Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985?—?and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.

That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:

In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.

The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector.

To say that Abetz was hardly filled with enthusiasm for a case which would raise women’s wages by around $100 a week would be an understatement. Pay equity was a principle no one would disagree with, he observed, but it appears that in practice, it’s never the right time to do anything about it.

This, of course, is the whole problem. The principle was accepted in Australian law in 1972, but the practice has lagged behind, and is now trending backwards.

The method by which the ACTU, the ASU, and the Equal Pay Alliance are proceeding is by a test case based on principles of work value. The Coalition removed the power of FWA’s predecessor, the AIRC, to hear such cases, opposes anything but minimal safety net awards, and rejects the principle of industrial tribunals determining pay rates by an assessment of the skills and values worked.

So, if they were still in government, this campaign could not succeed. And it they return to government, it will not succeed. The Labor government, by contrast, is intervening in the case in support of the union position, and Julia Gillard made a cogent argument as to the timeliness of properly valuing community sector workers’ skills and experience tonight.

The audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech.

Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.

So, I was interested to read Ben Eltham’s piece in New Matilda today, which covers the FPC decision, and also segues into a valuable discussion of other aspects of employment in Australia. But what is key in the current context is Eltham’s citation of a study by John Quiggin and Steve Dowrick:

When John Quiggin and Steve Dowrick analysed the literature on minimum wages in 2003, they found little relationship between minimum wages and employment levels, but a very strong relationship between low minimum wages and increasing inequality.

Countries like the United States with low minimum wages had much greater levels of inequality than countries with higher minimum wages like Australia and the members of the European Union. The reason appears to be that holding minimum wages low doesn’t destroy many jobs, but it does have a broad impact on inequality by holding the wages of low-paid workers down across the board. “There is little reason to expect strong employment benefits from freezing minimum wages in nominal terms, that is, reducing minimum wages in real terms,” Quiggin and Dowrick concluded.

The Quiggin and Dowrick paper can be found here [link to pdf].