Intermission: Pay and Personalities III

Women of ingenuity fill the annals of women’s equal pay activism. Whether teachers in Tasmania or NSW, trade union organisers and political advisors in Perth and Melbourne, devising Aboriginal education, training and employment schemes in Alice Springs or Perth or Adelaide or Brisbane, working in disability policy and advocacy, heading local government work in youth, multicultural affairs or Indigenous programs whether in Canberra or Darwin or Tennant Creek, Dampier or Karratha or Cape York or back-of-Bourke, women brought skill, competence and dedication, but were paid less than the job and their work in it was worth. Women trained up young men to take over management positions, the women’s knowledge and abilities recognised in their being designated to do this training, the men they taught gaining titles, corner offices and salaries set way above the wages of the women who knew the job better and could do it best. Women worked alongside men whom they knew were paid more for the same job, and railed inwardly against the injustice—or wrote indignant letters to the press which were published, or not, dependent upon male editors deciding on whether equal pay was newsworthy or limited in its readership. Women appeared in industrial tribunals or wages boards, Basic Wage or National Wage Cases alongside well-paid trade union or employer representatives who enjoyed substantial salaries or briefing fees, whilst the women took unpaid leave, relied on holiday pay, or self-funded their appearances whilst living on meagre pension or superannuation pay-outs. They came from the country or the city, remote or regional centres, lobbied for kindergartens and childcare, buses and public transport, roads rid of rifts and potholes, and won debates in trade union conferences and halls. They got their equal pay motions up, whatever the denigration heaped upon them or endeavour to push them out of the queue at the microphone. The personalities who pressed on with the equal pay principle, whether the rate for the job, pay equity, work of equal value or comparable worth, were imbued with persistent determination, courage and commitment, guts and grit. When a crusade spans the centuries, movement backward and forward, the goal in sight then more distant, this is what it takes, and takes, still. So, whatever the odds, the women of the equal pay campaign never contemplated defeat, rejecting it then and renouncing it now.