Women at work in Australia: bargaining a better position?

• Author: van Wanrooy, Brigid
• Position: Contributed Article

Abstract

The Australian industrial relations system has undergone significant upheaval in the last few decades, with a push towards decentralisation. Women have traditionally relied on centralised wage setting and other statutory arrangements to improve their chances of equitable outcomes. One factor to which the widening gender pay gap is attributed is the introduction of enterprise and individual agreements (van Gellecum 2008). Using the Australia at Work study, this paper explores women's experiences at work, focusing on their position in the labour market and their role in bargaining at the workplace. Women are more likely to be found in part-time, low-paid and low-qualified jobs, which limit their ability to negotiate better employment outcomes. Regardless of their position in the labour market, however, women tend to rely on award arrangements to determine their pay and conditions. Any policies that undermine these arrangements are likely to contribute to inequitable outcomes for women.

Achieving equitable outcomes for Australian women in work is a struggle that is only made more difficult by the continuing upheaval of the industrial relations system. Since the 1990s, significant change has been made to labour law and, consequently, the way employers and employees negotiate pay and conditions. Australia has gone from a centralised wage fixing system in the 1980s to unrestrained and unmonitored individual and collective bargaining in the mid-2000s. Women were particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 and the individualisation of bargaining due to their weaker position in the labour market (Pocock et al. 2008). In the Fair Work Act 2009, the Rudd Government has reversed the strong emphasis on individual bargaining and has placed the focus on collective bargaining to improve and maintain labour standards. While the safety net has been extended to ten National Employment Standards for all employees, awards have been reduced in number and now contain only ten award-specific matters.

The Howard Government's reform agenda, Work Choices, brought the issue of working conditions and industrial relations back into the electoral spotlight. While the broader industrial relations system has been debated and altered, women continue to face particular challenges. Despite their increased participation in the labour market, women still hold the primary caring responsibilities and seek to manage both work and family. Further, women tend to work in poorly paid occupations and industries, in positions of low skill. They traditionally have had limited representation in bargaining and hold many precarious employment positions.

Using the Australia at Work study this paper examines the quality of women's employment in terms of how they are engaged and the types of work they in which they are engaged. Evidence of men and women's levels of bargaining power and involvement in workplace negotiation is also provided. This information is used to assess how differential bargaining power impacts on women and their industrial arrangements. We then speculate on how women's reliance on particular arrangements may impact on their working conditions under the Fair Work Act, arguing that women workers are particularly vulnerable under the Fair Work Act, which advocates enterprise bargaining as the way to improve working conditions beyond the basic safety net. The improvement and maintenance of many women's working conditions will rest on the success or failure of the low-paid bargaining stream.

Women's Place in the Labour Market

The male full-time breadwinner model of employment is still a significant barrier to gender equity in the workplace. It is a barrier to being engaged in rewarding work without neglecting non-work responsibilities and limits the opportunities for career development, promotion and pay. The main solution in Australia for women who want to be both engaged in paid and unpaid work is to 'downshift' to part-time employment. Australian and UK research has established that part-time work experience has a detrimental impact on women's earnings (Chalmers and Hill 2007). Further, women's traditional concentration in 'feminised' occupations such as teaching and nursing and in services industries such as hospitality and retail has meant that clear gender lines are drawn in the labour market. This has facilitated the inequities in men's and women's pay and working conditions. Segmentation into low-paid occupations and industries has, in turn, resulted in restricted 'access to bargaining power, a limited presentation in bargaining structures and minimal access to over-award payments. (Smith 2003, p.90).

Women have traditionally relied on minimum pay and conditions provided through the award system. More recently, however, awards have been relegated to 'safety net' status and can no longer be relied upon to limit gender wage disparities (van Gellecum et al. 2008, p.47). It was argued that enterprise bargaining would enable women to negotiate more equitable and flexible outcomes for themselves. But research has showed that women's interests are marginalised at the workplace level (Boreham et al. 2006). The widening gender pay gap, to, has been attributed to the advent of enterprise bargaining, particularly, non-union collective agreements (van Gellecum et al. 2008). These types of agreements put women at particular risk because of the lower union density in female-dominated industries and the need for union advocacy in the valuation of women's skills.

The advancement of decentralisation--from enterprise to individual bargaining, particularly under Work Choices--put women in an even weaker position. The changes experienced by many of the low paid women under Work Choices were the result of unilateral decisions made by employers and the lack of any opportunity for real negotiation (Pocock et al. 2008, p.481). In a qualitative study of low paid women workers, Pocock et al. (2008) found that Work Choices had impacted on women's job security, income, voice, working time and redundancy pay. The lack of power to negotiate affected not only women's working conditions but also their ability to manage their non-work responsibilities. Low-paid women workers reported less control over their working hours, which undermined their ability to fulfil their caring responsibilities. The Fair WorkAct 2009 has only limited provisions for individual negotiation through Individual Flexibility Agreements (IFA) provisions in awards and agreements. The centrepiece of the new laws is collective agreement-making,. There is, however, no distinction between union and non-union bargaining but rather a reliance on the notion of 'good-faith' bargaining. Research has shown that there are substantially poorer outcomes from non-union bargaining (Evesson et al. 2007). The 'scaling down' of the award system and the promotion of collective bargaining are likely to have noticeable consequences for women who have traditionally had relied more than men on the award system for the setting of their pay and conditions.

Methodology: Australia at Work

Australia at Work is a longitudinal telephone survey of 8,341 people aged 16-58 years who were in the labour force in March 2006 (prior to the implementation of Work Choices on 27 March 2006). This paper reports on the first collection of data that occurred in March to July 2007. The first survey wave asked respondents about their current employment situation as well as that in March 2006. The sample size of female employees is n=3,198 and for male employees it is n=3,258. New entrants to the labour force after March 2006 are excluded from this study. This may have a small impact on the findings relating to female labour force participants, as women tend to move in and out of the labour force in response to their child bearing and caring responsibilities. The data have been weighted to reflect the population by sex, age, location and union membership (for more details see van Wanrooy et al. 2007).

Employment Engagement: Quality and Quantity

There are two main areas where men's and women's employments differ: first, the way in which an employee is engaged and, second, the type of work they are engaged in. The first aspect refers to the form of employment such as permanent or casual, and whether it is part-time or full-time work. The second refers to the content of work such as skills used and autonomy and control of tasks. This paper explores both.

The majority (74 per cent) of part-time jobs are held by women, while men occupy 66 per cent of all...