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Description
There is a plethora of research that addresses women's need to integrate family and community responsibilities with paid work and an extensive debate on the work and family interface in Australia, and how it can best be accommodated across workplaces. (1) The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) made a submission to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) test case on Work and Family with the emphasis on family leave. (2) In 2005, the AIRC ruled that employees have a right to request family-related leave; increased simultaneous parental leave to eight weeks at the time of birth; increased the total of parental leave to two years, and allowed a return from parental leave on a part-time basis until the child reaches school age. It also extended the amount of time and the conditions under which employees could request leave as carers or in emergencies, but emphasised that all these provisions were dependent on the effect on the workplace or the employer's business. (3) More recent legislation, the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005, has rendered even these provisions largely irrelevant, with the Australian Fair Pay and Conditions Standard considerably paring back allowable conditions in industrial instruments. (4)
In Australia, engaging in casual and/or part-time work has been the preference for many women with children, especially in the context of unevenly distributed child care arrangements. (5) Government assumes that part-time and flexible working hours will be in demand, 'especially from those with caring responsibilities' and will involve a significant part of the paid workforce. (6) Individuals and families confront growing time pressures from extended paid and unpaid working hours, and working adults, especially women, juggle paid and unpaid work as time spent in paid work competes with time for children, partners and elderly parents, and time for household chores and personal leisure. (7) This pressure is increasing as demands (time, energy) at home impinge on work performance, and vice versa, (8) Conflicts and tensions arise since role overload or role interference occurs when there is not enough time or energy to meet the commitments of multiple roles or when the expectations and demands of the two roles conflict. (9)
The choice to work full time, part-time, or not at all, most often made by mothers, is dependent on whether they can find accessible, affordable child care, adequate parental leave or an acceptable way of juggling many roles, with the consequence that the choices many women make are constrained, (10) It has been suggested that more equitable sharing of family responsibilities is needed to 'make it easier for both women and men to meet their caring responsibilities as well as to enjoy the rewards of sharing', but also that family- friendly policies in the workforce, mostly used by women, are more likely to entrench women's disadvantage in the workplace than otherwise. (11) Pocock argues that the society lacks a consensus between men and women and among women on these issues, while political and industrial factors make a balance more difficult to achieve: a situation which is likely to be exacerbated rather than diminished as industrial relations reform is extended. Meanwhile, established patterns of men's and women's expectations of work and home life have so far proved intractable. (12)
How, then, in the absence of major cultural or policy change, is it possible for men and women to engage in paid work and be actively involved in family and community at the same time? The older term 'family-friendly' workplace has given way to the concept of 'work-life balance', and a 'perception of satisfactorily resolving the multiple and often incompatible demands of work and family roles'. (13) Programs that promote a work-life balance for women acknowledge the potentially conflicting demands of being a conscientious and committed parent at the same time as being a conscientious and committed employee.
While there is no one definition of what constitutes a family- friendly workplace or one that promotes work-life balance, there is a broad consensus, derived from previous research, of desirable policies and practices. (14) At least for the foreseeable future, the central issues for women who are carers revolve around a limited agenda that would give them enough flexibility to take leave from paid work to fulfil family responsibilities without jeopardising job security or other opportunities at work. The ACTU identifies working hours, control over hours of work, and leave arrangements including parental, annual and carer's leave as the three main areas to be addressed in reconciling work and family needs, assuming adequate safety nets and adequate incomes. (15) Table 1 outlines a suggested list of provisions.
Methodology
Against this background, in 2004 the authors undertook a number of case studies with organisations that were obligated to submit reports to the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA). This paper reports on an analysis of six workplaces. The research uses documentary information (EEO reports and Workplace Agreements) together with structured interviews with managers and women employees to address the research questions. The researchers visited the main work site for each of the six organisations and interviewed HR managers, other managers and a selection of female staff, using a semi-structured protocol. Focus groups were conducted with between two and nine women employees in five of the organisations. A total of 60 people were interviewed individually or in focus groups, and the transcripts analysed using QSR Nudist software. Interviews took an average of 30 minutes, although there was a wide variation in duration. The interviewees were volunteers but were nominated by the HR manager in each case. The interviews covered a broad spectrum of issues related to the development, implementation and application of equal opportunity policies and practices. Women at the six workplaces were asked about the work they did, their working conditions, their level of contentment in their current role, and their ambitions. The interviews included discussion of work-family balance issues and programs. The purpose was to establish how the achievement of work-life balance was realised within the workplace and to what extent this was facilitated by (enterprise or industrial) bargaining or EEO programs. It should be noted that the research reported here pre-dates the 2005 industrial legislation. The focus in this paper is not on policy developments across workplaces, but rather how individual workplaces address the tensions between work and family commitments using both formal and informal mechanisms and processes.
The six private sector organisations were chosen on the basis that they had fulfilled the minimum requirements of reporting to the EOWA, addressing key issues of recruitment, promotion, training and development, work organisation, conditions of services, harassment, pregnancy and breastfeeding. Three had exceeded this by being classified by the agency as an Employer of Choice for Women Employees (EOCFW) or by having their reporting requirements waived (see Table 2). They had not necessarily made an undertaking to provide family-friendly workplaces or develop programs to... |
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