Have you heard? The so-called great resignation is afoot. A world where an empowered workforce say “no” to bad bosses and a life dictated by work. In the US, increased job departures have been coined a “revolution in workers’ expectations”.

Australian workers were squeezed for an average 6.1 hours unpaid overtime per week in 2021 – a substantial increase on 2020.  If only expectations matched reality.

In Australia, employers crow about shortages in low-paid, “churn and burn” jobs of which they refuse to improve the quality. Meanwhile, 700,000 people are unemployed, and 1.3 million are in jobs, but need more work. Around 1 million more aren’t looking for work, but want to work and are available. The ABS calls them “marginally attached” and “discouraged” workers.

Women know a thing or two about being discouraged. Far from quitting as an act of righteous agency, they’ve lost their jobs during lockdowns against their will. It’s material. Less “life’s too short to work 24/7”. More “my kids need care immediately”.

The explosion in caring demands associated with lockdowns fell disproportionately to women – as in 2020, when women’s average hours caring for children and performing household tasks rose faster than for men, reaching 5.1 hours per day (versus 3.1 for men).

In February 2021, 175,000 women didn’t look for work even though they were available and ready to start within four weeks because they had pressing caring responsibilities.

Even if women loaded with caring demands wanted to retain their jobs, the odds were stacked against them. They hold the majority of low-hours insecure jobs without protections against sacking. When bosses want to shed jobs to save bottom lines, women cop it worst.

68% of all jobs lost between May and October were held by women (205,000 jobs). Women’s participation in the job market fell 1.7 percentage points. Nearly all (90%) of women’s jobs lost were part-time.

Little acknowledged, the latest job vacancies data mirror women’s exodus from paid work. In August, vacancies were highest in healthcare, administration and retail. These are all industries employing 50% or more women. All are in the bottom-half of industries by average weekly earnings.

The question is, as wallets open, beers flow and economic activity resumes, what’s bringing women back to work? A couple shifts at minimum wage, and higher COVID-19 contagion risks to boot. All to pay for one day of high-cost childcare? Hardly appealing.

An empowered workforce can walk away from bad jobs. But structural barriers stop women from participating in the first place.

High-cost childcare is a clear barrier for women workers. Before the pandemic, over half of non-employed women with young children said high-cost childcare was the biggest influence on their decision not to work.

Australia’s outdated paid parental scheme bakes “primary” and “secondary” carers into family structures – reinforcing the exodus of women from work, and blocking the equal participation of fathers in raising their children.

The so-called great resignation is gendered. But women shouldn’t have to resign themselves to the revolving door of crap jobs and important caring responsibilities.

We’ve come a long way since the 1950s when conservative norms dictated women’s labour should be unpaid and confined to the home. Women have better access to the world of paid work now. But their relegation to insecure, low-paid, and junior roles shows we have much further to go.

And it’s government policies that holds us back.

Australian women need genuine measures to support them in all aspects of their lives; from free early childhood care and education, better work-family balance policies, pay equity, and more opportunities for decent jobs.

Only then, can women imagine a world where they are empowered through work.

We are pleased to share the article by Amber Schultz, with kind permission from Crikey media.

Belittled for being angry, Alison Pennington is breaking the mould of boring economists

Centre for Future Work senior economist Alison Pennington makes no apologies for harnessed rage.

By Amber Schultz

April 23, 2021

Anger is an emotion we’re rarely told to express. Passionate women and people of colour are often framed as overly outspoken, enraged, shrill or resentful. Their fights are discredited the second they raise their voice.

But regardless of how it’s framed, anger gets results. When directed in the right way, rage can inspire change. It pulls people out of their homes, it causes them to rally outside Parliament, call out bullshit and fight for what they believe in.

This week Crikey spoke with Alison Pennington, a senior economist with the Centre for Future Work, about what’s got her riled up this week — and how anger has worked in her favour.

Crikey: When has rage worked in your favour?

Alison Pennington: My analysis has force because I feel plenty of rage, and the immediacy of every moment. Being passionate is about giving a shit. “Giving a shit” suggests you have a moral code. I make no apologies for harnessed rage.

My rage is harnessed as a slow-burning force. I want to dismantle the logic of those creating harm and inequality and establish better systems and processes. That requires equal parts rage and optimism.

Crikey: Have you ever been called out for being angry?

I have had years of experience of being belittled or seen as not serious, or as capable, because I give a shit.

I worked in budget at the Department of Finance. When policies hit my desk for review, I could envision how they impacted working Australia on the ground. I’d suggest additional assessments of clearly damaging, non-transparent government proposals. I was routinely told that caring was getting in the way of efficient rubber-stamping. “Just let it wash over you.” I was also told I was “a bit of a bogan”!

Crikey: Do you fit the mould of a typical economist?

Most economists are men in corporate jobs who are actually paid to maintain this air of authority, objectivity and distance from emotion. Bringing your humanity to the table every day is much harder than hiding silos of self-congratulatory authority, which is the way that economics is consistently being taught.

People don’t want to see impersonal suits wearing economists as authorities and people telling them what their life is like and what it should be like. They want to see someone who talks like them, and thinks like them, or is as angry as them and as concerned as them.

Crikey: What’s got you riled up this week?

There was an agricultural worker of 15 years. She provides 14 years of blemish free loyal service as a mushroom picker and then gets injured, and then suddenly, in the six months after that, there’s four disciplinary warnings against her. Finally, the employer finds “the evidence” that she can be sacked because she put her mushroom picking knife on the wrong hook.

The Morison government has gone about increasing the power of employers in our industrial nations laws to screw over workers in the workplace, and that was just a story that really highlighted the difference between rhetoric and reality.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the government can say that they care about women’s work opportunities and making sure women have opportunities to work and close the gender pay gap and all that but like this is what it looks like on the ground.