Larvatus Prodeo » sociology of work

Unequal pay for work of equal value

Mark Bahnisch — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:20:19 +0000

The persistence, and now the widening, of the gap between men’s and women’s pay is one of the continuing scandals of Australian public life. Despite the fact that unequal pay for work of equal value has been illegal since the Whitlam era, what ought to be a major issue is typically surrounded by obfuscation, if not ignored entirely. In today’s Crikey, Eva Cox has published a useful corrective to many of the myths which serve to excuse, obscure and justify what is a continuing disgrace:

Why is there still such a pay gap between men and women in full-time paid work?

This working week is still catch-up time for women on average weekly ordinary-time earnings. Until Tuesday September 1 they will earn less than men did to last June 30. So a coalition of women’s groups is asking for action to close the pay gap. The gender gap was reduced by 19% between 1972-79 (up to 80%), after the male minimum wage was abolished and equal pay for work of equal value approved. It has been up to 86% and now it’s back to 82.5%. So why is this happening, considering women are now better educated, more likely to be in paid work and there are measures in place supposedly to deal with prejudice?

The figures from various industries are interesting and counter the idea that most of the gap is just that women work fewer hours and years. Even when women are in the same industries as men, they earn less, but ABS figures show the gap is biggest in the male-dominated areas, e.g.

Finance 31%, property and business services 26%

mining 25%, government 7%, education 10%

hospitality 12%

In 2008, the pay gap between men and women in finance grew from 24% to 28%, which raises an interesting question about the effects of global financial crisis and who has benefited, after maybe contributing to its causation?

And it’s not the arrival of family responsibilities as new graduates often show clear gender differences, even in the same professional areas, e.g. law and medicine. There is evidence that 40 years after the first decision started the process of equal pay for work of equal value, we are still not there.

The facts are that the cultures of the workplace, community and related attitudes of men and women have not shifted as dramatically as the public rhetoric suggests. We still have a workplace model that survives almost unchanged since the industrial revolution when men first moved out of the home and into the workplace. This became the public sphere and became more important and regulated than what was left outside.

Workplace reform shortened official hours (but they’ve gone up unofficially), emphasised the value of hours worked (the more the better) and assumed the presentism (being there) was an unquestioned good, even when technology offered wider options. The private sphere and its needs were excluded except for some idea of family wages, now defunct. Changes of assumptions about good workers, good bosses, hours and place based locations shifted marginally and women who joined were expected to “fit in” with some minor adjustments.

So it is not surprising we are still under-paid for similar jobs. There are bits that could be fixed by using existing legal and educations processes that can be used to alleviate the differences. Signals of continued discrimination include:

* Women get paid less for the same jobs, sometimes despite better qualifications and experience, often because they don’t ask for more
* Women are less likely to apply for higher-paid positions but tend to more qualified when they do
* Women tend to do many lower-paid jobs because they echo the feminine private roles; e.g. care and support roles and few men will do them
* These types of jobs are paid less than similar skill jobs usually done by men; e.g. child care versus car care because feminised skills are undervalued
* Women are more often in publicly funded jobs in NGOs, etc, which pay minimum wage rates and awards.

Harder to fix assumptions include deeply held views about what is highly valued in the workplaces and out of them:
* Full-time work hours are overly long and not getting any shorter and people ignore the higher productivity of most part-timers
* Women still do most of the unpaid care/domestic work, so cut back paid-work hours to take this on
* Women still have to conform to different criteria of male-defined workplace behaviours for women to be acceptable; i.e. need to be nicer not tough, not aggressive
* Workplaces cultures still value limited male-defined skills and credentials excluding “soft skills” as natural attributes that do not need to be paid for

Data for May showed full-time ordinary time earnings rose by 6.5% for males and 5.2% for females, showing how women’s pay is going backwards. So women’s groups are asking women to wear red to work next Tuesday to illustrate their deficit and give their boss a red rose to remind him we too have thorns, if this gap does not decrease.

Update: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog, noting the appearance of sexism in the comments thread attached to this thread, which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, but is as disappointing as it is predictable.

