Paid maternity leave is a work-related entitlement

The Howard Governments' attempts to de-rail the debate on a national paid maternity leave scheme raises serious doubts about their attitude towards working women in this country.

John Howard and Tony Abbott have been repeatedly sidestepping their response to proposals for a national paid maternity leave scheme by tacking it on to the family assistance package of reforms, that it is proposed will be introduced ``some time in the future''.

John Howard claims that the strategy his Government has adopted is "post-feminist". However what he fails to explain is that Australia is one of the few countries without a national paid maternity leave scheme in place. He also ignores his own ideology - that of freedom of choice.

Such a deliberate strategy which avoids a direct response to a national paid maternity leave scheme is, in the meantime disadvantaging thousands of working women in Australia who are either pregnant or planning to have a child.

Particularly women in private industries such as manufacturing. Most women in manufacturing are greatly disadvantaged because not only are they, generally speaking, low paid but they are also most probably not entitled to any paid maternity leave entitlement at all (only 5 per cent of all certified agreements in manufacturing contain a clause for paid maternity leave).

An urgent and sincere policy response from the Howard Government on a paid maternity leave scheme is overdue. The Howard government has been avoiding the public policy debate for some time now. A debate that has seen employer groups, employers, community organisations, and unions all come out in support of a nationally taxpayer funded paid maternity leave scheme.

The scheme currently on offer and proposed by the Democrats in the Workplace Relations (Paid Maternity Leave) bill is a modest proposal and a major compromise. The scheme proposed would be taxpayer funded guaranteeing women entitled to maternity leave, 14 weeks at the federal minimum wage (which is only $431 per week).

With employer groups, unions and community organisations, in principle, agreeing on the proposal at the recent Senate Committee inquiry into the bill, the real debate on paid maternity leave should focus on how the scheme will operate and whether employers should top up payments to pre-leave earnings through an employer funded levy or through enterprise bargaining. The unions preferred option is for an employer levy.

However, the way things are going, a national paid maternity leave scheme is a long time coming, or as John Howard likes to explain the situation, "it is being looked into".

If the timing of the introduction of the nationally funded General Employee Entitlements Redundancy scheme (GEERS) is any indication, whereby the Howard Government only reacted, before the last Federal Election, to introduce a scheme, after a sequence of major corporate collapses such as National Textiles, Steel Tank and Pipe, Onetel, HIH, Ansett etc, then we may have a long way to go.

It actually makes one think? if there hadn't been a federal election looming, would we have seen the debate on the protection of employee entitlements clouded by a policy reform package titled, "corporate governance and employee entitlements" similar to the "family policy package" deferral strategy being adopted in the paid maternity leave debate ?

The Howard government, by ignoring the national scheme proposals and insisting that paid maternity leave be lumped into the category of ``family policy'' is attempting to re-define paid maternity leave as a work related entitlement into a social welfare payment.

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.

The real debate that we should be having is not why women should be entitled to paid maternity leave but rather what should the national scheme look like and who should top up the payment to pre-leave earnings and how?

Peter Costello himself recently highlighted the confusion in the debate when he argued that paid maternity leave would not fix Australia's ailing fertility rate and that such arguments were wrong because there was no "magic bullet". This led to confusion in the media over what the Government line really was, but maybe all that Peter Costello was doing was trying to do was deal directly with paid maternity leave and hadn't been briefed properly on his Government's "family policy" diversion strategy.

It goes without saying that all interested parties - employers, the Government, unions and community organisations and of course women themselves must examine other support measures for all mothers and consider family policy initiatives which will assist workers to balance their work and family lives.

There are also other serious and pressing issues relating to women's participation in the workforce that need to be addressed such as childcare, precarious employment, promotion and career opportunities and pay inequity to name only a few. But this doesn't mean that a direct response on a national scheme on paid maternity leave can't be considered in isolation to any of these issues or policies.