T
he filing system in my
office places ''parental
leave'' under the heading
''social policy''.
But I'm no longer convinced
that this is where it should remain.
I increasingly maintain that the
issue of paid parental leave is now
a hard-edged economic agenda
item and productivity
considerations demand it be
addressed.
We are told that there are skills
and labour shortages in parts of
the Australian economy. Many
commentators highlight our
construction and mining
industries as suffering from skills
shortages. The truth is skills
shortages are not uniform, but are
nonetheless real in some parts of
the country.
These capacity constraints are
adding to inflationary pressure,
and inflation pushes the Reserve
Bank to slug households through
interest rate rises.
All true, but where does the
parental leave issue come in?
The participation rate for
women in the workforce in
Australia is one of the lowest in the
Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
To add to that, when women do
work it is often in casual, low-paid
jobs. The net effect is that in our
wealthy first world democracy,
women still earn far less than men.
If we are serious about
increasing the labour supply in the
mining and construction
industries, we should start with
Australia's women.
Our industries are
comparatively highly paid. A
combination of strong demand for
workers and, we'd humbly argue, a
strong and effective union keeping
the bosses honest, means wages
are solid and work is available. So
encouraging women to get
involved in these industries would
also go a long way toward easing
the gender pay gap.
The industries our members
work in conjure images of hard
physical work, dirt, dust and sweat
(not images you'd immediately
associate with working women).
Now it is true that many jobs in
construction and mining are
physical and dirty, but equally
these days many are not.
The image of a coal miner, pick
in hand and struggling in the dark,
is a thing of the past. Mining
nowadays is a high-tech
operation. Miners operate
complex machinery it's a skilled
job requiring brains more than
muscles.
Similarly, many of the trades
and occupations in construction
could be done just as easily by
women as men. Driving a crane or
operating earth-moving
equipment doesn't require brute
physical strength, just training and
the right skills.
So if we accept that women
could do many jobs in most
industries, help ease the labour
shortage and at the same time do
good things for parity in wages
between the genders it begs the
question, why is this not
happening?
Well, a few things stand out.
Firstly, these industries more than
most in the private sector don't
have particularly female-friendly
arrangements. This problem is
historical in nature and due to the
male culture of mining and
construction. ''Women's issues''
were simply not on the agenda.
A glaring example is paid
maternity leave.
Paid maternity leave is the
exception not the rule in many
workplaces we represent.
This has to change.
That's why our union has
argued at the Productivity
Commission hearings into these
issues, that on January 1, 2010 all
women should be granted 14
weeks' paid parental leave, funded
universally by government at the
minimum wage.
This figure should then rise to 26
weeks by 2015.
Employers should be compelled
to top up this entitlement to the
worker's normal wage. This is
sensible cost-effective policy we
cannot continue to be one of only
two nations in the OECD without
the universal scheme Australian
women deserve. We've also
argued that fathers should get four
weeks' paid leave at the birth of a
child to better reflect the modern
reality of parenting.
The second issue is child care.
Governments need to
comprehensively support child-
care initiatives. The
announcement of a doubling of
the child-care rebate in the budget
is welcome and timely. But there's
a lot more work to be done.
In our view, addressing these
child-rearing issues would go a
long way to encouraging women
into construction and mining.
So paid parental leave is not a
soft or marginal issue, it's an
economic imperative.
It's high time the big end of
town stopped pushing the line
that the only way to fix labour
shortages is to bring in large
numbers of vulnerable temporary
workers from overseas it's not a
durable solution. A better answer
lies much closer to home.
John Sutton is the national secretary
of the Construction, Forestry, Mining
and Energy Union.