Expectations about unemployment

Mark Bahnisch — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:04:35 +0000

Andrew Norton has posted on some interesting findings from Roy Morgan’s employment perceptions survey. Basically, there’s something of a disjunction – with 70% of respondents believing unemployment will rise over the next year (the highest since the last recession, and the third highest since the survey began in 1975) while 80% think their own job is secure (the same number as last year’s survey). 63% believe they could easily find another job.

These sorts of surveys demonstrate one of the weaknesses of opinion polling – we’re left to speculate on the reasons. It really would be extremely helpful if polling groups were to supplement such research with qualitative forms of enquiry such as focus groups, or qualitative aspects to the survey instrument.

But since we have to speculate, my guess would be that one or more of the following factors might be in operation:

(a) “The economy” itself is something of an abstraction in most people’s minds, and unless they can feel the impact of economic stats directly or by anecdote then it remains an abstraction. This is exactly the dynamic that explained the failure of various “beautiful sets of numbers” to give John Howard and Peter Costello any traction last year, and for that matter, vitiated the arguments in favour of WorkChoices. So, if there’s something of a lag beween the financial aspects of the crisis and their impact on “the real economy”, then it may be that expectations also show something of a lag;

(b) Relatedly, people tend to extrapolate to the future from the recent past, and more powerfully from their own experience than from history or meta narratives. So we would expect attitudes to employment and the labour market to reflect the most recent patterns, particularly among younger and more skilled workers. It may also be a realistic (at this point) implicit understanding of the fact that “the economy” is a much more disaggregated creature than it once was, with different sectors both occupationally/industrially and geographically more weakly correlated with overall trends. In that sense, if people are aware of continuing tightness in the market for particular jobs in their field, there’s a reasonably rational belief that the underlying skills picture may continue, and/or that their sector may be somewhat insulated from broader nationwide and global developments.

(c) “Unemployment” itself has a different subjective meaning due to the casualisation of the labour market and the increase in contracting. It may be that a recession no longer poses the threat of a non-existent secure permanent job disappearing just like that for many people, but rather a shift in hours or longer gaps between contracts. “Unemployment” as a lived category means something different from both its statistical and legal meanings.

The future of journalism – or its vanishing present

Mark Bahnisch — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:07 +0000

As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.

Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain

Guest Poster — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:00:18 +0000

MB writes: Lost, it would appear, in the government’s focus on productivity as the ruling motif of the workplace is any consideration of the human costs of work in the new economy. I had hoped that Julia Gillard might bring a focus on industrial democracy and the quality of working life to her role as Industrial Relations Minister, but, to date, that’s a hope that appears a futile one. Nevertheless, I agree with David Coats that we need to politicise “bad work”, as I’ve suggested before, and that may well be a contribution largely to be made by civil society. Anyway, when I read this post at The Global Sociology Blog, I thought it cohered well with this effort, and so I asked SocProf if we could post it at LP, and I’m delighted that she agreed.

Dominic Huez, an MD specialized in questions of labor-related medical conditions, has a book out, Souffrir au Travail: Comprendre Pour Agir, that connects illness and suffering to management practices. He recently had a chat hosted by Le Monde. Here is the digest version of what was discussed.

Rejecting “stress” as the proper concept to define his subject, Huez prefers to use “suffering at work” as the correct one that can be caused by a lack of recognition by one’s peers or bosses. In a very Durkheimian fashion, he explains that the dynamics of recognition are essential to one’s identity-at-work and to one’s health.

For Huez, there are two main mechanisms at the root of psychopathologies at work (in both senses):

The intensification of work, the reduction of margins of maneuvers, the disappearance of breathing spaces for employees

The disastrous consequences of “new management” where the reality of work is not taken into account but where individuals are managed by indicators that measures individual performance for the extent of its deviation from prescribed results. Evaluation of performance becomes threatening device because the point is to judge people not the work really accomplished but on personality aspects and appearances. Under such conditions, there can be no system of recognition or collaboration that lead to psychosocial risks based on the risks of falling down. The illusion of autonomy may in reality be isolation without cooperation.

