SOME time after 10.30 this morning, perhaps at the Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Waverly, or maybe after at Woronora Cemetery, someone is going to say an 85-year-old woman was ‘‘a real fighter’’.
They might even say she was ‘‘indomitable’’ and ‘‘a trailblazer’’ and hail her “relentless advocacy”. Those were the words the Labor Party chose last week, when the NSW opposition took the unusual step of issuing a media statement to farewell Betty Monica Spears, Member of the Order of Australia.
Labor was honouring its own, with due cause. Betty Spears, a former deputy president of the Federated Clerks Union, campaigned all her life for equality of opportunity for women.
This isn’t her obituary, so I’ll skip the details. You can read the bare bones online at Sydney University’s Working Lives biographical register, where her part in the bitter turmoil of the Labor split is reduced to a terse ‘‘expelled from ALP early 1958 for standing on a Unity Ticket in FCU elections’’ – she rejoined in 1974.
What it adds up to is that Betty Spears lived through massive social changes that she herself, as leader of the NSW Labor Council’s equal pay committee, helped bring about.
When she was born in 1926, society officially defined a wage as money that a man earned to support a wife and three children.
When she started work in 1942 it was still accepted that a woman’s pay rate should be only 75percent of a man’s.
As late as 1982, she was an executive in a union that had 70percent female membership but only 20percent female leadership.
By the time she died, she’d helped ensure that Australia officially had equal pay, not just for women doing the same job as a man (1969), but for women doing other jobs of equal value (1972).
So it won’t be surprising if someone laments today that ‘‘there’ll never be another one like her’’, or says that ‘‘this is the end of an era’’.
Not being at the funeral, I can safely snort ‘‘Baloney!’’ There are others like her, and the era of truly equal pay is still somewhere off in the misty future.
Her equals in spirit are everywhere. Generation Next is just as committed as Betty Spears was, but they face different challenges.
One difference is that they’ve widened their aim: not just equal wages, but equal time.
Community operated groundbreakers such as Newcastle’s Working Women’s Centre or the justly named Betty Spears Childcare Centre at Tempe set a pattern with their one-stop-shop approach and long daycare of giving women some flexibility in fitting jobs and lives together.
But it’s what current business jargon calls a ‘‘wicked’’ problem: when one aspect seems to be solved, another half dozen, all urgent and interdependent, pop up.
Melbourne academic Mary Leahy has a useful essay, Women and Work in Australia, at apo.org. In it she concludes that the difficulty lies in framing the problem: do policy makers treat women solely as workers, solely as carers, or as individuals with acknowledged responsibilities? Do they treat men the same?
She concludes that Australia has moved on from the traditional man-as-breadwinner, and statistics back her up: even eight years ago, only 32percent of two-parent families fitted that mould. More recent figures show 62percent of couples with children have both parents working. But they’re one-and-a-half wage families, because the woman’s in a lower-paid, part-time job.
That reinforces female inequality. The ‘‘universal-breadwinner’’ style, where women adopt men’s work patterns, also has bumps: who’s left to do the caring? And who, among the lower-paid workers, can afford it?
Europe, she says, favours ‘‘caregiver parity’’, in which women’s responsibilities are deliberately treated as different from men’s, and supplied with some form of payment for care work. But it still leaves home-based women unlikely to achieve equal pay.
The solution Australia has already begun adopting is a ‘‘universal caregiver’’ style in which either gender is given financial incentives for caring, such as the recent 18-week Paid Parental Leave scheme, during which whoever becomes the stay-home parent receives the basic wage.
The problem is that families, hemmed in by mortgage payments, usually decide that the higher-paid – male – parent should stay in work.
Leahy notes that solving this one is going to take ‘‘a significant shift in social attitudes, changes to the nature of work, a restructured tax/transfer system and a more comprehensive system of high-quality care services’’.
I think we are going to be glad of our new Betty Spearses.
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