the comments made regarding the gender pay gap in Western Australia. While it’s true that WA has the worst gender pay gap in the country, and that this situation largely emerged during the early-mid 1990s, the divergence from the national average began prior to the implementation of the Workplace Agreements Act (WA) 1993.
It would make things much easier if there were a clear causal relationship between WA Workplace Agreements and the gender pay gap; there is not.
Incidentally, the gender pay gap in WA worsened in 2002 as employers left state IR system in favour of the federal system.