If I can’t dance…..
On the first day of winter in 2011 I found myself dancing to Elvis in the office of my local Federal Member of Parliament.
I wasn’t alone. Two of my youth sector workmates were with me, as were several of our colleagues in the wider community sector – which comprises disability support workers, policy advocates, youth workers, community centre co-ordinators, refuge workers, housing case managers and many more professionals. We were flanked by two branch organisers from the Australian Services Union (ASU), who had put us through our paces outside while we waited for our appointment with the (rather bemused) electoral office staff.
Dancing for equal pay was a key plank in the ASU’s campaign to secure equality of wage remuneration for workers in the community services sector; those nominally grouped under the Social and Community Services (SACS) Award. SACS (soon to be known as the SCHADS; or, Social, Community Health and Disability Services Award) indexes the wages of those who perform a range of work in non-government organisations. This work includes providing support services with, for and by people with disability, women, people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or questioning their sexulity; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, families and communities; young people; people who are transgender, intersex or questioning their gender; individuals, families and communities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; those who need housing, emergency financial assistance, mental health support; those experiencing social isolation and family breakdown; and more.
I came late to the party. In early 2011 I returned to working in the community sector after six years as a PhD candidate and casual employee in university admin, teaching and research. These days I work part-time in policy advocacy and as a relief worker at a refuge – both services that are provided in a non-government capacity. On returning, I found the community sector union leading a charge to make the case for a long-overdue pay rise. Headed by Sally McManus (a powerful woman leader if I ever saw one), the ASU sought an Equal Pay Remuneration order from Fair Work Australia, a ruling that would require the support of State and Federal governments. Whilst services are marked as ‘non-government’ it is governments who fund the vast majority of community service organisations and it is governments who would need to find the money to realise the Order. (Indeed, the amount now required by governments is enough to send any neoliberal-minded politician to the counsellor’s office – something like six billion dollars, to be distributed as a pay increase for SACS workers between 17% and 41%, as shown here, at Attachment A.)
The campaign was both playful and direct at every turn: members and supporters sent ‘a kiss‘ to Julia Gillard when she was Minister for Social Inclusion in the name of ‘no more lip service’, an ongoing slogan was ‘Pay Up!’, and the Elvis moves and teasing tut-tuts of the Equal Pay dance asked for ‘a little less conversation, a little more action.’ Check out the ASU’s video summary here (hackable and imperfect captions by moi, with thanks to Universal Subtitles).
From the counsellor and long-term activist who first marched for equal pay for women at the age of sixteen, to the clients of services who turned out to march for the people who help them, to the Young Laborites cutting their unionist teeth – the Equal Pay campaign will resonate across labour organising and activism, labour law-making and labour rights in Australia and beyond. And, most importantly, it is a shining new pillar in the debate about how we distribute resources in an unequal society that is divided by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity and religion; where privilege and prejudice often conspire to ensure that people cannot get enough to eat, a place to live, a nurtured body and a peaceful mind.
Community services work is not always-already ‘good’; it does not necessarily ‘provide a service’, it may be carried out in the name of a community no less oppressive than the one that has failed service users; our organisations may be plagued with bullying and incompetence. The Equal Pay win, I speculate, may actually ameliorate some of the sector’s human problems in this regard (which, of course, are not institutional, organisational or workplace problems limited to the community sector). Better pay (that can be roughly matched or considered competitive with similar roles in the public or corporate sector) will, I believe, both retain and attract skills in the community sector – skills that make a difference to people who have been excluded from accessing the goods that others benefit from. These are not necessarily the skills of ‘everyday heroes’ or ‘angels of mercy’ as those of us who do this work tend to be caricatured (NB: these are notions which we should interrogate with gusto!). They are the administrative skills required to distribute resources in a way that makes an ameliorative if not empowering difference to people: assisting a person to leave an unsafe home in favour of a safe one, to find an affordable place to live, or an emergency one hundred bucks, or a new skill to sell for wages, or a meaningful job, or a trip to the movies once a week. This administration is impossible without the relational and emotional skills that users of community services repeatedly say makes the difference for them. (Given that any of us could be users of community services at any one time, this is something you can probably appreciate).
The win also enacts a redistribution of capital away from those who benefit the most from a capitalist system and those who benefit far less. Indeed, in an age of austerity, where there is apparently not enough money to provide adequately for those who are unemployed, a pay rise for community service workers seems almost counter-cultural.
Whilst there remains a risk that, say, recipients of Newstart (the absurdly named unemployment payment here in Australia) will continue to be punished and ignored whilst community service workers only increase their social security – I think there are a number of reasons to be thrilled with the equal pay win, including:
- As Megan Clement-Couzner explains, “women’s work” has been declared commensurate to that of men’s, and steps taken to ensure this is reflected in law and in wages.
