Paid maternity leave is a work-related entitlement

Such a shift in policy focus represents a deliberate attempt to deny women their right to paid maternity leave specifically related to the employment relationship. Women workers can and do have babies. Paid maternity leave recognises and rewards women's service at work and allows women to combine work and family. A social welfare payment for all mothers does not.

Rewarding a worker for their service, which directly benefits their personal non-paid work life is not a new concept. Annual leave and long service leave are entitlements awarded in recognition of an employees service and the need for rest and recuperation and for a personal life outside of work.

The employer benefits from a more productive worker who is more refreshed on a return to work. The annual leave loading is more of a case in point because it actually compensates a worker for the extra costs associated with the time away from work. Annual leave developed as a uniform entitlement in the 1970s.

It is 2002 and paid maternity leave has yet still to be developed as a uniform entitlement. If John Howard wants to lump all mothers together then perhaps he should consider legislating for an annual leave entitlement for all mothers so that they can have a break from their non-paid work as mothers, thus breaking down the real divide between the public and private sphere.

The non-existence of a national paid maternity leave scheme in Australia is a sad indictment on how working women are treated in Australia when compared to other countries around the world. Greece, Spain, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Luxembourg provide 15-20 weeks paid maternity leave. Italy, Portugal, the UK (from April 2003), the Czech republic, Hungary and the Slovak republic provide 20-30 weeks and Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden provide 30-64 weeks paid leave.

Last year at an ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) course in Singapore, which I attended with over 30 other trade unionists from the Asia Pacific region, I had the embarrassing experience of being one of the only participants to have to state in a session on maternity leave that there was no guarantee to paid maternity leave for women in Australia.

Participants from countries such as India (they have 12 weeks) and Vietnam (they have 4-6mths) later expressed their complete surprise to me that Australian women did not have a guaranteed entitlement.

Instead of guaranteeing a minimum standard for paid maternity leave through a national safety net scheme, women in Australia have been forced to bargain for paid maternity leave entitlements at the workplace level.

This system has failed women. Not only has it not guaranteed comparative wage justice because bargaining outcomes are dependant on the bargaining strength of workers, it has also not guaranteed a fair and equitable paid maternity leave standard for all women.

In male dominated industries such as manufacturing, successfully bargaining for paid maternity leave has proven a hard ask, as often the claim gets placed at the end of the queue, in favour of other popular claims such as wage increases, regulation of casuals/contractors and improvements to long service leave.

This has led to the result that even though there are 250,000 women working in manufacturing, very few are entitled to paid maternity leave. Evidence collected from the AMWU's national EBA database has revealed that only 60 out of 1500 agreements that the AMWU is a party to contain a clause for paid maternity leave. Even then the average period of paid leave in these agreements is only 6 weeks.

The Howard Government is not only to blame. The debate in the media has also fed the Governments' ability to cloud the issue. Stories in the media on paid maternity leave have been linked to the fertility and aging population debate.