Wage rage: the struggle for equal pay and pay equity in Australia

This is an interdisciplinary thesis in women's and gender studies combining legal analysis with archival research. It traverses Australian women's struggle for equal pay and pay equity from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginnings of the twenty-first. It recounts and analyses women's activism through campaigns targeting state and federal politicians, prime ministers, premiers and state and federal ministers for labour and industrial relations; engagement in the industrial arena; and through women's organisations and work with the trade union movement. The thesis analyses achievements and setbacks through the federal industrial arena, and references, too, major state industrial cases and legislation. It analyses women's intervention and impact in the Equal Pay, Minimum Wage, Basic Wage and National Wage Cases. Through archives, original letters, articles, pamphlets, books, interviews and other sources, the thesis recounts women's agreements and disagreements on how the struggle would be won, and the solid campaigning in which women engaged from the late years of the nineteenth century, through every decade of the twentieth, and in the first years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. It covers a span of over one hundred years, during which the claim was characterised as one for equal pay, the rate for the job and, more recently, pay equity. Looking at the past and the present, the thesis concludes that women's direct engagement with the industrial system and parallel working within women's organisations and trade unions has been central to gains in equal pay and pay equity. Apart from women's and men's earnings in Scandinavia, relativities between women's and men's wages and salaries in Australia have been -- despite the disparity - the most approximate of all OECD countries. The thesis posits that it is only with a return to centralised wage fixing, with women's organisations intervening and bringing their own experts to educate industrial commissions, employers and unions, that the value of women's work will be recognised as equal to the value of men's work, and equal pay, the rate for the job, or pay equity will be achieved.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2007

Author dc:creator

• Scutt, Jocelynne A.

• Wages -- Women -- Australia.
• Equal pay for equal work -- Australia.
• Thesis degitisation program

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/20520

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/40563