IR reform and flexi-carity for single mothers

As we head towards economic recovery from COVID there is currently debate about workplace flexibilities and employment policy. Gendered analysis of the government’s use of flexibility clauses in the current IR legislation highlight that they are measures that reinforce and sustain gendered discrimination in labour market policy, particularly for single mothers. In this post @simonecasey looks at how the COVID remote working experiment might contribute to improving gender equality in workplace and employment policy.

There are decisions currently before our leaders which will determine whether Australia’s way out of the COVID recession will be via a route that accelerates inequality - or not.

One of these decisions is the IR bill currently before parliament. The Unions are referring to the bill as Workchoices 2.0, because of clauses that will enable employers to define more employees as casuals, and which will make it easier to remove the better off overall protections in enterprise agreements. These concerns are being countered by the argument that ‘flexible work’ is preferred by some kinds of workers, such as the sizeable population of women with childcare responsibilities, who are unable to work standard hours, and therefore seek part-time work, seasonal employment or shifts with penalty rates.

But are women with caring responsibilities really benefitting from this ‘flexicarity’ or are these measures that reinforce gender discrimination in labour market policy? Of course, this rhetorical question is posed here to draw attention to the bias in labour policy which has long failed to value women’s reproductive contribution as work, and which, has also undermined women’s advances in paid workforce participation.

This is because reproduction and the encumbering domestic and emotional labour is regarded as a private risk. If you can’t work full-time, or the math on the cost and stress of child-care outweighs the financial and other benefits, you can only get a part-time job.

This problem is amplified for single mothers who mostly work part-time, and pay for child care, leaving them in financial stress. Add to this the massive gender inequality in time use, the emotional labour of care, negotiating family violence and family law issues, widespread child support arrears, low retirement incomes, and housing insecurity, there really is a need for reforms to the causes of the labour market insecurity of single mothers.

The magnitude of this insecurity manifested during COVID business shutdowns because existing ecosystems of support single mothers relied on were shattered by social distancing. Women who could no longer leave their children elsewhere to attend jobs in person - were the hardest hit.

But the jobs that were lost were insecure in the first place, lacked paid leave, and were no longer viable. This is evident in the data on the numbers of parents in the jobactive caseload. In 2018, there were approximately 50,000 principle carer parents, the classification for mainly single parents in the jobactive program; while recent data provided to the COVID Senate Inquiry showed there are now 191,000 parents in jobactive. So, while the numbers in jobactive overall doubled during the pandemic, this figure shows that sole parents lost work at twice the rate of everyone else. 

This data reinforces analysis that showed that employment for sole parents was down 14.4% during the lockdown. Similar data from the USA has painted a bleak picture of how it has been there.

In practical terms it is time to review the implications of the underpinning masculine framing of the economic value of work; which leaves domestic care work unremunerated, except in the form of inadequate social security payments. This is why the idea of a Basic Income for sole parents is doing the rounds, but as Beth Goldblatt argued a gendered human rights lens on social and economic policy is needed to achieve more fundamental recognition of the value of reproductive labour.

Rather than removing protections, we should be seeking to enhance the support offered to single mothers so that they can maintain quality jobs; and have more choice over the ways in which they balance care and work.  Our policy should acknowledge and compensate for the time and emotional labour of child rearing and the related domestic tasks, which in single parent families falls solely on one person’s shoulders.

Full-time work is not ideal as a solution to inequality because teenage children do need after school supervision. Studies have shown that lack of parental supervision increases the risks for young people, and that it also increases the levels of stress and anxiety in parents.

Rather the solution is to increase the availability of secure and reasonably remunerated part-time work with flexibilities such as remote working. A UNSW survey of 6,000 public servants during COVID has shown that remote working had numerous benefits for productivity and well-being. Working mothers reported being more productive when working from home, an indicator of the sizable chunk of the time they spent doing drop off and pickup and office commutes.

The labour movement should resist further compromises on flexibilities, and focus on strengthening industrial protections to enforce flexible working practices and increase the availability of good quality part time jobs - so that more women can take on jobs with more hours to improve their economic security.  Further, the post-COVID window for reform should refocus policy efforts away from punitive mutual obligation and income support approaches towards enabling policies.

Finally, it is easy to overlook the fact that so much insecure work cannot be performed remotely, particularly in service and foundational economy sectors like aged care. The workers in these sectors were hard hit during the pandemic, and there is a need to rethink security for them as well.