Changes in Population and Lifestyle - Impacts on Workplace Practice
Federal Sex Discrimination
Commissioner
Pru Goward
CEDA, Adelaide
Hyatt Regency
12.30pm
Friday 23 May 2003
- The chair of CEDA, ... ... ... ....distinguished guests,
- Thank you so much for inviting me to address this forum today on such a challenging topic and one so dear to my heart.
- Allow me first to identify what I think are the key demographic changes about to make their mark on Australian work place relations:
- The gradual fall in fertility in Australia, which peaked at 3.6 children in 1961 and is now down to 1.7, has been working its way through our socio economic structures for forty years and is now about to profoundly affect the sustainability of our support structures and economic prospects.
- For the first time (at least in peace time) since the great plagues, the population of the western world is set to decline in the next fifty years.
- The numbers of people in the Australian work force is projected to decline somewhere between 2005 and 2007 as baby boomers retire into old age. Forecasters estimate unemployment is projected to reach around 4% in 2005.
- This experience is being duplicated throughout the western world.
- Currently in Australia there are 18.2 people aged 65 years and over for every 100 people of working age.
- 'Working age people' being our country's tax payers.(1)
- In 2041 it is expected that there will be 38.3 people aged 65 and over for every 100 people of working age.(2)
- With this rise we reduce our tax base, our workforce base and our productivity as a nation.
- Immigration will not make up for this loss for two reasons-
- One, the rest of the industrialised world is also after skilled migrants and they are very heavily bid for and two, unskilled immigration might provide an expanded consumer market but, since unskilled workers are more likely to be unemployed, they will also require large amounts of welfare support. The children they bring, who we will train and educate as the workforce of tomorrow, represent a long term investment. Demographic studies suggest these children will have no more children than other Australians, suggesting that migration will not, in the long run, address our fertility rate.
- You know all this, more or less, already.
- The question is whether it is a good or a bad thing?
- In the absence of a population policy, or a population policy framework, the answer depends on how we think population and population mix affect three great national goals: our environmental sustainability, our economic growth prospects and our social stability. It also depends on whether we want to make trade offs between these three national goals- and for that matter, whether there are any other goals I have forgotten to mention.
- These are not particularly issues for the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner or for equal opportunity more generally unless we conclude that we need to expand the size of the Australian workforce.
- Let us assume that we do. We want more workers. Let us agree that a trend towards greater dependency with fewer tax payers is both unsustainable economically and possibly socially- but also not conducive to higher rates of economic growth nor the effective exploitation of the economic growth opportunities offered to us courtesy of globalisation and the industrialisation of the Asia Pacific.
- Let us assume that we won't be turned back into a farm and a mine by the cheap labour of China and Asia; that we can and want to remain a post industrial society.
- There are two strategies we can employ- one short term and the other long.
- The short term strategy is to increase the size of our workforce by raising general participation. That means lowering the age at which people can begin work, raising the age at which they can retire and reducing the number of people who withdraw from the workforce during their productive years.
- Although Australia now places heavy emphasis on the education and training of our young people, resulting in shorter working lives and in a sense exacerbating the shrinkage of our labour market, it is also true that the shift from an unskilled to skilled economy means that job opportunities for this age group are increasingly limited. Despite this, in fact an enormous number of young people do work, but part time or casually. Young people and mothers, for example, make up the bulk of those workers in the hospitality and retail sectors. It is difficult to see how the size of the youth market can be further increased.
- The need to keep older workers engaged for longer has also been recognised and by a series of carrots and sticks, people are slowly beginning to do so. Early retirement for women is being phased out-too slowly in my opinion, since it is women who currently end up poor in old age and should be encouraged to stay longer than they do.
- Although Commonwealth public servants can still retire to their unfunded but fully indexed pensions from the age of 55, arguably governments could apply more pressure on those choosing to leave the work force early. The political realities of taking on the biggest age demographic might not make this option attractive, but would do the country a great favour.
- Of course many older workers point to the high unemployment rates for the over fifties (in some socio-economic groups it is the over forties) as evidence that older people have little choice but to retire early. Overwhelmingly the economy and its employers appear to value speed, versatility and innovation, none of which is associated with we oldies. That must and can change, just as it has in other countries that grappled with the greying of their workforce.