Indeed, what Huez describes here is something that social thinkers such as Ulrich Beck (see especially Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences as well as The Brave New World of Work), Zygmunt Bauman (see especially Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Liquid Fear, and The Individualized Society) and Richard Sennett (see especially, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Respect in a World of Inequality, and The Craftsman) have described in more sociological terms when they analyzed the changes in the world of labor and their personal consequences.

This lack of recognition of crafts and commitment is especially visible in the fact that suicides at work are more likely to be from people who are the most committed to work, not those who are disengaged. But when one examines the statistics of suicide at work, it is not surprising to find that they happen in labor units that experienced precarization of work in the global context. These suicides also happen more and more at the middle management levels, these that are subjected to paradoxical and double-bind-type demands, and are now also more likely to experience the precarization of their working conditions.

Huez discusses also the devaluation of the work by older workers. This is well in line, again, which Richard Sennett’s argument that the New Capitalism does not value experience or craft but potential skills that are non-specific. This again ties back into the lack of recognition.

Experience and craft is something that one build over time and applied to a specific domain of work, whereas potential skills are something that is more or less subjectively assessed as a potential of the person irrespective of the task at hand because what is precisely valued is the capacity to solve problems in a variety of environments (which is the essence of the job of consultant, for instance, no long-term ties, short-term contracts in a variety of settings that require not craft or experience but problem solving skills).

Is there a gender component to suffering at work? Well, of course there is. Women suffer more than men. Why?

One explanation, for Huez, is The Second Shift. Men can assume work burdens, safe in the knowledge that their wives or female partners are taking care of the kids. There is no such backup for women.

The second, and more convincing explanation according to Huez, is that women are more likely to be subjected to organizational constraints, more pushed around and more likely to be judged by standards concerning what is considered proper for women, how much they conform to culturally-expected “feminine qualities.” Therefore, they are expected to pay more attention to relational aspects and to be more attentive to others. Generally, the level of expectations, both in terms of productivity and relationships, is higher and more pressing on women.

Ultimately, what it all boils down to is the meaning of work for one’s identity. And in the context of precarization, devaluation of identity, generalized insecurity, lack of recognition, unrequited demands for commitment and new management double-binds, this is a tighter rope to walk, with pathological consequences.

The Future of Journalism – reflections

Mark Bahnisch — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:53:40 +0000

As noted here and here, I attended the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event in Brisbane yesterday. Courtesy of the lovely folks at the ABC, the sessions were all recorded and will be viewable online, so that absolves me from the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a session in which I was a panelist after the fact. So what I wanted to do in this post is thank the organisers of the day – particularly Jonathan Este of the MEAA – and of my session – particularly Cristen Tilley from the ABC as Chair and my co-panelists Axel Bruns from QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and blogger/journalist Marian Edmunds – for what I found was a stimulating and enjoyable experience. I also wanted to note some reflections which were prompted by many of the discussions.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Cameron Reilly, for instance, appears to have perceived an antagonism in the session that he was a panelist in which entirely escaped me as someone watching it from the floor. He also takes an unjustified swipe at QUT’s Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the “catastrophist” narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper. And that theme is reproduced in another key by another participant Perth Norg‘s Bronwen Clune, who also recently wrote the obituary of the (Fairfax) newspaper. I don’t want to be reductive about the contribution that Reilly and Clune have to make, and the latter in particular had some interesting things to say which I’ll come back to, but this “web evangelist” stuff does seem to me to unhelpfully define itself against its Big Media Other, and to need sustaining through constant boosterism which then moves on to some “new killer app” almost at the same speed as the permanent revolution fails to deliver what’s claimed for it, and as the media empires resist their predicted collapse into ruins. Self “branding” and entrepreunerial writing bring in their wake real costs as well as benefits, and citizen media is not the transparently democratic exercise it’s purported to be.

