Pay equity: Valuing our essential services
In partnership with the National Foundation for Australian Women (@NFAWomen), we are running a series of pieces that analyse how the Covid-19 pandemic is differentially impacting on women. In today’s analysis Kathy McDermott of NFAW provides the first in a three-part series that looks at women and employment. Today’s piece examines the undervaluing of female-dominated industries.
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Because employment is gendered, the impact of the coronavirus on employment is also gendered. Because women are disproportionately represented in direct contact employment and the retail and hospitality industry, more women than men are losing their jobs -- 272,816 in hospitality alone as of 23 April.
Women are also disproportionately represented in frontline crisis response roles: 80 per cent of healthcare workers are women and 70 per cent of pathology services are provided by women. Women predominate in most of the essential support services and among the workers that cannot stay home: the teachers, aged and childcare workers and hospital cleaners. Social services are under pressure from the virus and most social service providers are women: social workers, mental health support workers, frontline domestic and family violence workers, child support workers.
Because employment impacts of COVID-19 are gendered, so are the impacts of the measures taken by the government to address employment. This analysis looks at:
the public image of frontline and social services work, and its implications for equal pay (this article).
In response to budget after budget, NFAW has argued that it is a mistake to treat expenditure on social infrastructure such as nursing education as a cost and expenditure on hard infrastructure such as roadbuilding as an investment. This is not just a means of keeping infrastructure costs off the books, it is also a means of ensuring that all discussion of austerity centres on social services. And it rubs off onto the relative work value of nurses and roadbuilders.
In fact when times are really austere, social infrastructure comes back into focus. The government doubles welfare expenditure and institutes something very like a social wage. It props up child care and education -- specifically the teaching of feminised courses in Teaching, Nursing, Psychology, English, Mathematics, Foreign Languages, and Agriculture -- and it increases funding for domestic violence programs.
At the same time, the ABS reports that, among businesses still trading between March 30 and April 3, those industries most commonly reporting temporarily increases in staff hours were Education and training (12%), Health care and social assistance (9%), Other services[1] (9%), Retail trade (8%) and Administration and support services [including building and other cleaning services] (5%). There is no associated data on how these increased hours were paid for, or whether they were paid for.
The industry groupings are large, and overall gains do not by any means offset losses (particularly in retail and hospitality). Nevertheless, industries showing gains clearly reflect strongly feminised occupations that make up much of the national social infrastructure, including health workers, teachers, aged and child care workers, social workers, front line domestic violence response workers and child support workers.
Taken broadly, the numbers confirm that focussing on ‘balancing lives and livelihoods’ means increased focus on social and a decreased focus on hard infrastructure; that national costs and national investments are not as easily distinguished as the national accounts would like to have us believe; and that market forces reflecting these assumptions are likely to have seriously skewed the established work value indicators.
COVID-19 has directed the national attention to the skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions of front-line feminised occupations of health workers, teachers, aged and childcare workers, social workers, front line domestic violence response workers and child support workers. As for the other feminised front-line roles, nurses and teachers continue to earn less than equivalently or less qualified professionals in similar occupations. Thirty-two per cent of police and 27% of ambulance officers earn more than $2000 per week, compared to 10% of nurses and 12% of teachers.
Will the rhetorical revaluing of the social infrastructure feed into equal pay? In the short term, will the government continue funding wage increases flowing from the 2012 social and community care equal pay decision, or will it really say that social and community care workers are too expensive? Will it continue to use its submissions in the equal pay case for childcare workers to drive the Commission further and further down the rabbit-hole of male comparators as the years pass slowly by?
The pandemic has highlighted the critical but undervalued nature of female-dominated industries, including education. Photo credit: Pexels.
In the longer term, will the denigration of people receiving welfare continue to rib off onto those who deliver it, or will the re-valuing of the social safety net encourage the re-valuing of their roles?
These questions are part of a larger set of questions about post-pandemic (post this pandemic) Australia. Earlier in April the government was giving currency to the phrase ‘snap back’, as if the old economy and the old policies will miraculously reappear against an unchanged background:
"There are not structural changes here. There is a snap back there, a snap back to the previous existing arrangements on the other side of this. And so there is an intensity of expenditure during this period. And then we have to get back to what it was like before."
It is has since become very clear that few outside the US White House continue to think a post-virus economy will simply spring back into its old shape. The Australian Treasury and Reserve Bank agree that Australian employment will take years to recover, despite the welcome measures that have been put in place to support a recovery. The economy and supply chains and the nature of much employment will be reshaped rather than snapping back; there may even be pressure to do something about the over-reliance of the Australian economy on casual employment. Throughout this process there will be an ongoing need for government stimulus. There will be debt and the tax system will have to respond.
The nature of the government’s longer-term response is unclear. We have the Prime Minister’s gnomic utterance that “business as usual when it comes to the policy settings we had prior to the election will need to be reconsidered” —but it is not clear whether this signals a move to the right or to the left.
Some analysts argue that the rhetoric of ‘snapback’ did not so much signal a retro view of the economy as a retro view of economic policy, that ‘snap back’ may be meant to reassure the conservative wing of the conservative party that ideological purity will be restored. The intentions currently foreshadowed by the Prime Minister suggest that such a move to the right may be the case. He has proposed an even more pro-business tax strategy, a further privileging of hard over soft infrastructure and yet further industrial relations reform which may (if Porter’s first rule change is any indicator) may snap workplace relations all the way back to WorkChoices, which was designed to increase employer prerogative, reduce employee protections and limit union reach.
On the other hand, the Australian public may be undergoing an ideological shift of a different sort. Vilification of the unemployed has stopped. The myth that a stronger social safety net is impossible has been shown to be groundless. People living on JobKeeper are gaining first-hand experience of how wage cuts will restrict household spending and re-engagement in economic activity. Television viewers have seen the critical role played by social infrastructure while the roads stand empty. The role of childcare in underpinning economic activity has become obvious. Home-based schooling has increased public understanding of and value for the teaching profession. The government has had to acknowledge union strength in frontline industries and been seen to consult and work with union leaders. Changes are possible, and now that that is obvious there is a fair chance that some of them at least can be part of the future.
Notes
[1] According to ABS Cat No 1292.0 - Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC), 2006 (Revision 1.0), units in this division are mainly engaged in providing a range of personal care services, such as hair, beauty, diet and weight management services; providing death care services; promoting or administering religious events or activities; or promoting and defending the interests of their members.
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
Posted by @SusanMaury @GoodAdvocacy