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Human Rights Defender |
Karen O’Connell
Karen O’Connell, Senior Policy Officer, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Motherhood impoverishes women but fatherhood doesn’t impoverish men ... Men do not have to choose. Fatherhood doesn’t reflect on their superannuation.
- Comment made at a union consultation with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Perth, 21 June 2002
It was horrible [returning to work with a seven week old baby]. It was something that I knew I had to do so I was aware of it and I just tried my best. I didn’t cut hours. I went back to my contracted hours which then was 54 hours per fortnight. I think I should have cut my hours but financially I just wasn’t able to because every last dollar of my pay is relied on.
- Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Interview 24, October 2002
Women are poorer than men; they earn less and they own less. One of the key reasons for women’s comparatively low economic status is their role in childbirth and child care. Women’s primary responsibility for raising children leads to economic disadvantage in several ways. First, women’s work in the home is both unpaid and undervalued. Once women become mothers much of their time and energy is expended on caring work that may be socially and personally valuable, but is unremunerated. How we have decided what work should be paid and what work should not is one of the keys to women’s poverty.
Second, workplaces are structured around the life patterns of the traditional male worker who has not had primary responsibility for caring work. For example, in many workplaces, the ability to work long hours at a stretch, to work on weekends or school holidays, to travel or to be available for shiftwork is simply part of the job. In such an environment, women’s dual roles in caring for children and participating in paid employment often conflict, placing pressure on women to leave employment, reduce their hours or refuse promotions and additional responsibilities.
Finally, women’s role as mothers makes them particularly vulnerable to workplace discrimination and its economic consequences. Women are more likely than men to experience employment discrimination, and when they fall pregnant the incidence of discrimination increases further. Australia currently has legislation in each State and Territory, as well as the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) that makes such discrimination unlawful. Complaints to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission under the Sex Discrimination Act show that, for example, women are often dismissed, demoted or harassed when they become pregnant. In the 2001-2002 year, pregnancy and family responsibilities discrimination complaints to the Commission made up 32 per cent of all complaints under the Sex Discrimination Act, an increase from the previous year’s figure of 18 per cent (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Annual Report 2001-2002). These figures do not account for the many cases of family responsibilities discrimination that are brought as sex discrimination complaints. Discrimination means that women lose valuable opportunities at work and sometimes lose their jobs altogether.
The economic consequences of undervalued motherhood, inflexible workplaces and discrimination are symptoms of workplace and social structures that have excluded women. The human rights system recognises that these issues are not only unfortunate by-products of male dominated structures of public life, but require active measures by states to remedy them. Women’s right to work and to be protected from discrimination are key elements of the relevant human rights instruments: the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the Women’s Convention) and the International Labour Organization’s Maternity Protection Convention. Each of these refers to paid maternity leave as a measure that States Parties should take to protect women’s rights at work.
The Women’s Convention specifically calls on States Parties to introduce paid maternity leave in order “to prevent discrimination against women on the grounds of marriage or maternity and to ensure their effective right to work” (Article 11(2)(b)). In 2000, the International Labour Organization adopted a new Maternity Protection Convention, setting out a “blueprint” for a paid maternity leave scheme based on a minimum fourteen week period of paid leave, at two-thirds of former income level. The Maternity Protection Convention is also directed at promoting the equality of all women in the workforce.
Despite these international standards, Australia does not have a national system of paid maternity leave. Australia has a reservation to the article of the Women’s Convention requiring paid maternity leave be introduced. This means that it has not agreed to introduce this measure and so accepts no obligation to do so. The Australian Government, in excluding paid maternity leave from its commitments under the Women’s Convention, pointed out that federal Government employees were paid for maternity leave, that a right to unpaid leave existed, and that social security support was given to many women who are sole parents. Australia also has neither signed nor ratified the Maternity Protection Convention.
Some women do have access to paid maternity leave because it is offered by their individual employer, or it has been put in an award or agreement that covers their workplace. These women are in a minority, since over 60 per cent of women workers have no right to any period of paid maternity leave. All employees, male and female, do have a legislated right to take unpaid leave at the birth of a child if they have worked for twelve continuous months with one employer. However, many young women have casual or contract jobs that do not allow them to access this leave. In addition, leave that is unpaid will not allow many women sufficient time out of the workforce to recover from childbirth and to bond with their newborn child. If their family relies on their income, they must return to work.
A fourteen week, paid period of time out of the workforce is by no means a solution to women’s economic disadvantage. Paid maternity leave is not going to overcome the economic disadvantage that stems from women’s work in the home being unpaid. Society relies on a demarcation between paid and unpaid work, and rethinking this fundamental distinction would take far more radical change than a single policy measure would achieve. However, paid maternity leave is one crucial element in addressing the disadvantage that women experience because of their biological and social role in the family.
For example, paid maternity leave would help with short term support by providing women with a guaranteed break at childbirth. Women would not be forced for financial reasons to return to work in the weeks immediately following birth. Paid maternity leave would also serve as income replacement, allowing women who would otherwise experience financial stress because of an unpaid break from employment to have a short breathing space.
In the longer term, paid maternity leave would go some way to compensating for the financial loss that follows childbirth. Paid maternity leave would assist women to maintain their labour force attachment, which in turn impacts on women’s lifetime earnings and retirement incomes. Salary and benefits lost early in her working life have a cumulative effect on a woman’s financial status. In addition, paid maternity leave can be seen as a measure that compensates women in part for the financial effects of discrimination based on their role as mothers.
In more indirect ways, paid maternity leave may impact on women’s economic status by ascribing greater recognition and value to the unpaid work that women do. Work that is valued in society has flow on effects in terms of social status and the position of women in the community.
[I]f you are the person who pulls the entrails out of the chicken on the processing line you don’t have choice, but if you get recognition through paid maternity leave you have a status that you never had before and you can engage in a way with your community in a very different way because you are recognised. It’s very easy to have women in professional work talk about choice but the majority of women in Australia work part time/casual and they don’t have that. This provides a dignity, a status, a recognition of the work done.
- Comment made at a union consultation with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Tasmania, 27 June 2002
Childbirth and childcare take time, effort and money. When carried out within the family the work performed on these tasks is unpaid. This, along with structural disadvantage and discrimination, impacts on women’s working patterns and on their economic status. Paid maternity leave has a role to play in counterbalancing the negative impact of traditional work and family arrangements on women.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has this month (November 2002) released its report on paid maternity leave A Time to Value: Proposal for a paid maternity leave scheme (available at www.humanrights.gov.au). This report outlines the preferred structure for a national paid maternity leave scheme and follows several months of extensive consultation in which people from all areas of Australian life called for a guaranteed payment to working women following childbirth.
Australia is currently one of only two OECD countries that do not guarantee women in paid employment a period of paid maternity leave. It is difficult to believe that Australian women do not already have a national paid maternity leave scheme. Paid maternity leave is about women’s human rights: their right to work in paid employment on an equal status with men. It is also about providing social and economic recognition of the value of women’s work.