The changes to the Fair Work Act proposed in the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill will affect women and men in different ways because the structure of the workforce is not gender neutral. In the case of the current legislative package, most of the proposed changes actively remove rights and entitlements of women by targeting female dominated sectors.
The proposed legislative package repeats and reinforces the gender bias inherent in the 2020 Budget. There the service sector, where women tend to predominate and where COVID-19 job losses were concentrated, was ignored. The stimulus measures taken were traditional, reflexive and focused on male-dominated employment in construction, energy, transport and manufacturing. Tax cuts overwhelmingly favoured men, if they did not explicitly target them.
The current Bill now seeks to address service sector employment not by stimulus but by further reducing wages and entitlements of the female-dominated part-time, casual, hospitality and retail workforces. According to the Explanatory Memorandum, it does this in the name of increasing employer confidence ‘to help Australia recover from COVID-19’.
Significant gains in labour productivity – 9.5% -- have been pocketed by employers between 2013 and 2020 while wage growth has fallen by 1.7%. Significant cuts have already been made to the penalty rates in female-dominated industries in the name of employment growth that never occurred. Now again further cuts to women’s earnings are being proposed in the name of building employer confidence – confidence which appears sufficiently robust to withstand the cessation of JobKeeper.
It appears that, like fiscal policy, industrial relations policy is being dragged backwards. As in the 1990s, the stated legislative intention is to increase employer prerogatives and remove employee protections because of the need to build employer confidence and willingness to employ. There is no fixed limit to this need – according to the Bill’s EM, provisions limiting ‘the right to just and favourable conditions of work …[are] reasonable, necessary and proportionate in the context of overcoming unemployment and underemployment’ (cviii).