Equal pay for equal work initiatives in the 1970s gave Australia a lead in closing the gap between women’s and men’s earnings. A 10 per cent gap for full time workers and a 20 per cent gap for all workers remains, mainly because women have different labour force characteristics than men. More women work part-time and casually.
They retire earlier, so that they are usually no longer working when men’s earnings peak. Some women’s choices may be determined by outmoded social attitudes, but given present mores, they are the choices they make.
The NSW Labor Council is arguing before the Industrial Relations Commission of NSW that differences in earnings do not result from labour force characteristics, but from the underpayment of women in occupations in which women are concentrated. Occupational concentration, however, only accounts, at most, for 2 per cent of differences in earnings.
It is also being argued that pay increases for women should compensate them for past and present gender discrimination. If considered desirable, such compensation should be paid out of taxes as social security. It should not be a labour cost charge that undermines international labour cost competitiveness.
The NSW Labor Council proposes that industry-wide comparative worth evaluations of predominantly women’s jobs should be set against evaluations of necessarily dissimilar men’s jobs. Librarians’ work is being compared with that of geologists.
Experience in the United States suggests that a small number of upper income women could benefit from work value evaluations in the public sector, but at the cost of employment and income for low-income women.
Research commissioned for the NSW Treasury confirms that unemployment would be likely to follow increases in women’s pay based on hypotheses about ‘equal pay for work of equal value’. Concerns about equity for working women are thus being misused to move back to industry-wide wage fixing and its attendant dangers of increased unemployment.
Helen Hughes is Professor Emeritus and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, and Senior Fellow, Centre for Independent Studies.