Australia: Pay decision a win for women

Submitted by anthony on Wed, 2012-02-08 22:28

Article here. Excerpt:

'Fair Work Australia's decision on equal pay for community sector workers is a step forward for all Australian women, the Australian Services Union says.

Some 150,000 community sector workers, mostly women, have been awarded a pay rise by the industrial umpire in a landmark test case.

"We said we wanted to put a dent on the 18 per cent gender pay gap between men and women in Australia," ASU NSW and ACT branch secretary Sally McManus told reporters in Sydney today.'

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Comments

I can't help but wonder if there's now a reverse wage gap within the communities sector due to this reverse discrimination.

Evan AKA X-TRNL
Real Men Don't Take Abuse!

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Submitted by xtrnl on Thu, 2012-02-09 06:56

While I don't doubt that community workers deserve more pay, 19-41% increase seems a little excessive (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-01/fair-work-orders-pay-increase-for-community-sector/3804682). Especially based solely on gender and a dishonest statistic (they used 18%, which is closer to the part time + full time comparison number. With that kind of pay increase, I suspect an influx of men into the fields, like in Canada, when they raised the pay of office workers to be equal to that of construction workers, and so all the construction workers applied for the jobs. Same pay for easier work and indoors, who wouldn't? Resulted in a shortage of construction workers.

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Submitted by Kratch on Thu, 2012-02-09 21:37