But one good point Clune made, and one which was echoed by other participants yesterday, was that the “control media” have missed the boat and been swamped by the tide. This is where I think the concentration on media ownership is misplaced – it’s certainly not unimportant that there’s a concentration of ownership in the Australian MSM (and Axel Bruns is right in my view to question whether that’s not a large part of the reason the Australian media have been so resistant to, and inept in, the web 2.0 takeup), but in many ways it’s a debate of the 1980s and the 1990s. I’ve never understood the focus on Rupert Murdoch as teh evil that seems to obsess so many. As a social democrat, I don’t expect capitalist corporations or media “barons” like Murdoch to act in the public interest or to be without a political agenda, and the recent Fairfax shenanigans surely put to bed any residual sense that Fairfax was or is some sort of temple of fourth estate goodness. A simple proliferation of papers – which all define “hard news” in the same narrow sense of crime and day to day politics – never provided us with the golden age of journalism some like to wistfully misremember, and there’d be a better bang for the buck from initiatives other than starting an ABC newspaper or whatever.

I think Jason Wilson was the first to make the point last year at the height of the Government Gazette vs. blogosphere wars that the angst that accompanied the pseph blog dissing was a reflection of the fact that the ownership of opinion and analysis had slipped from the proprietorial grasp of the punditariat. That sort of ownership is gone, and it ain’t never coming back, and that’s a really important shift. And there’s a broader shift at work where media corporations can no longer control their audiences, which does totally disrupt the equation of a conversation among pundits at the summit of the media heights with a representative role for a unitary public. That point was made by MEAA secretary Chris Warren. That was never true, and it’s clear that it’s increasingly impossible to maintain the pretence that it is true now. A democratic public sphere needs to privilege participation over representation by a putative fourth estate.

And that’s a problem with a lot of these debates about the future of journalism. They’re based on pretence and a threatened professional identity. Again, Clune and others had some worthwhile things to say – particularly to many of the young and student journalists in the audience – about the need to focus on interactivity and a different conception of “sources” than is captured by the traditional models – a point also made by Edmunds on our panel. But for someone who’s not actually part of the media industry, what’s striking is the degree to which a groundswell of workplace change has come so late to the attention of journalists.

A lot of us have been working in an environment for many years now where the “nine to five” job is totally a thing of the past, where it’s actually vital not to identify too much with one employer, and where fluidity characterises work practices and career patterns both. Industrial realities and workplace restructuring driven relentlessly by the bottom line seem suddenly to have jolted a lot of journalists into a realisation that this is not the hypothetical way of the twenty-first century or something (for instance something happening in “society” outside the media workspace), but the reality of the present. It struck me that the distancing from “society” proper to a certain conception of the journalist as a professional, the reification of change, and a mindset that privileges the observer are actually huge barriers to both a constructive approach to change and to resistance to its more deleterious dimensions.

A lot more could be said about all this, but I was left thinking that the first steps towards mapping out a future of journalism involve a rigorous and probably unsettling confrontation with the harsh realities of the changed conditions of possibility for professional practice. I think that also entails – paradoxically – a stronger identification with the profession itself (and a weaker identification with employers) and a shift in disposition towards radical questioning of what entails doing “being a journalist” in the world we now live in.

Note also: Related posts at LP from Kim and dk.au, and from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.

Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.

Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.

The future of journalism in Brisbane

Mark Bahnisch — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:38:42 +0000

As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.

I’m keen not to restage the “bloggers v. journos” debate as I think it’s wrongly framed for a number of reasons. First, blogging is in fact a much richer suite of practices, norms and communicative styles and interactions than is usually captured by positing it as an alternative or supplement to journalism, and I think is interesting and in many instances laudable in its own right. Margaret Simons, who’ll be one of the speakers on Saturday, has a useful taxonomy of blogs published this week at Creative Economy Online, which captures much of the diversity of the range of practices that make up the blogosphere.

Secondly, I think the actual subtext to much of the so-called debate is a threat to the professional identity of journos. That probably gets me close to the topic – because I agree with my co-panelist Axel Bruns (who previewed his thoughts at Gatewatching the other day) that in many instances the sorts of work bloggers do prefigures what is now required of journos. There appears to be a misperception that blogging just happens, that all it takes is a keyboard and an internet connection, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll probably talk a little about that from my own experience, and I think it’s important to see it within the context of a broader challenge to the boundedness of professional identities and practices which is one of the key characteristics of work generally at the present time.