- Aged discrimination, where it exists, needs to be addressed by public education and commercial demonstration. Older workers, like their younger counterparts, deserve retraining and reskilling and there is no evidence that they gain or give less from it.
- Part time work and other arrangements that allow older workers to scale down their working life rather than abandon it altogether need to be developed and fostered.
- With the shrinking of the available labour pool set to kick in during 2005, age discrimination should also decline. The availability of age-friendly work practices will increase as employers struggle to maintain market share through the maintenance of their labour force.
- But there is a limit on the extent to which older people can be relied on to expand our work force numbers. Old age, senescence and death, as my biology text book put it, inevitably means that, at least physically, older workers are not able to work the same long hours as younger workers. This is clearly true for manual labourers but also for those whose eyesight, or eye hand coordination or nimble fingers are integral to their work. You don't see many 60 year old road workers.
- And certainly it's true we should not be encouraging young people to forego education and training any more than they presently do.
- This leaves increasing the participation of working age adults as the remaining strategy for increasing the size of the labour market.
- This means increasing the participation of women.
- Although participation rates for men have fallen sharply in the past couple of decades- currently the male participation rate is around 66%, the female participation rate is still much less, around 44%. This represents an enormous loss of potential and is almost exclusively the result of motherhood.
- Some might say it is a good thing that women become full time carers of children and the country can hang the economic consequences of all that education and training going down the drain.
- But that is not the premise of our discussion today, which is that we need to find ways of expanding or at least maintaining the present size of our labour force. That is exactly the dilemma faced by Scandinavian countries forty years ago- they chose to expand their labour markets to increase economic growth rates, and did so by greater use of women with children, the main drop-out group. The myth of the emancipated Swedish state was born of industrial necessity, not of gender enlightenment!
- The solution to this part of the equation is obvious; if we want to immediately increase the participation of women in the economy, we need to focus our efforts on mothers.
- But we cannot do this by treating them as if they were not mothers. We cannot do this by expecting them to work as if they had no family responsibilities. Afterall, that is why most women leave the work force in the first place- because they can't make work and family fit together.
- It is no accident that the first time a modern young women encounters sex discrimination (having poo-pooed its existence to her mother for a decade or so) is the day she announces her pregnancy to the office. The complaints that come to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission about pregnancy discrimination continue to rise. Last year they rose by 250 percent. Every month I see the same sorts of complaints- immediately put on to lesser duties, immediately over looked for promotion, immediately has job redesigned and demoted, often, immediately asked to leave.
- But if she gets over that and has her baby (most do) she then struggles to find child care and reasonable hours she needs to fit in with her new family. This need remains paramount so long as men are, by and large, full time workers with little inclination to seek family friendly conditions for themselves.
- Although most family friendly company policies include men and women, although unpaid parental leave is available to all Australian male workers and although many companies now offer paid parental leave, the gains are very slow. Australia's time use survey shows men increased the amount of child care they did from 13 minutes to 14 minutes a day between 1992-7. Wow! Was it really worth letting him off mowing the lawn for an extra minute?
- Australian employers, despite industrial case law, are often reluctant to allow women workers the flexibility they need to care for their children and make up for lost work hours some other way. This too, can end up in complaints to the Commission.
- Australia has only very slowly started to move towards better integration of work and family. However, the demographics and the economics have never been better for women. Companies are increasingly offering family friendly conditions in order to retain skilled and experienced workers, mainly women. The pressure to do so will increase, not decrease.
- Skilled workers will do the best but there will be trickle downs to the less skilled.
- It is my guess, having spoken and listened to hundreds of women and read thousands of pages of analysis, that the factors that inhibit women from returning to work with children also inhibit them from having children, or having more children, or enough children.
- This takes us to the long term strategy for increasing the size of the Australian labour market, which is to raise our fertility.
- With Australian work places still so unsuited to women with children, it is no wonder that our fertility rate has dropped to 1.7. It is no wonder that the proportion of only-child families has risen from One in Five families to One in Three families in the space of a generation. Having one child is tough enough if you need to keep working; having two is out of the question.
- I'll put that more graphically; you can't tell young women they can top the school, win the University medal, top the TAFE course, open their own natural beauty therapies business or become a detective, then tell them they can borrow the money for their car, buy their own home unit and dream about running the country, only to take it all away from them on the day they get pregnant by telling them there will be limited support for them to remain in the workforce - that in fact their lives will now be a hellish and guilt ridden panic, rushing from child care to meeting to child care to kitchen stove to homework- and if they want to remain in the work force under those conditions, well they're on their own baby ... ... you can't tell them all that and expect them to choose to have children! Having children under those circumstances is just not rational.
