Dutton, read a book — the right to disconnect will help women

The Albanese government’s third round of industrial relations reforms passed last week, including a “right to disconnect”, prompted some big feelings from employer organisations and the opposition. The new right simply means employers will now be prevented from punishing employees who refuse to answer “unreasonable” calls and emails outside of work hours.

Nonetheless, the childish tantrums it’s caused sadly threaten to roll back progress on other fronts, in particular flexible work arrangements that have benefited women and helped narrow the gender pay gap. 

The change will lead to job losses and higher prices, claimed some in the business lobby. Employers will, it follows, have no other choice but to reduce flexibility for staff. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” Andrew McKellar, chief executive officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told ABC’s RN Breakfast. 

An apoplectic Peter Dutton told Sky News that Labor was “outsourcing industrial relations and economic policy to the Greens” and the changes “would lead to a continuation of the productivity problem in our country”. Of course, it follows, that he would have no choice but to roll them back for the good of the country. 

“I’ve been around industrial relations a long time, and I’ve heard the sky is going to fall a lot of times, but this is really one for the ages,” Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, who championed the changes, told RN Breakfast.  

Indeed. My “big feelings” have centred on the gendered dimension of this debate, because the last time I checked we were all supposed to be united in tackling the gender pay gap and shoring up women’s economic security. 

My advice to Dutton is that he should shush long enough to read the work of American economist Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize for economics last year. Her work illustrates how the advent of “greedy jobs” — high-paying, high-pressure roles that demand workers be available at unusual times outside their contracted hours — set back progress in closing the gender pay gap by largely negating other efforts to close the gap. Anything that helps stem the tide of “greedy work” might be especially good for women. 

I also suggest he consider the fact that there has always been a “burnout gender gap”, with women more likely to experience burnout than men, and that this gap doubled over the course of the pandemic (as I wrote about extensively in Leaning Out, my Crikey Read). Perhaps he should think twice about whether it is wise — as the leader of a Liberal Party that haemorrhaged women’s votes at the last election and has since embarked on a navel-gazing exercise exploring what can be done to bring women back into the fold — to quickly pledge to reverse the changes. 

I also have some rather harsh words for the business leaders who have threatened to roll back flexible work. I am minded to cross reference all those supposed “male champions of change” we gave cookies to for banging on about flexible work against those now signing up to this threat — or remaining complicity silent.

Next week, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency will — for the first time — publicly disclose the size of the gender pay gap at employers with more than 100 staff. It might not be wise to use threats to roll back flexible work to block the right to disconnect, given it’s a tool employers might need in their toolbox to help reduce the size of their own embarrassingly large (and now publicly visible) gender pay gap.

And with regards to the whole productivity furphy, can we please all take a step back and remember that we started the IR reform debate with a long-overdue conversation about how we could unlock the “productivity gold” that would flow from having more women in the workforce? Australia has the most highly educated and skilled prime-age female workforce in the OECD, but not correspondingly high women’s workforce participation rates.

The pandemic was meant to be our collective “aha!” moment, shining a light on the barriers to women participating in the workforce at a level that matches their skills and aspirations. Have we forgotten? I haven’t. And I suspect neither has Australia’s new chair of the Productivity Commission, Danielle Wood, who famously made this comment in her keynote at the 2022 Jobs Summit: “I can’t help but reflect that if untapped women’s workforce participation was a massive ore deposit, we would have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground.”