On equal pay day, tell Ted to pay up
01 September 2011
Ted Baillieu should mark Equal Pay Day by fulfilling his election pledge to meet the cost of equal pay for adult disability educators — 40 years after women won the right to be paid the same as men.
Today — Equal Pay Day — should be a celebration of forty years of equal pay for work of equal value. Instead, September 1 highlights the fact that Australian women working full-time are still paid only 83 cents for every dollar earned by men in similar roles.
To close the current wage gap, women would have to work an extra 63 days a year to match the income of their male colleagues. In effect, until September 1 each financial year they are working for free.
AEU president Mary Bluett said: "Nowhere is the pay gap felt more acutely among our members than in the adult disability sector where many educators earn less than $50,000 a year for a highly skilled and difficult job that changes the lives of thousands of adults with learning difficulties and their families.
"So today we're calling on the State Government to mark Equal Pay Day by honouring its election commitment to fully pay the outcome of the pay equity case at Fair Work Australia."
The average pay gap of 17.2% less equates to $12,500 per year on the average wage. But in some sectors that gap widens to over 30% .
This means women also losing out when it comes to flow-on benefits such as annual leave and superannuation payments. In 2010–11, the average superannuation payout to a woman is projected to be around $150,000 — half the average payout to a man.
ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence today said: "Women now make up half the workforce and are more skilled and educated than any other time in Australia's history. Equal pay is a workplace right and a human right."
Equal Pay Day was initiated by Australia's Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency in 2008 to draw attention to this ongoing gender-based inequity.
In an historic ruling, Fair Work Australia has accepted unions' case that gender plays a part in the wage gap between social, community and disability workers and comparable government employees. It is now deliberating on new salary levels for those workers.
But the Baillieu Government has backed away from its pre-election promise to meet in full the cost of any pay rise — and warned that it may be forced to cut services and hours if the increase is too large.
Tell Baillieu, it's time to Wake Up & Pay Up!
