Women's Web Women's Stories - Women's Actions
Welcome | Stories | About Us | I.W.D. | Dialogue | Feminist Futures
Actions

Last Updated: January 29, 2012
Contact us: wmnsweb@iprimus.com.au

WORKING CONDITIONS

On this page: Dr Jocelynne Scutt; Prof. Beth Gaze; Prof. Margaret Thornton; Pamela Curr; Yvonne Smith; Molly Hadfield; Women's Health in the North; Thelma Prior
see also: Equal Pay

Dr Jocelynne Scutt

I am not so much concerned about the glass ceiling, (because at least if you have the glass ceiling above you, you can see the sky), but about the women who have the concrete canopy over them. These are women working in the factories, working in cleaning jobs where they are being exploited and where their talents are not being properly recognized and women in the rag trade, and pieceworkers.

There has been union organization of the pieceworkers and the rag trade. This is one of the good things that has happened. That has come about because of the women, and a few decent men, in the unions.

... And, of course, there is the whole issue of trafficking. There are women being used and abused as domestic labour who are not being properly paid. In the childcare industry, the women are not being properly paid. Women in nursing still aren't properly paid, women in teaching still aren't properly paid, and what we have is the ridiculousness of the Federal Government changing the Sex Discrimination Act to get scholarships for men to get into teaching!

If there were decent pay in teaching, men would be in it. When I was at Law School, most of the women who had come through school with me, went on to become teachers if they had brains. They were at Teachers' College with men who did not have brains, because the men who had brains, and some who didn't, went on to become lawyers and doctors and nuclear physicists and so forth and so on.

But the Teachers' Colleges at that time had one of those negative affirmative action programs - that is, the ones that are not the proper ones which allowed people with lesser qualifications, namely men, into Teachers' Colleges. These men, who got into Teachers College with half the qualifications that the girls had, have become principals.

I knew a lot of these girls and they were really, really, bright girls. That problem is not going to be solved by changing the Sex Discrimination Act to give some men teaching scholarships. The whole issue is going to be solved by recognizing teaching as valuable as it is, and recognizing all the contributions that women have made to teaching.

I think we have a huge job and I think we have gone backward at a rapid rate. I think there are some really good young women coming up who really do care about the issues like we do.

At the same time I think that this notion of individualism has got a very firm hold. I think that some women in all generations have been seduced by jobs where they think they are being well paid, rushing around in their power suits - or whatever is the fashion today.

And I must just put a final plug in here. The conference I was at in Thailand was Women, Gender and Development and I was struck by the fact that women who were there were from Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, The Phillipines - those countries in that area. They don't talk about gender like it is bashed into our brains here, that "Oh, well, men are just as badly off as women".

They have women as their central focus, make no mistake about that. The only relevance they see to gender is that it has to be included, because men have to change their conduct start and organize themselves, so that women's contribution can be properly incorporated and recognized and acknowledged.

They see that in this way we will advance both women and men and girls and boys in a really productive way. But they don't have this division that happens in Australia and, I think, all over the Western world, where gender is being used as a way of toning down issues about women.

The putting down of women, along with racism and disability discrimination, is essential to the negative differences that exist: where some people are allowed to have access to all the resources, or a major part of the resources, and some people are deprived entirely or have very little, comparatively speaking. I have seen something that Edith Morgan was saying, and I thought that was what I thought, too.

"Change can only occur through strong political action in redressing the inbalance of power and resources."

PROF. BETH GAZE

The recent reporting of Spotlight's offer of two cents an hour to new employees to enter Australian Workplace Agreements without penalty rates, public holidays or leave loadings failed to notice one important feature of the story. Spotlight's floor staff are mainly female.

Unlike the men at the Cowra abattoir, they have not been able to fight off this challenge through union strength or public campaigning. Instead, the Prime Minister has expressed satisfaction with this outcome, saying that it is the intended result of WorkChoices because it is what the economy needs.
Women are a large proportion of low-income earners in Australia and are disproportionately employed in industries such as retail, clerical and community services and in part-time and casual work.

We are all familiar with the data on women's under-representation in management, on boards, and in higher level positions in the workforce. We know that among the factors involved in this are women's acceptance of primary responsibility for child care and the persistence of discriminatory practices and stereotypes in the workplace. This translates into women's concentration in lower paid segments of the workforce, and means that WorkChoices will have a disproportionate impact on them, through the process of removing award conditions and reducing pay.

