Page 5862 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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Changes to the labour force and families, including increased dual-income and sole-parent families, mean that most children live in households where all the adults work. Parents of young children face extreme time pressure, particularly mothers of children under five years who are working full time. This can have a negative impact on family wellbeing, including the child’s wellbeing.
Currently 35 per cent of mothers of children under 12 are employed casually and have no paid sick leave or carers leave. This is a growing area of need and provides fresh challenges for women who are trying to find a healthy work-life balance. Women are often faced with the challenges of choosing leave for holidays or leave for caring.
So how do we support women in these endeavours and, as a result, value the roles they work in? It is critical that we work towards flexible work practices which allow people to balance work and family life, including higher employment through an increase in workforce participation by mothers and carers, enhanced productivity through the retention of skilled workers after the birth of a child and greater gender equity through quality part-time work for parents rather than casual work.
Work to remove the social structures which disadvantage women must be achieved in order to fully support and value the role of women in our community. These social structures include the need to reduce gender pay inequity, greater career opportunities for women and increased access to quality part-time jobs.
We cannot engage in serious discussion of the importance of women in our community without highlighting the continuing disparity in pay between men and women in Australia. Women in Australia doing equivalent work get paid, on average, 18 per cent less than their male colleagues. This continuing gulf between men and women exists despite more than 30 years having passed since equal pay for equal work was enshrined in our federal workplace laws. Successive commonwealth governments, both Labor and coalition, have sat by as the struggle for economic equality has ground to a halt.
For those who would claim that this is simply a reasonable function of the market at work, I would say that this is a clear case of market failure. Female-dominated industries like early childhood education, nursing and the community sector face a huge demand for workers and a low supply, and yet these industries continue to be low paid compared to male-dominated sectors that do equivalent work.
In the ACT a recent report called Motivation, money, making a difference: a profile of the ACT youth sector workforce, prepared by the Youth Coalition of the ACT, confirms that the ACT youth sector, as one example, is a clearly feminised workforce, with over 70 per cent of respondents identifying as female.
I am proud to take the opportunity to credit the Australian Services Union—a union that I have been a member of for at least 25 years in various forms—the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the hundreds of thousands of union members and working Australians taking part in the pay up campaign seeking equal pay for workers in the community sector, a historically underpaid, female-dominated workforce that
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