The gap between work and choices - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Peetz
COWRA IS A SMALL REGIONAL TOWN, with a population of nine thousand. In regional areas, away from the resource boom districts, alternative opportunities may be hard to come by. There is a national shortage of nurses yet in Parkes, a hunded kilometres from Cowra, a nursing home gave five nurses a work choice: take a 22 per cent pay cut to become "care service employees", or be made redundant. That was legal, said the OWS. In a small town, if you take on your employer, you may also be hurting your chances of getting a job elsewhere. So there are stories from places like Coffs Harbour, Merimbula and Albury of people forced to sign AWAs that cut their pay, in ways that are mostly illegal but for which redress is quite impractical.
For women, the problems of WorkChoices are not restricted to regional areas. Women are more reliant on awards, and people reliant on awards have most to lose from WorkChoices. Workers on collective agreements will generally have the collective bargaining power to resist reductions in pay and conditions. But those who are entirely award-reliant, who until now have been subject to the collective protection of awards, are people who are without individual market bargaining power. They have suddenly had that collective protection taken away.
Women have more to lose from the attacks on institutions and from the shift to individual contracts. Unionism and collective bargaining have a bigger positive effect on women's pay than on men's. Conversely, individual contracting has a bigger negative effect on women's pay than men's. Women on individual contract agreements have an hourly wage one-fifth lower than men, whereas for women on collective agreements the difference is only one-tenth.
Throw this in with the welfare-to-work laws, which target sole mothers and the disabled, and we have an unpalatable mix. Because if a sole mother is offered a job on an AWA that has no penalty rates, no overtime pay, no meal breaks, no shift allowances, no leave loading, no redundancy pay and only pays minimum wage, and she knocks it back, she is breached and without income for eight weeks. Then where does she go?
WorkChoices killed off the ability of women and unions to pursue equal pay, parental leave and other important conditions through industrial tribunals. Indeed, some types of equal pay claims are now illegal. At the same time, actions that are illegal may become increasingly tolerated. Western Australia's Equal Opportunity Commissioner warned that one consequence of WorkChoices is a fear among workers about lodging complaints concerning discrimination. Stripped of the collective protections provided by the law – or at least, of confidence in these protections – it is women who are most vulnerable in the dysfunctional workplace.
But it is both easy and dangerous to fall into a sort of resigned torpor, to accept that all our rights have been taken away and we might as well just get used to it. In reality, workers still have many rights at work. There are a lot fewer than existed in the past, but they still exist. The problem for many workers is to know what rights they still have, and possess the confidence to exercise them. This is a special problem for non-unionists, who make up the majority of employees, as they are less likely to be informed about their rights or to have the ability to enforce them.
IN ONE WAY, WORKERS ARE LUCKY THAT WORKCHOICES came in when it did – during a resource-driven boom. For many occupations, there simply are not enough workers to meet employers' needs. But try explaining to the half a million workers presently unemployed that they are the ones with the upper hand in bargaining with a potential employer, and see what sort of look you get. Explain it to the sole parents or the disabled people on "welfare-to-work". The "boom" is uneven, many people are missing out (real wages are falling for about half the workforce), and economic growth is slow in several states. No boom lasts forever, and this one will come to an end as surely as every other one has. Then, even the workers who are momentarily protected from the effects of these laws, because their skills are in short supply, will find them biting hard.
In the long run, it is that fundamental shift in power – which eventually tears away the entitlements that workers fought so long to get – that represents the biggest threat posed by these laws. It is not what it does in 2007 or 2008 that comprises the worst aspects of WorkChoices; it is what it could do to the prospects of our children and our grandchildren. ♦