This will affect not only new employees at Spotlight, but will flow through to existing employees.
When their protection under existing enterprise bargaining agreements expires over the next two to three years, they may be offered AWAs on similar terms to the new employees, and the conditions of the whole Spotlight workforce will have been reduced.

This employer appears to care very little for quality of service.WorkChoices has other effects that will have an impact on women's positions in the workforce, affecting them in all occupational areas.

The privatisation of the details of employment contracts into AWAs will make it much more difficult to determine whether sex discrimination in pay practices is occurring either directly, or indirectly through the use of job classification to isolate women to lower paid classifications.

In a workforce dominated by AWAs, it will be virtually impossible to determine whether sex discrimination in pay or conditions is occurring. Thus a side effect of these changes is the demise of structures for equality at work built up through hard work and campaigning over decades.

t will not be necessary to directly repeal them, they simply cease being usable. At risk in future are other gains for women.
... see Equal Pay; Forced Labour

Prof. Margaret Thornton

It is interesting looking at the websites, which I have recently been doing. There is all this rhetoric about how wonderful employers are in terms of diversity, but then there is this little bit saying how many workers have been - well, they don't say sacked or retrenched, but 'downsized'.

The Reserve Bank was interesting, as one example. There were pages of the rhetoric about diversity and all the things they were doing in terms of work/life balance, equity, justice, and so on, and then there was a tiny mention of the fact that the number of employees had been reduced by 50% over the last decade, but no mention of how 'diversity' was maintained as a result.

I suggest this language of diversity has actually stifled the language of social justice, of equity and equality. There is no longer space for words like inequality or discrimination. They are seen to be too negative. You have to present this very positive view of an organisation through what might be termed the 'jolly discourse of diversity'.

Organisations now have a great list of dimensions of identity that they extol. As well as sex, age, race, etc, they include a extras like: life experience and educational background.

My favourite is 'personality'. Can you imagine an employer considering a person's personality that falls outside the norm as being a 'plus' in terms of workplace diversity? The history of inequality, exclusion and discrimination is lost in this morass. It seems to me that diversity has become an absurdity as a workplace norm.

I am generally interested in the workplace and the sort of rhetoric that prevails to disguise gender inequality.

Another current favourite is 'flexibility'. This is one of the words we find our Prime Minister using to justify the present workplace reforms. It is dressed up to appear as though it operated in the interests of women, but it is the flexibility of the employer's need that is privileged.

It means that a woman might live out in the Dandenongs and spend two hours travelling to work for an hour or two, say at Myers at lunchtime, then an hour or two travelling home. She is home in time to pick up the children from school.

This is seen to be evidence of an employer's commitment to the 'work/life balance'. In fact, of course, what is happening through this rhetoric of 'flexibility' is the move to casual work - employees are paid only when they are needed.

The phrase 'precarious work' has been used by commentators and critics to capture this phenomenon. There is no security of employment, no holiday pay or other conditions associated with full-time work, and the person can be sacked at will. In the United States at the moment, under federal law, there is only one guaranteed condition - a minimum wage, presently of $5.15 an hour. Otherwise there are no protections whatsoever and employees can be sacked at will.

That is the situation our government wishes to emulate in Australia - by doing away with the union movement and doing away with protections.

It might also be noted how moral conservatism is invoked to justify casual work for women. The point is a tricky one, as flexible work does indeed suit women with caring responsibilities. However, the conservative argument has no interest in what is just for women in terms of the conditions of work, but what is best for 'the family' - understood in traditional 2-parent terms with a full-time male worker and an ancillary female carer.

By 'choosing' casual work, she still cares for him and the children. Rather than being confined behind the white picket fence, 1950s style, women can usefully serve the economy in times of high demand in accordance with the 'reserve army' thesis.

They also support the economy through increased consumerism. Neoconservative morality is strongly influenced by the religious right.

The intersection between politics and a particular kind of Christian fundamentalism has been borrowed from the United States by the Howard Government, and is clearly explicated by Marion Maddox in God under Howard. This morality is also shaping debates around feminist concerns, such as abortion and access to IVF, in addition to the entire social agenda.

