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Mothers lose out

Claire Nemorin looks at the various barriers the Government has put up between mothers and re-entry into the workforce.

March 2007

Maybe you have read or heard the headlines and quotable quotes re: motherhood and the workforce. This government gives choice to lower to middle income families! To provide state paid maternity leave would be to discriminate against stay at home mums! And perhaps most infuriatingly: the $4000 Maternity Payment should entice Australian women to have ‘one for your wife, one for your husband and one for the nation.’ Of course these opinions and perceived benign policies for families are best translatable to the two-parent family whereas single mothers are largely criticised and penalised.

So what government policies hinder or enable women’s re-entry to the workforce?

On child care

Upon election, the Howard government removed the child care centre subsidy in order to increase ‘choice.’ As a result, centres which were not making great profits in lower to lower middle class income suburbs — which are more likely to be populated with families than inner metropolitan areas — closed down.

Cheap, government funded, and accessible childcare should be available in its many variants: Vacation care, out of school hours care (OSHC), long day care, family day care, in home day care and occasional care. However what we have is the unequal and poor subsidisation of long day care, which is necessary for working mothers with children five and under. Long day care centres are overwhelmingly officially funded in the cities as opposed to suburban, rural and remote areas. Long day care seems to be flourishing in the private sector where on average staff is poorly paid, there can be issues with quality of care, and greater expenses. Furthermore, in rural and remote areas, government has an over reliance on private operators moving in or local school provision of care.

Child care places are also a problem which is related to federal funding and state and territory licensing requirements. According to the recent Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs press release, around 110,000 places are available around Australia. This information came from the Child Care Access Hotline, which in itself is a commendable initiative by the Government. I rang and inquired as a mum with a 12 month old from Blacktown, Sydney who needed a long day care place, and I was cordially warned that a place cannot be guaranteed because it is just an information service. Besides that, I was given the names of five private and community centres — all of them open for 48 hours in total from Monday to Friday. These average hours are a problem for those who do shift-work, for example those in health and emergency services. Also how many of those places are subsidised with larger amounts for children with disabilities? And how many of these available places are in rural, suburban and even harder to imagine — remote areas?

Where employers provide child care for employees, tax deductions are only available to the former. The latter receives exemptions through salary sacrifice. Yet only large employers are exempt from paying fringe benefits tax, and they are only able to provide one form of child care anyway.

Work(non)Choices and pay inequity

Besides the lack of institutional support, there is also deficient structural backing for potential working mothers. WorkChoices curtails employee rights which has deeper ramifications for female workers. Women already have fewer entitlements in the workplace compared to men. WorkChoices oversees less job protection for those in a 100 and less employee workplace, the bargaining with an employer for rights such as sick leave and paid leave, and the growth of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs — individual agreements). Casual workers are greatly affected; most casual workers are women and the intermittent basis of casual work makes it difficult to plan around unassured childcare places. Casual work has grown exponentially under the Federal Government; this entails a growing number of employees without many benefits. Furthermore, the workforce is increasingly deregulated so that a flexible workforce is fast becoming the norm at the expense of the 9-5 day. This cuts into family time. Already 90 per cent of fathers with an infant work on average 46 hours a week.

We earn 85 per cent of male earnings and there has been an increase from 12 per cent to 20 per cent difference between male and female average hourly wages on AWAs. Certain gendered occupations in the hospitality, retail, health, and community services sectors attract the lowest wages. These lowest earning occupations will be the basis of the Australian Fair Pay Commission’s ‘No Disadvantage Test’ for AWAs. The heavily reduced awards that composed union negotiated agreements will exacerbate the gender wage gap, will destroy any already fragile notion of a work-family balance, and will hinder mothers from gaining rewards from the workforce that some fathers enjoy.

Parental/Maternity leave – paid and unpaid

The government provides no workplace incentives so that women can work and combine parenthood. Twelve months of unpaid maternity leave, while a start, actually coerces women to exit and re-enter the workforce at lesser pay rates with insecure work opportunities. Moreover, family friendly policies prevail in higher status workplaces. Yet despite this disparity in status of professions, there is no reason why the UK and New Zealand has paid maternal and parental leave and Australia does not adopt either.

Welfare and income support:
Family Tax Benefit B (FTBB)
A two partnered sole income family has access to FTBB. The highest income threshold is $4,234 per annum, meaning when the secondary income reaches this amount then the benefit cuts out by 20 cents in the dollar. This coupled with it not being subjected to an assets test renders this benefit accessible to most families regardless of wealth. Child care costs are high, the institutional barriers to balancing work and family are concretised for women and men, and discrimination is real, therefore this benefit is a disincentive for parents to re-enter the workforce. This is due to high effective marginal tax rates many lower to middle income families face, income splitting, and the small income differential between working fewer hours or not at all with FTBB and working full time and the expenses that accompany it.

Howard argues that to remove FTBB will hurt women because we are overwhelmingly the primary carers and individual tax cuts favour men. Yet is this what most women want? Moreover tax cuts to upper middle to high incomes have occurred anyway. If there are labour shortages and if this government is serious about getting female parents into the workforce, then should not mothers who want to work full or part time be given proper options without being punished?

Unfortunately these are the realities for many mothers who want to re-enter the workforce. In addition to expensive education, underemployment, increasing costs of unavailable public housing, poor to average public transport, the reconstitution of the Welfare to Work program, discrimination on grounds of motherhood and pregnancy, and income splitting which discriminates against women and singles. These realities affect all of us, whether we are single or partnered; childless or parents, as socially and fiscally conservative governments try to play women off against each other. For we all make different life choices — some more constrained than others. Things need to change for a more balanced approach that ameliorates current government policies to reflect the needs of women. This needs to be done as soon as possible; with a factoring of the ageing population, the desperate needs of many people, work-family balance, and some would say most importantly, women’s rights.