- And if you think I am ignoring the role of instinct and primal longing in child bearing, look at the historical break down of the fertility rate. It shows the number of children born went down during the Depression and up in the post war boom. Economics do count.
- It shows unemployed women, Indigenous Women and Islamic women have more children than employed women. It also shows children are the new status symbol- very high income as well as very poor families tend to have more children than middle income families.
- Because Australia's big, fat, dirty secret is that working motherhood is a nightmare.
- Despite this, every year more and more Australian women seek to do it. It is the most difficult choice, the most stressful. That is why they leave it later and later and have fewer and fewer. That is why so many stay out of the work force and then come back to less skilled jobs. That is why the majority of Australia's sole parents (mothers for the most part) are on government benefits instead of in work. And once on the welfare track many find themselves stuck on it for the rest of their life, ending up in poor old age. And all that is not just to their cost, but to our nation's.
- Changing work practices with paid maternity leave, part time opportunities, flexible hours and access to decent child care, so that work works for mothers as well as everyone else, can only assist Australia's economic growth. It also recognises the needs and onerous non-work responsibilities of mothers- it respects their right to choose, their contribution as mothers as well as workers, it honours and supports them. It makes the family a saner and happier place.
- But it would be a foolish country that left its response to demographic change entirely to the market. Individual companies can only do what makes immediate commercial sense for them; they are not there to ensure greater social harmony, a fair go for children, or to raise fertility. That is why we still have governments - to do what private interests cannot or will not.
- Governments can ensure all kids get a decent start by providing state education and public hospitals, for example.
- Take paid maternity leave - 60% of Australian women workers are not eligible for employer provided paid leave. Those who are tend to be the most skilled, professionals or public servants.
- What's more, there are structural changes occurring in the labour market that might ensure the majority will now never get paid maternity leave.
- As Australia's industrial relations system becomes more flexible and competitive, job tenure has become less secure. Already 42% of Australians are in the same job for less than 2 years and 45% of Australians are in non-permanent work (a big change from 20% a generation ago). With decreasing tenure and permanency, eligibility for employer-provided paid maternity leave reduces.
- Without a government funded scheme similar to those of all OECD countries save the US, we are facing a situation where increasing numbers of women are forced to return to work early with very small babies because they can only afford to stay home for a limited period. Why would you have a baby under those circumstances you might ask- and the answer is, they won't! That's where governments come in.
- In the western world of global competition and declining populations, Australia will not just be competing for goods and services, but for people.
- As I said at the outset, there is already a very competitive market for skilled labour, world wide.
- Last year, despite our great beaches, fantastic economic growth, great people like you and me and political stability, Australia lost 40,000 people. People who permanently migrated.
- That is the highest number ever. It could go higher.
- They went: teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists, lured by better jobs and conditions elsewhere. But also lured by countries that offered better social conditions. As Canada's leading work and family expert, Professor Linda Duxbury, told an Australian forum recently: "We're out to get as many of your good people as we can". Canada offers a year's parental leave at full pay, by the way.
- Who is to say that our young families will not be comparing and contrasting social support systems, including work and family arrangements, before deciding which country (especially another English speaking country) best suits them?
- A reason for Australia seeing its international competitiveness in the broadest possible light.
- Australia's falling fertility is the consequence, very directly, of providing women with more choices, including equal access to education and training, safe and reliable contraception.
- But it is also the consequence of not supporting each of those choices, including the most difficult and popular choice- to both work and have children. Doesn't everybody want to do everything? You didn't have to be Einstein to work out that if you didn't support the most difficult and popular choice with public policy things might go wrong.
- Now we have a fertility collapse and prospective and endemic labour shortages.
- We need to make some big changes or we wither away.
- Australia, if it is to be a great nation, or indeed a nation at all for much longer, cannot talk itself out of a good idea. Making work work for women, men and their families, is everybody's business.
Thank you.
1. Based on ABS Series II projection, see ABS Population Projections 1997-2051, Catalogue 3222.0.
2. Based on ABS Series II projection, see ABS Population Projections 1997-2051, Catalogue 3222.0.
Last updated 28 May 2003
