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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.