Penalty rates loss affect women most

Around 4.5 million Australian workers rely on penalty rates. Emergency service workers, hospital and health workers, doctors and nurses, the manufacturing sector, police and many other workers. 

It is no coincidence that the government, the business lobby and employer associations are creating a conversation about abolishing penalty rates paid to workers in particular industries, namely hospitality and retail. 

I argue it’s for two reasons; first, there is still a gender divide across the Australian labour market and a gender pay gap of 26.1% in Western Australia against the national average of 17.1%. Women in Western Australia and across the country are going backwards in terms of pay and women are clustered in the sectors where the government wants to slash penalty rates. 

Second, many believe hospitality and retail jobs are the jobs you do on your way to securing a better job. Yet many employers want mature workers over a weekend because they value customer service and/or product knowledge. There are many workers across hospitality and retail who have made these jobs their careers and many are women.

The government appears to think these female workers are an easy target. And since they have little bargaining power and low rates of unionisation across many of these small workplaces, maybe they are. 

Make no mistake: if the government is successful in lowering penalty rates in hospitality and retail, it will flow onto all sectors of the labour market and penalty rates will be lost or lowered forever.

These same sectors were the areas where individual agreements in Western Australia flourished: low paid, insecure work with employees who have little or no bargaining power. These workers were targeted and were more vulnerable to the new agreements which cut their wages and conditions, including penalty rates.

A paper by Janis Bailey and Bob Horstmann examined industrial reforms in Western Australia from 1993 onwards. The paper, titled Life is Full of Choices, reported that more than 50% of agreements in these sectors reduced or eliminated significant conditions such as penalty rates, overtime and leave loading. And as second generation agreements came in, there was a fivefold increase in agreements which offered below award rates of pay.