A 1980s Skirmish into Comparable Worth

Would ‘comparable worth’ as the measure of women’s labour make a difference to determining the measure of Australian women’s wages and salaries? Would it overcome real and perceived inadequacies of ‘rate for the job’, ‘equal pay for equal work’ and even ‘equal pay for work of equal value’? With the accession of the Hawke Labor government in 1983 and convening of the Economic Summit in Canberra, women saw a chance for their campaigning to prosper, and took it. For the first time since the Minimum Wage Case 1974 women intervened in the federal Commission. In the Basic Wage Inquiry 1949–1950 when the Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women (AFBPW) and National Council of Women (NCW) intervened, the question was how could a ‘basic wage’ be set if it ignored the equal responsibilities and cost of living for women. For AFBPW, Audrey Taylor’s scrupulously calculated statistics and finely honed submission scored misplaced, indeed ill-advised, ridicule from the bench. In the 1980s, National Wage Guidelines were being set—yet without equal pay incorporated, how could they set a ‘national’ wage? Absent a real monetary measure of women’s work alongside men’s, how could fair Guidelines be framed? In the National Wage Case 1983 women’s organisations said just that, advocating that no National Wage Guidelines should ever be devised in the absence of explicit and substantive incorporation of equal pay. This should be based in women’s right to an economic valuation of traditional women’s work and women’s work in ‘male’ industries and dominated trades and vocations. Gender bias against this should be recognised and eliminated. This was followed up in the Nurses Comparable Worth Case 1985–1986 when women advocates sought the validating of nursing skills, qualifications, professionalism, ability, and capability through the principle of comparable worth. Reminiscent of the short shrift given to AFBPW and Taylor, the substance of their submission was dismissed. The federal Commission repudiated them as seeking to introduce a US approach into the Australian industrial relations system, a practice and principle seen as foreign to Australian wage calculation. And so the decade ended, with nursing, like childcare and librarianship and teaching and all women’s traditional trades and professions continuing as undervalued and underpaid.