'Family friendliness
The Work and Family Unit in the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business released a report in June called “Work and Family — State of Play 1998”. The report examines “the extent of progress and developments in the spread of family friendly provisions at Australian workplaces generally, and specifically through the legislative framework provided by the Workplace Relations Act 1996”.It reports on the incidence of “family friendly” provisions in the certified agreements and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) that have replaced awards coverage.
Family friendly practices are divided into two groupings. The first includes “tangible items”, such as on-site child-care centres, family rooms, and conditions such as paid parental leave, career breaks and purchased leave schemes.
“While paid maternity and paternity leave are obviously important conditions for employees, and are very beneficial for employers in terms of increasing retention rates, they are accessed at most only a few times during the working life of an employee. Similarly, on-site child care centres are a great facility, particularly if no other child care providers are available close to work and home, but they are only used by parents with children of a particular age.”
What a bother! All that outlay by the boss and the employees use the service only once or twice in their working lives.
The report points to a second group of provisions to show that AWAs have succeeded in making workplaces family friendly. These include flexitime, control over start and finish times, influence over the pace of work, access to a phone at work and access to regular part-time work. These measures are “arguably just as important to employees with family responsibilities, and cost the employer little to provide”.
Approximately 67% of certified agreements and 79% of AWAs include one or more family friendly measure, with flexible working hours being the most common (52%).
The report extols the repressive Workplace Relations Act's encouragement of family friendliness: “It allows employers and employees to sit down and decide what terms and conditions suit them best. They are not being dictated to by third parties such as unions who have a very poor record of helping employees combine work and family responsibilities.”
The report neglects to mention that hard-won conditions are being sacrificed in many agreements, and that those workers in weak bargaining positions — especially women and people from non-English speaking backgrounds — are far worse off than when they were covered by the conditions of an award.
It was the strength of workers organised through their trade unions that won significant gains for workers, like maternity leave, paid holidays, paid sick leave and wage increases. These conditions were not the result of a friendly chat with the boss over tea and scones. They were won using industrial action and often in conjunction with movements like the women's liberation movement, which fought hard for child-care and other conditions that made it easier for women to participate in paid employment.
Part-time work is widely touted as a great advance for women, even by some feminists, because it supposedly allows women to combine work and family life. But most women part-time workers to not have a choice; they would rather work full-time, but child-care is too expensive (around $170 per week per child, or 37% of the average weekly wage for women).
The fact that it is overwhelmingly women who take part-time work after having children reflects that parenting and unpaid work in the home are still seen as women's work. The government's industrial relations legislation exacerbates this. It is employers, not women, who benefit from the “flexibility” of part-time work.
While it was the Australian Democrats who allowed the Coalition government to enact the anti-worker Workplace Relations Act in 1996, the ALP-dominated trade union bureaucracy's refusal to put up a decent struggle against individual and workplace agreements replacing awards was just as big a sell-out.
Workers need to once again stand together and fight back if we are to defend the gains won by and for women in the past. Real flexibility and real choice for women workers will not be granted by governments and their big business chums, but must be taken from them through struggle.
By Margaret Allum