Equal pay wins in Australia removed direct discrimination and can be classified as transformative. Feminists initially made claims for equal pay by arguing that women should be paid the same as men, i.e. equal pay for equal work. In 1969 the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission handed down the first equal pay for equal work decision, which meant that employers employing men and women to do the very same job could not legally pay a different rate to women. Due to the heavy sex- segregation of the work force, however, this resulted in pay increases for only around 18 per cent of women nationally. Soon after, a 1972 decision resulted in a new equal pay principle, equal pay for work of equal value. Women doing similar work to men, but perhaps under a different title (for example laundry attendant and laundress), gained access to the same pay rates, and nationally there were overall increases in women’s earnings of around 30 per cent. Then, in the third of three landmark equal pay decisions of the period, in 1974 women achieved the amendment of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which was changed to read ‘adult’ rather than ‘male’ minimum wage (Sawer and Radford 2008: 195). This meant that the formal, legal gendered categorization of employment was over in Australia.
Despite the earlier gains made in the late 1960s and 1970s, between 1974 and 2011 no legal progress was made toward equal pay at the federal level, and feminists and unionists focused on state jurisdictions. This was perhaps due to the requirement in the federal arena for a male comparator, when in some cases, no suitable comparator was available. While there were 16 attempts to utilise the federal equal pay principles for the revaluing of women’s work, these were uniformly unsuccessful (Barnard 2008: 26-27). A notable example of these failed cases include the Industrial Relations Commission rejection of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) claim for a comparable worth reassessment of nurses’ work in the mid 1980s (Pocock 1999: 281-282). During this period it was in the State jurisdiction that equal pay gains were made, and some of these gains were very significant.
The NSW Industrial Relations Act 1996 moved to a concept of pay equity rather than equal pay. This emphasized comparable rather than equal value, which meant that different types of female dominated and male dominated work could be compared. Further, as discussed above, the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry in 1998 found that the undervaluation of women’s work was such that male comparator industries should not be required in determining a case of pay inequity, setting up a precedent for the type of case we saw with the ASU equal pay campaign (NSW Deprtment of Industrial Relations 1998). These changes set a standard for other State jurisdictions, and were adopted and carried further in Queensland.
These shifts in definition and target for equal pay campaigns in part reflect both the discursive shifts of feminism over the period, and the legal progress made. As stated above, initial equal pay campaigns saw feminists argue for the same legal status as men, and seek to remove gendered legislation such as male and female minimum wages. Later, women unionists strategically sought to have wages in particular industries reclassified on the basis that they were low due to more subtle feminised histories and ‘undervaluation’, meaning they were valued less than similar work if it were male dominated. One prominent example of this was the comparison of hairdressers and mechanics made in the NSW pay equity inquiry of 1997-1998 (NSW Department of Industrial Relations). Despite similar skill levels (apprenticeship), training (trade certificates) and working environments (small shops), hairdressers were paid significantly less than mechanics at the time. Hairdressers’ wages were then ‘pegged’ to the mechanics award to reflect this. The union strategy of affirming feminised work identities in order, indirectly, to raise pay rates, had the effect of both reifying or affirming, and destabilizing or deconstructing gendered economic discourses. On the one hand, hairdressers got a significant pay rise from the inquiry referred to above, money in their pay packets that would make a material difference in their lives, and reduce their economic inequality. On the other hand, the arguments and efforts put into showing the feminized nature of the work both exposed and reaffirmed its feminized status.
In 2006 the federal Liberal government’s Workplace Relations Amendment
(WorkChoices) Act dramatically changed workplace relations in Australia. It
curtailed the effectiveness of State industrial responses to pay equity (Queensland Industrial Relations Commission). Nonetheless, Queensland saw three successful equal pay cases for dental assistants, children’s services workers (Queensland Government 2009: 16), and community workers. This case granted workers “wage increases of between 18% and 37% phased in over a three-year period starting in July 2009” due to the Commission’s conclusion that undervaluation based on gender had depressed wages in that industry (Australian Services Union 2009). At the time, the success of pay equity cases in Queensland provided a stark comparison to their failure in the federal jurisdiction.
We can also assess broader economic policies impacting equal pay as transformative or affirmative. Even prior to the introduction of WorkChoices in 2006, pay equity gains were beginning to be eroded by the deregulation of the Australian labour market, and the ineffectiveness of the then federal equal pay provision. The move from industry to enterprise bargaining by the federal Labor government in 1991 was to have a significant effect on women in the paid labour force, and was opposed by women’s organisations at the time (Smith 2003: 90). The National Wage Case of the same year saw arguments largely focused on the segmentation of women in poorly organised and low paid work with little bargaining power. It also focused on the issue of productivity bargaining, problematic for women concentrated in white-collar and pink collar work, like community work, where there has historically been difficulties measuring such gains (Smith 2003: 90). This reform divided workers further within their industries, encouraging the reification of identities around productivity and industry, and reducing bargaining power on the part of employees.
Much has been written about the effect of the move to enterprise bargaining on the gender pay gap. Whitehouse and Frino explain that women were concentrated, to their disadvantage, in low-paid award-only sectors with low rates of unionisation (2003: 594). Higher pay outcomes were consistently achieved in male- dominated enterprise agreements, and where before, those with better bargaining power may have pulled wages in the industry up, with enterprise bargaining the effect was more isolated (Whitehouse and Frino 2003: 593). For example, although proponents of industrial deregulation argued that penalty-rate (higher pay rates at the weekend and for shift work) reduction measures would be associated with
higher wage increases, instead penalty rates were largely reduced in poorly paid female-dominated agreements (Whitehouse and Frino 2003: 594). Men were more likely to be represented in agreements that had benefits such as overtime payments and ordinary working hours (Whitehouse and Frino 2003: 588). The gender pay gap began to plateau in the early 1990s, after a long period of decrease after 1972.
As the ‘low hanging fruit’ of legal equality has been picked, feminists needed to make more complex arguments about gendering of certain professions, and the consequent impact, in order to make further pay equity gains. The concept of equal pay has changed since women in Australia first demanded “the rate for the job”, i.e. to be paid the same rate as men for the same job (Ryan 1984). Twenty-five years later, the Fair Work Act 2009 defined pay equity as “equal remuneration for work of equal or comparable value” (Subsection 302(2)). The Fair Work Act did not require a male comparator profession as previous legislation had. This meant that historically feminized industries such as child care, that are without an obvious male-dominated comparison, can still make claims for increases to their award wages on the basis of gendered undervaluation. The question of whether this is transformative from a redistribution perspective, or deconstructive from a recognition perspective is complex. I suggest that it is transformative to some extent from a redistributive perspective because of the redirection of greater resources to employees, although it does not challenge the employee-employer relationship. However, from a perspective of recognition the question is more complex.
In this section I have shown something of the history of equal pay in Australia whilst also highlighting the transformative, deconstructive, and/ or affirmative or reifying effects of that history on both redistribution and recognition or identity. I have suggested that equal pay campaigns, whilst having some transformative effects on economic resources, can either affirm or challenge the feminization of care work, or potentially do both. Whilst winning equal pay campaigns shifts resources and thus challenges the low earning capacity typically associated with feminized work, they can also build the feminized identity and affirm the feminization of caring roles. This bears consideration if future campaigns wish to challenge gendered working identities and is a question I consider further in my
case study chapters: is contemporary economic activism in Australia transforming and deconstructing economic discourses and identities?