There’s been a bit of discussion about blogging and journalism around the traps recently, in the context of the “quality journalism” debate kicked on by the Fairfax sackings and strike. Where Mark Day gets it wrong, I think, is that he recites another cliche of the journos v. bloggers wars – the claim that blogs don’t “break news”. That’s sometimes untrue, but even if it is largely true, it misses the point. There’s a difference between “news gathering” and analysis, commentary and interaction which is what the blogosphere provides – and transparently. That’s where its value, I think, lies. Again, there’s a sort of mythology at work here with fearless journos pounding the streets in search of a story which rarely reflects contemporary media work practices. On the other hand, bloggers like me do have our own networks and people we talk to – in the context of political blogging including contemporaries who are active participants, party strategists, etc. But they’re not regarded as “sources”. It’s more a matter, I think, as Kim said, of reconfiguring, analysing and throwing open bites of information as it were and particular perspectives.

The other point I probably want to make – and this goes also to Axel’s point about where skills and capacities can be found and disrupting the pro/amateur distinction – is what I and others at LP argued in a recent discussion over two threads with George Megalogenis … which is that it’s interesting that when News Ltd began its co-optation of the blog form, (and I still think that most if not all of the MSM ‘blogs’ are better characterised as message boards), it didn’t appear to occur to anyone concerned that the facilitation of community and interaction is itself a skill and a potentially transmissable one.

I’m not sure where all this leaves the “quality journalism” debate but I’ve got a strong feeling it’s actually completely unrelated to the whole question of the blogosphere. Others may of course have a different view!

The Olympics and workplace productivity

Mark Bahnisch — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:50:28 +0000

I noticed yesterday that Griffith Uni has provided a plasma screen in the library window for students and staff to watch the Olympics, but when I questioned both my Griffith students and later on my ACU students, most said they were too busy with things like paid work, study and parental responsibilities to be following the Olympics closely. That’s obviously an unscientific sample, but it does (I think) go to show that not everyone immerses themselves in the Olympics coverage. I don’t necessarily object to a bit of it – I had some fun watching some of the Sydney Olympics on a trip to Melbourne (as you do!), but I’m too busy to pay any attention this time around – because of paid work and study (looming deadline for second draft of PhD thesis). I did notice that Stephanie Rice had won another gold medal, but I think only because she’d been the subject of discussion here around privacy issues.

But I imagine that consulting ratings figures would demonstrate that a lot of people do watch a lot of the Olympics, and that criticism of Yahoo!7′s online coverage probably implies that some people want to watch some from the office. In that vein, it was interesting to see an article in the Fin last week about various large organisations more or less agreeing with Bob Hawke and his comments on the Americas Cup – that “anyone who sacks an employee for checking results on the intertubes or for taking a sickie after staying up late during the Olympics is a mug”. Managers of various companies were quoted saying they didn’t have a problem with employees looking at online coverage provided they managed their own workload. That raises the broader question of policing internet access at work. My view on that is that if someone spends all day looking at websites, there’s probably either a problem with workflow or they’re not a terribly motivated employee after all. My feeling is that most employees exercise a fair degree of self-discipline in achieving work goals, and that’s backed up by a lot of studies of working from home. One anecdote I have is of the Queensland Public Service in 2000, when I was doing a consultancy in house for a few weeks. One day I was in the office was the American presidential election – and I suppose because a lot of public servants are political junkies, a whole open office was full of people hitting refresh on CNN. Most of these people were doing project or research work, and not required to do customer service as such, and I didn’t hear that any deadlines had been missed – folks were just making up the time later, or building that desire to obsess over election results into their work planning.

Some organisations are now not requiring employees to account for hours at all, but rather for results. There’s an obvious danger of workload creep here, but I think generally self-management and maximum autonomy at work should be encouraged. Any boss who thinks that all their employees require constant surveillance and close supervision is probably a mug themselves, or they’ve hired the wrong employees and sent the wrong messages (which leads us to the same conclusion).

Elsewhere: Self-described “sports refusenik” Helen posts on the Olympics.