Pamela Curr

In April 1996, on the 4 Corners television program on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, there was a program about outworkers. These women sewing in their homes, in Australia, in garages and loungerooms, for $2 an hour.

I couldn't believe it. I thought
"We've got a basic wage, a minimum wage in this country.
We have industrial laws, and yet here are wrokers in Australia routinely being underpaid and employers are getting away with it".

I set out to find out if indeed it was happening.

At the time I was doing Social Policy and I had to do an essay assignment so I thought I would combine it with that. That program alerted me to something I hadn't known could happen in Australia.

So, I spoke to the unions - I spoke to Annie Delaney from the TCF union, I spoke to the churches and to some groups who had been involved in investigating this.

Annie said: "We are looking at setting up a community campaign to work alongside the unions".

I thought about that and I thought "Wow, that would really be something",
because the more I looked at it, the more I could see that what we had here was a Third World economy with Third World conditions operating in our beautiful, wealthy First World economy.

The contradictions were glaring.

So, I came on board with the Fairwear campaign before it was launched. I was working as a student on placement, getting it up. Then, after it was launched, as we got a little bit of money, I started working part-time. Initially I was working 2 days a week, co-ordinating the activities.

During that campaign I met a lot of really brave, clever, wonderful women. It reinforced for me the capacity for people to overcome adversity. But it also showed up the question of why they should face this.

I remember standing at a picket one weekend, outside a factory in Broadmeadows. The factory made shirts and suit for, as it turned out, people like Jeff Kennett - the right-wing Premier of Victoria.

These women told me they knew of factories where the women would go to work and find a red dot on their sewing machine, indicating they hadn't sewed the required amount the day before. This put them on notice - if retrenchments were happening - they were sacked.

They were also timed when they went to the toilet and heavily supervised. They told me how they came to work and were told to do a certain amount of, say, collars. It was something astronomical like 4,000 collars in a day.

They would come to work and find the collars hadn't been correctly cut. So the women had to recut them. But that wasn't factored into the time they were allowed. So they would still end up with a red dot.

I realized that it wasn't just outworkers, it was in-factory workers, working under legal conditions, with all the protections that should involve, who were still being really badly treated.

I spent five and a half years with the Fairwear campaign. They were fantastic years. I learnt a lot. I worked with wonderful people. Annie Delaney was one of the people who really inspired me.

Annie has an incredible energy, a very clear focus and great integrity. That is the sort of thing you need to take you through a campaign where you are constantly being asked to do deals - to pass over things. Because this was what we were asked. This was a hard campaign for politicians and employers.

In the beginning they denied it was happening. By the end, they knew they had to acknowledge it. We got state legislation in the end. We wanted national legislation, we didn't get it.

But in the meantime we fought two successive waves of Peter Reith trying to undermine workers' conditions. We were at the forefront of that, and the situation of outworkers was so well known and accepted that the politicians couldn't go around it.

Yvonne Smith

- I left school very early and went to a business college, starting work at fifteen in the office at a big conglomerate company in the city. I transferred to a subsidiary office in Port Melbourne and really liked it down there.

We had relatively good working conditions in those times. I didn't start work till 9 o'clock. I knocked off at about 4.20 pm when the factory did as we had special buses provided for us, and on top of that we used to get shopping time off to go into town. Every year we got a bonus, which was equivalent to about one and a half week's wages. Of course, staff were hard to get during the war.

- ... I needed to get back to work when the children were older, mainly for financial reasons, and I decided to try a factory. I got a job at Smorgons, the meat works. It was a terrible job, packing in a meat factory.

The hygiene was appalling; it was an eye opener. We were packing offal. It was clean on the tables where we worked, but where we went to get the plastic bags the meat was packed in wasn't. It was a terrible, dark little shed with holes in the wall where vermin could enter. The bags would often be on the floor which was anything but salubrious.

The factory inspectors knew – they would go in there for a smoke. It wasn't a good job. There was no way anyone tried to involve the women in the union. I later found out that it was said around the industry that this company was notorious for buying off their leading hands and some of their union people – maybe that also extended to factory inspectors?

