The August 15 agreement between the Australian Catholic University (ACU) and its non-academic staff that provides one year of paid maternity leave, and three weeks of paid paternity leave, is a step forward for women.
There are only two developed capitalist countries that do not guarantee paid maternity leave to women — Australia and the United States. In Australia, 70-80% of women workers do not have access to paid leave. For those that do, leave is often as short as a week.
Most workplaces do not offer many choices to women who wish to have children. Paid maternity leave offers women the time to recover from childbirth, adapt to having children and spend time with them without financial pressures intruding. It is a disgrace that this is not available to all working mothers.
The ACU deal is proof that big business can afford to provide leave that allows women secure options for raising children. This is why big business has not welcomed the deal.
Following the decision, the mainstream media was awash with pro-mother rhetoric, welcoming the decision and castigating the government and employers for not being "family friendly" enough. It revealed a narrow conception of what is "family friendly".
Pregnant women workers at the ACU can look forward to a year of financially secure full-time parenting (12 weeks at full pay, 40 weeks at 60% pay). But this is not what all women want. For many women, one year out of the work force would mean missing out on promotions and losing skills. Many prefer to return to work as soon as possible.
For these women, fully funded child care would be an appropriate option. This is not provided under the workplace agreement at ACU.
For other women, part-time work offers a chance to maintain work skills and spend more time with their children. But unless such work is adequately compensated, which the ACU does not offer, the burden of reduced pay and childcare fees is prohibitive.
Some couples choose to rely on the mother's wage, while a man provides full-time childcare. But the ACU is only prepared to offer extended parental leave to women. This also leaves gay male parents out in the cold.
However, part-time work at full-time pay, fully funded child care and paid paternity leave have not featured in the capitalist mass media's articles on making workplaces "family-friendly". Instead, we have been subjected to more calls for "flexible" workplaces — meaning more poorly paid part-time work.
Cathy Sherry, writing in the August 16 Sydney Morning Herald, argued that paid maternity leave is a "furphy". Instead, she proposed extending unpaid maternity leave until children start school.
For the mainstream media and the Catholic Church, the only families that matter are those in which women take responsibility for the care of children at the expense of their working lives. That's it.
Just days before the ACU deal was announced, the Catholic Bishops Conference decided to apply to the High Court to prevent single women and lesbians from accessing in-vitro fertilisation treatment in Victoria.
At the same time, it is preparing to defend the "right" of frozen embryos to "life", against those who would make use of these cells to discover a cure for cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
The Catholic Church's position on all these matters has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with promoting the heterosexual, nuclear family that entrenches the male as primary breadwinner and the female as child carer.
The ACU deal has given the unions renewed energy to fight for the international standard of 12-weeks' paid leave for all women. But paid maternity leave is not enough. An industrial campaign is needed to open up more options for women, and men, who want to have children.