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Background

AMACSU

The Australian Municipal, Administrative, Clerical and Services Union, Central and Southern Queensland, Clerical and Administrative Branch, Union of Employees (AMACSU) has coverage of clerical and administrative employees in both public sector and private sector industries in Queensland. The ASU is the largest union for clerical, administrative and call centre employees in the country.

We are a national union with branches in every state and members in almost every industry.

Our industries include both the public and private sectors. Some of our larger areas of membership are in industries such as health (public and private), airlines, local government, call centres, higher education, energy and other Queensland government statutory authorities.

Our Submission

This submission should be read in conjunction with the Queensland Council of Unions submission. It also does not seek to replicate information, data or research papers which have been addressed or identified in the Discussion Paper. 

Clerical and Administrative Employees 

Clerical and administrative employees work in every industry and every enterprise. For this reason achieving pay equity in a de-regulated system is impossible. Statistics on clerical and administrative workers often include higher level managerial workers as well, however, women tend to be concentrated at the lower and middle levels. Pay inequity is shown to exist at every level even when statistics do differentiate different levels. The comparative value of clerical and administrative work when compared to similar skilled work is lower.

The gender segmentation of the Australian labour market is well known and clerical and administrative work is often identified as ‘womens’ work. Even within the same industries and indeed, enterprises, women with similar levels of skill are paid less than men. This has been compounded recently but the use of ‘market based’ wages and incentives to occupational groups where skill shortages have been identified. The widespread application of such ‘market based’ rates completely undermine the capacity for women to achieve equal pay for work of comparable value. The following table demonstrates pay inequity both between male and female dominated occupations as well as within all occupations.

Table 1 Hourly Ordinary Time Cash Earnings

Occupation	Male	Female
Managers	37.80	31.00
Professionals	36.40	31.60
Technicians and trades workers	25.90	21.00
Community and Personal Service workers	25.90	21.10
Clerical and Administrative workers	26.40	22.10
Sales workers	22.00	18.80
Machinery operators and drivers	23.20	19.20
Labourers	20.80	17.80
All occupations	27.00	24.30

(ABS 6306.0, May 2006)

It does need to be acknowledged that in many instances, men employed to do clerical work are also disadvantaged as a result of the gender segmentation of the workforce.

Factors affecting Pay Equity

AMACSU notes that the Discussion Paper identifies that the previous Inquiry recognised that a range of indicators impact on pay equity, such as the concentration of women in low paid work and forms of precarious employment. However, those factors were not addressed in the recommendations. AMACSU contends that those issues should be identified and be the subject of recommendations of this inquiry and that there are a range of other issues which impact on pay equity and that these issues should also be addressed. These issues include:

Lack of available affordable childcare and other social and community services

Availability of childcare and other social services impacts heavily on the ability of women in particular to participate in the workforce. Whilst it is not intended here to provide detailed evidence of this, it is noteworthy to refer to the Australian Council of Social Service, Australian Community Sector Survey, 2007 which provides statistical support of a general trend reported by community service workers and increasingly identified in research that many users of services have several disadvantages that require multi-faceted responses. Services identified which had the highest percentage of eligible people turned away as a proportion of those assisted were:

“Housing Assistance. 1 person was turned away for every 4 who received a service
Disability Supported Accommodation. 1 in every 4 people who received a service was turned away.
Community Legal Centres. 1 in every 5 people who received a service was turned away.
Child Care. 1 in every 12 people who received a service was turned away.
Financial and Material Support. 1 in every 14 people who received a service was turned away.” (Australian Council of Social Service, National Survey Shows Services Under Strain, as viewed on http://www.acoss.org.au/News.aspx?display ID=99&articleID=2102)

Flexibility, job security and precarious employment

Flexibility has become a catch cry of industrial relations reform and is oft cited as an advantage to employees and in particular a benefit to women seeking to balance work and family. However, flexibility more often than not is in the form of precarious employment arrangements. The Australian Services Union Members’ Survey 2007 found that 97% of respondents rated ‘job security’ and ‘maintaining working hours’ as personally important to them.

A recent University of Melbourne research study concluded that “the rise in flexible working arrangements is having a particularly adverse impact on women……those working in casual or contract jobs reported much higher levels of job strain compared to their full-time counterparts.”  University of Melbourne; Women Bear the Brunt of Precarious Working Conditions”, as viewed on http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/articleid_4253.html)

Temporary jobs can trap workers in employment and earnings insecurity, and are usually not a voluntary choice, according to the OECD which notes “access to non-wage benefits, which represent an (increasingly) important part of job quality, also tends to be lower than for workers under permanent contracts. This is particularly the case in countries where fringe benefits are not provided by employers on a universal basis, such as Australia, Canada and the United States.” (OECD, Employment Outlook 2006; P. 170)

The OECD notes generally that the high incidence of part-time work among women (about three times greater than among men) is a contributory factor to the lower professional attainment of women in terms of salary and career progression. (OECD, Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care: Early Childhood Education and Care, 2006) This may also be linked to the decreased willingness of employers to provide training and professional development opportunities for casual and part-time workers compared to full time workers, further disadvantaging women in terms of pay equity.

WorkChoices has progressively limited the capacity of industrial instruments to place limits on part-time and casual work in the name of ‘flexibility’. Federal Awards for example, can not limit proportions of part-time, casual or other precarious forms of employment or establish minimum or maximum hours for part-time employees. Additionally, AWAs generally require part-time or casual workers to work up to 38 to 40 ordinary hours with no penalty or overtime rates for hours in excess of ‘contracted’ hours. 

Whole of Life Earnings

Lower wages as well as different patterns of work for women including the higher level of precarious employment arrangements, child bearing and rearing responsibilities mean that women are even more disadvantaged in terms of whole of life earnings.

Similarly, in some industries, benefits such as portable long service leave are available for people who have worked in an industry rather than for a single employer. Portable long service leave is currently available in the high turnover coal mining and construction industries, but its application in other industries is limited or non-existent. Even in industries which have portable long service leave, it is generally confined to male-dominated trade streams and not widely available to clerical and administrative workers.

Welfare to Work

The high cost of childcare and the loss of benefits for women seeking to re-enter the workforce have a major impact on pay equity.

The National Foundation for Women in their report entitled What Women Want expressed concern that new welfare to work arrangements were forcing women to sign AWAs under WorkChoices in order to obtain employment, often without informed consent. The threat of losing welfare benefits if they knock back employment opportunities, regardless of the conditions compounds this. The report recorded that government agencies appear not to be addressing what are, in effect, illegal actions.

Summary

Pay equity needs to be viewed as much broader than wage rates and the achievement of same would require governments to address a range of issues which combine to disadvantage women over their working and non-working lives.