- Governments are now required more than ever before to pay what community services are worth - rather than getting a cheap deal on social fabric by relying on the low wages of community service workers.
- Given that advocating for service users is integral to the work of community services, better pay will retain and attract these skills to the sector, and improve the capacity of workers to carry this out.
As a political move, the Equal Pay win relies on a series of wagers and proxies: the state as a proxy for family and community in a particular form, wages as a proxy for caring in a particular form, the community worker as an advocate for the needs of an other in the service of this community. We don’t necessarily know to what ends the value of the contract between the cared for and the caring has been raised.
However, we know we made the claims for a renewed contract between ‘the carer’ and the state, with the implicit and sometimes explicit support of ‘the carees’ (who are not always so divisible – many community workers are people who have had lifelong contact with community services such as out of home care, youth centres and disability support services), from a clear conviction that to pay community workers so comparatively little, for that to have a basis in gender, and for a key impact to be the incapacity of the sector to attract and retain skills to help people who ask for help and have no other resources, was unjust.
It’s enough to keep me in the union, that’s for sure. That and getting to see some of my blokier comrades cutting up the dance floor.
For the love of women’s liberation
Originally published at ABC’s The Drum.
I don’t call myself a feminist. But some of my best friends are feminists.
Some women don’t like the descriptor, and reject it because they don’t want to be associated with a certain stereotype. Or because they believe in countries like Australia there is gender equality now. Neither of these reasons is why I shy away from the label.
I originally abandoned the tag because I don’t agree with what is called patriarchy theory, with which feminism has been inexorably associated (especially inside the academy and social movements). Although that is in many ways an abstract debate, and I tended not to correct people who saw me as under the feminist umbrella.
More recently I have become irritated with the term, because ‘feminist’ increasingly has little specificity. As Nina Power argues in One Dimensional Woman, the term ‘feminist’ (and indeed the wider feminist project) has been stripped of much of its sharpness and liberatory potential.
Protected: LADYCAVE DISCUSSIONS
One Year On
On Monday it will be a year since my father took his own life. Since his death I have been thinking about writing about it, but felt the barrier of years of professional discipline insisting “what is the purpose of this piece? What do you want to convey?” I still don’t have an answer to those questions, and yet I feel I must write, so here it is. I think it’s just to bear witness, a process I believe in wholeheartedly, and to help me with my grief. But if you want to see the roots of my feminism and why I believe the personal is political, it’s here too. I’m not trying to give you a lesson or a message, but if you get something from reading, I’m glad.
How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving? I don’t know and really it’s a pointless question, because what I do know is that death happens to us all, and grief just is, and it will be. It is a physiological process as much as anything else that we dress it up as with our culture and plethora of abstract ideas, and our art. It is moving through me and with me, and I must and want to travel with it.
A Cosmopolitan Morality
Intolerance is central to parochialism. It is anathema to a cosmopolitan society. On this we can surely agree. What if I say, ‘intolerance of religion is just as problematic as the intolerance of atheism’? Still with me?
Arguments that point to the long history of structures of power held by religious institutions are important, though the power keeps shifting in a so-called secular state. But such power is still manifest even in Australia, such as in the case of the religio-legislative stranglehold on the same-sex marriage debate. And it’s only ‘common sense’ that an anti-choice position on abortion is linked to religious views, as they certainly dominate that side of the debate. I’ll return to that ‘common sense’ later.
However, I fail to see how Melinda Tankard Reist’s anti-porn work has anything to do with her religion, and find it incredibly reductive to dismiss her arguments on that basis. It is a sleight of hand (and an ad hominem one) to say ‘I disagree with her anti-porn work because she’s a fundie Baptist and by the way you know she’s pro-life/anti-choice?!’ The logical fallacies therein are pretty obvious, and yet they’ve currently been amplified-while-under-analysed due to MTR’s (ill-advised, in my opinion) decision to threaten a blogger with defamation for pointing out her alleged membership of a Baptist church and suggesting she has been duplicitous about her religious affiliation. While I stand solidly in the camp of those decrying the legal threat, I’d like to examine the things that MTR probably should have argued instead of trying to silence the blogger.
Framing Occupy, Homelessness, Solidarity
Ron Paul: next president or protofascist?
Cross posted from Overland Magazine Blog
There’s a joke on the new tumblr, Shit Liberals Say ToRadicals, that goes, ‘Sure, Obama’s not perfect, but consider thealternative.’ Followed by the fine print, ‘I did, it’s called socialism.’
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