I got put off after a month, they just said on pay day ' you're not coming in next week'. Perhaps I wasn't fast enough, I don' t know. I didn't agitate. It was a casual job. The workers there were nearly all migrant women who didn't speak English so it was hard to know what was going on. Anyway, I didn't want to go back. It had been an interesting experience.

- ... I heard about a job at the meat employees union, as a secretary. My work and responsibility extended and I was eventually given the position of Claims Officer, doing workers' compensation and the smaller disputed industrial claims.

This was very interesting advocacy work which also gave me the opportunity to visit the workers in their factory and take educative information to them on the job about their rights.

When I first took on this job, a lot of the workers were dubious about a woman speaking for them but after a while they liked it. Once there were a couple of chaps waiting in the union foyer. One was demanding to see the secretary, not me, about his workers compensation problem, when the other one said, 'no, mate, see her, she's better'.

Molly Hadfield

- A lot of political talk used to go on in my home. As a child, I think, you are running around and not really listening, but at the same time things are still sticking in the back of your mind so when you are older you can compare things. When I was about 15 or 16 I wanted to be a nurse - because I had cared for my mother, who died when I was 10 - but I could not pass the exams because I had never had the schooling. I had to leave school at 13 to care for my younger sisters, so when I went to the hospital to work they said 'well, you can't do the exams, but we would like you to work in the nurses' dining room'.

It was here that I found that when the lunch was to be put out for the nurses, I had to put it all on the table, but when it was to be put out for the sisters, I had to keep it in the oven to have it piping hot to put out in front of them. I never used to think that was fair. I had a cousin who was a nurse and she was always complaining about her cold food.

Also, we lived on the premises. The domestic staff had their quarters and the nursing staff had their quarters. Through my cousin I became friendly with some of the nurses. The matron called me into the office. She said 'I can't stop you from seeing your cousin or your friends, but you must not go to their quarters, or see them while you are on these premises. I thought that was a most terrible thing.

All that stayed in my head for later.

- ...I moved to the city to live with my aunt in 1940, who I spent my time with when we had weekends off work. I was thrown into the factories to work. That, for me, was a whole new world. I feel now for migrants when they come here. To me it was just so different. I had never seen anything like it.

I was working in a factory making silk stockings. A man was walking up and down with a watch. I was taking no notice, but at lunchtime I found out what was going on.

The women said 'hey you, what do you think you are doing, working fast like that? You will have us all doing that! That was a time and motion man. Don't let him see you work like that! The memories of my uncle came back. He used to say 'They would have us shearing dozens of sheep more if they could, but we are not going to let them. We are going on strike!'

I thought, 'Oh, this is what that means'. So, once again childhood memories were coming back to educate me.

- ... For example, I was recently invited to meeting at the Trades Centre where the bank workers were protesting their conditions. These employees, speaking about their conditions, reminded me of working in the factories back in the 1950's and 1960's. We were timed when we went to the toilet, but the tellers now are not even allowed to leave to go to the toilet when they are working for under five hours. One woman was pregnant. You know what that means, with the pressure on your bladder.!

The staff, for example, had to work unpaid overtime if they were interviewing someone applying for a loan. Also, they had to do these jobs with just a couple of hours training. It isn't even good for the customers.

Taken from: PEACING TOGETHER Women's Health in the North

As one woman pointed out, I think it's the second age where people are so busy working, running children around and surviving, they don't really have time to get into issues like this. If I was working and running a family, I wouldn't be here even if I wanted to be. I just wouldn't have time.

Which brings up another question, replied another woman. Why is it that we have such an appalling form of work which forces people to have their heads down and their bums up all the time? The stresses experienced by people through work over the last ten years are one of the biggest problems we've got.

This is a fundamental concern within our culture, again stemming from the balance of power lying with the few.

Yes, was the response, but that's a fault of the economy, isn't it? So who controls the economy?

The 'economic rationalist' philosophy of governments was nominated as one of the most significant threats of peace, undoing past efforts and gains the women had worked so hard for.

We are the inheritors of change that occurred in the thirties and the sixties. We are in the middle of a revolution of the most pernicious kind which is trying to undo the culture of peace and justice put into place by the likes of us. Women's Health in the North

- I had to change jobs often. The slump hit in the sixties, but there were other slumps. The factories were moving out of Collingwood. I went to work in a printing factory in Moorabin where they brought in an enormous machine that did the work of lots and lots of us. Economic Rationalism hasn't just hit us now. At different times, the economic situation affects different people in different ways. And, even then, people in the Progress Association made the effort to work for social justice and for things for the community.

