the Banner Bright

On International Women’s Day, the ILO has published a disturbing report that finds “Work-related gender gaps have not seen any meaningful improvement for 20 years”. One of the key issues is the “imbalanced division of work within the household between men and women is one of the most resilient features of gender inequality. … [I]t is estimated that the gender gap in time spent in unpaid care work would not be closed until 2228; in other words, closing the gap would take 209 years.” The report says this trajectory can be averted if deliberate efforts to shift the caring burden are made, and there is evidence that paid paternity leave can have a lasting impact: “Research suggests a positive correlation between men’s take-up of paternity leave and their time spent in caring for their children even after the end of the entitlement, and also positive effects in increasing their daily share of household chores every day. In addition, mandatory paternity leave can also generate an increase in women’s wages. A Swedish study found that, for every month of leave taken by men in the first year of the child’s life, the woman’s long-term salary was 6.7 per cent higher.” Governments must look for opportunities to shift the burden of caring within the home, in order to eliminate gender gaps in the workplace.

Exploitation of workers in Australia is now at such a crisis point that even the Coalition Government has been forced to accept that criminalising wage theft is necessary. It has accepted in principle all recommendations of the Migrant Worker Taskforce, including criminalising “clear, deliberate and systemic” wage theft. Other suggestions include banning advertising jobs for below legal minimum wages, introducing banning orders to remove bad bosses from the economy, and extending liability to head contractors and franchisors. These have been core demands from the union movement for years. At the heart of the problem, though, is the Fair Work Ombudsman: “A major area of consideration relates to the adequacy of the enforcement response of the relevant agencies, primarily the Fair Work Ombudsman… It is confusingly styled as an ombudsman. The term normally covers dispute resolution schemes, not regulatory schemes… In our view, the FWO could more strongly support the enforcement and litigation objectives (rather than the mediation objectives) of the Act.” In a nutshell: “We are of the view, given the scale and entrenched nature of the problem, that there needs to be a much stronger enforcement response than has been evident to date.”

Tanya Plibersek promised Labor will make abortion services available through public hospitals, which will address two significant problems. One is that Tasmanian women are currently forced to pay for high cost private services or fly to Victoria. The other is that SA and NSW still have outdated criminal laws in place, significantly restricting women’s access to abortion. A 2017 attempt to decriminalise abortion in NSW failed, but there seems to be broad support for a new conscience vote on the issue this year, and SA’s parliament is waiting for a report from the Law Reform Institute before considering a Greens bill.

The ACTU has released a discussion paper coining the term “income recession” to describe the double impact of wage stagnation and cost of living increases: “The vast wealth generated over the last three decades has decisively gone into the hands of a privileged few. Profits, executive salaries and bonuses have soared, while average real wage growth has remained anaemic.” The report draws on the work of ANU’s Ben Phillips to suggest that living standards have suffered their largest fall in 30 years, before suggesting a suite of policies to address the problem.

According to Tim Colebatch, applying the Victorian election results to federal electorates would see the Coalition all but wiped out. Of course, those numbers can’t be directly transferred to the national contest, but this observation can’t be denied: “The most surprising thing about the landslide in Victoria last November is how little difference it has made to the Morrison government’s policies and style. … For Morrison and his ministers, it’s been business as usual, despite an election in which Victorian voters made it clear they don’t like the way the Coalition is doing business.” Elsewhere, Sean Kelly wonders whether the Coalition has fallen for its own spin, missing a fundamental shift in the electorate’s priorities: “Our country is waking up to the fact that, over a very long period, many people have lost, so that others can get ahead. Bank profits, the protection of the church’s reputation, money made by polluting industries, the extraction of valuable minerals from land inhabited by Indigenous people, the incredible wealth enjoyed by some individuals — these successes have come at great cost, to a great many people. Those people know what is important, and are tired of being asked to look away.”

The Heart Foundation is campaigning to address gender discrimination in the health system: “The discrimination against women who have heart disease starts with the fact that women are 12 per cent less likely to be screened for heart disease and are less likely to be prescribed blood pressure medication than men. It continues with the startling revelation that only 15 per cent of cardiologists in Australia are women when international research shows women fare better when treated by a health practitioner of the same gender.” Among the barrage of statistics, the most shocking is that the death rate of women who suffer heart attacks is higher than that of men.

The ABC’s Margaret Burin has revealed the exploitation of warehouse workers at Amazon’s new fulfilment centre in Melbourne: “the workplace is built around a culture of fear where their performance is timed to the second; … high-pressure targets make them feel like they can’t go to the toilet and sometimes push them to cut safety corners; they can be sent home early without being paid for the rest of their shift when orders are completed; and everyone is employed as a casual and constantly anxious about whether they’ll get another shift.” The NUW says the problem is that bargaining doesn’t occur where the power is, thanks to outsourcing: “There’s no point bargaining with [labour hire company] Adecco, they have no power because they don’t set the rates of pay out there. We can’t bargain with Amazon because, technically, they don’t have any employees [within scope], so the workers are locked into low-quality low-pay work.” An Amazon worker who spoke anonymously to the ABC cuts to the nub of it: “Jeff Bezos has got the most money of any person on Earth. He’s not earning that money. That’s the money we’re making for him.” It’s time to change the rules so that workers can bargain with their real boss.

The Centre for Future Work’s Troy Henderson has some ideas about stamping out wage theft. In addition to more wage inspectors and making wage theft a crime, he rightly identifies collective action by workers as the mechanism that will make the difference: “Restoring unions’ rights to visit workplaces, request pay records, and take quick action to ensure correct wages are being paid would be another step forward. Speaking of unions, more collective representation for vulnerable workers would both help them to detect wage theft, and then stand up to it without fear of reprisal: it’s no coincidence that underpayment occurs most often in the least unionised industries. And we should systematically educate young people (starting in high school) and migrant workers (through migrant services, universities and adult education) about their rights in the workplace. They need to know what they are entitled to, and how to take action if they are being ripped off. Once upon a time unions were invited into schools to do precisely that — but in the current climate of union-bashing, they are no longer welcome in most states.”

An independent review of Australia’s workplace safety system has recommended a national industrial manslaughter law, to ensure that bosses who kill workers can be sent to jail. Rejecting claims by the business lobby that existing general manslaughter laws are sufficient, the review noted significant technical hurdles under the general law, which make “prosecutions of large companies for manslaughter almost impossible”. The report endorsed community demands that there “should be a separate industrial manslaughter offence where there is a gross deviation from a reasonable standard of care that leads to a workplace death”, and the new law should prevent businesses using their corporate structure as a legal shield.

Two stories about climate communication today. First, the bad — announcing a rehash of the Coalition’s failed climate policy, our Prime Minister thinks he can hide its shortcomings by stammering an ocker mantra: “It is absolutely fair dinkum power. It doesn’t get more fair dinkum than this. This is fair dinkum, 100%.” But now the good — on Channel 7’s weather reports, Jane Bunn is putting weather in context, drawing on work by the Climate Change Communication Research Hub. On a rainy day in July, she notes there has been a “trend toward less July days with significant rain”; on a cool day in May, she observes the “overall trend since the late 70s is warmer than the long-term average”. Says Bunn: “I just want the facts, quietly put through in a straightforward way that people can understand.” If only our government did, too.