We were so tired some nights, we couldn't keep awake, but we still went to the Progress Association meetings. We used to run dances and picnics and things to get the money to get the things like the Community Centre or the kindergarten. In those days, land was put aside, pushed by the Progress Association and similar people, for these things. It was not just left to developers. We had good councillors. They knew it was not just a matter of putting up houses. Also, the people moving in were supportive and progressive.

What worries me today is that areas are developed without looking at all this first. It is too late when the land is gone. Anyway, then the Community Centre was built. Then a football ground and tennis courts. It was quite a big area put aside for community use.

Thelma Prior

- Bo's father had been an organizer of the unemployed during the 1930's depression and I started to learn about the exploitation of workers. When I started to look at this I realized I knew this from my own experience at work. For example, we made coats for Inslees. Well, the highest paid worker in the factory received 4 pounds a week making 4 coats a day, 20 a week. The factory received 6 pounds a coat and they retailed for 24 pounds each. I always remember that bit of arithmetic.

It was so wrong. It offended my sense of fairness - you were lucky if you had a pair of shoes as a worker. I read Thomas Paine and decided things should be shared. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need became my creed. Eileen Capocchi

When I came down to the city for work - a job back in the clothing trade - I boarded from Monday to Friday with a friend and went back to the children at the weekends. I got a job opposite the Victoria Market at a clothing factory.

We did what they called Time and Motion there. You had to do a certain amount for your wage and after that piece rates applied. It suited me fine but I didn't earn enough to pay my way and pay for the kids. I wasn't quick enough to do the piecework.

I earned the wage, 8 pounds a week, I paid 4 pound a week, 2 pounds each for their board. There were clothes and extras and my own board and everything and I was saving for a divorce at the time. Eileen Capocchi

Anyway, a friend knew the man who played the accordion at Marios - a restaurant/night club. She said he would set up an interview for me with the head waiter. I was going to apply for a job as drink waiter.

I walked to Mario's in Exhibition Street from work. I introduced myself but he had never heard of me. Well!

He said, "have you ever had any experience?" I said "no, but how am I going to get experience if I don't get experience?" He said, "Well, do you really think you want to do this? If so, well, you go across the road to London Stores and get yourself and get yourself a waiter's jacket, a cummerbund, a tie, a shirt, black skirt, and black shoes. It will cost you about 11 pounds and then come back we will give you a waitress to walk around after and learn the ropes for three nights without pay. Then, if you manage it, you have got a job.

I made my own skirt. This saved a bit.

On the third night as I was walking in one door into the bar with my empty tray, then out another door from the bar with my empty tray - around and around with the empty tray - when a man sitting at the small table I walked around said, "Excuse me, we are very curious. When are you going to put something on the tray?"

I got the job. I worked two or three nights a week and made the extra money I needed for my needs, working at the factory during the day. It was very tiring but I did enjoy it. I think the only reason I kept that job was by chance. Because I went home to the children on the weekends I missed out on the day when the staff would be lined up and questioned on the prices and contents of the menu.
Eileen Capocchi

I am very much akin to two of the women in this book as, like them, I also worked in a textile factory, packing stockings. I became a Shop Steward at the age of 15 years. I saw speedup and unguarded machinery which caused the death of a girl.

I did a safety course at night school for 12 months to help improve safety on the job. I was involved in many campaigns for reduced working hours - from 44 hours to 35 hours a week.

In 1949 I was sacked for fighting for an increase in junior wages of 2 shillings and 6 pence a week. I was blacklisted throughout the trade.

In the same year I transferred to the Federated Iron Workers Association and got a job as a process worker for Lightning Zip-Fasteners. I was elected shop steward and remained there for 37 Years.

Today (1990) women are represented on union executives, however back in my time, this was not so. As a shop steward I had great trouble getting co-operation from the unions on problems facing women in the workforce.

I relied very much on discussions with the women at work, in the Union of Australian Women (UAW), and other women's groups, to help me with many of the problems faced by women at work and at home.

Back to top