Women At Work

By Kaye Hargreaves

While working women have achieved much, the issues of the right to work, equal opportunities and rewards, healthy work environment, unionisation and, in particular, the problems of 'the double working life' are still very much alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sweetspire Literature Management LLC
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958381915

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Copyright © 2023 Kaye Hargreaves

Paperback: 978-1-958381-90-8

eBook: 978-1-958381-91-5

Library of Congress Control Number: Pending

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Kaye Hargreaves was born in Melbourne in1951, but spent most of her school days in Canberra. She returned to Melbourne in 1969 to study sociology at Monash University. After graduating she worked at the Centre for Urban Research and Action in Fitzroy. Her involvement in the women’s movement began when she participated in setting up Melbourne’s first women’s refuge. She began research on women at work in 1977, becoming a co-ordinator of the Western Region Centre for Working Women in 1979.

She is particularly interested in links between women workers in Australia and in Asian countries, and is currently doing research into women workers in Japan. She is single and has two dogs.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: ‘Really on the way’

Chapter 2: Show a little fight

Chapter 3: `And we’ll het our jobs back

Chapter 4: ‘Recognise your value’

Don’t Be Too Polite, Girls!

We’re really on the way, girls, really on the way,

Hooray for equal pay, girls, hooray for equal pay!

They’re going to give it to most of us in spite of all their fears,

But do they really need to make us wait three years?

Chorus

Don’t be too polite, girls, don’t be too polite!

Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight!

Don’t be fearful of offending, in case you get the sack,

Just recognise your value and we won’t look back.

I sew up shirts and trousers in the clothing trade,

Men don’t do the job so I can’t ask to be better paid.

The people at the top rarely offer something more,

Unless the people underneath are walking out the door.

They say a man needs more to feed his children and his

What are the needs of a woman who leads a double working

When the whistle blows for knock-off, it’s not her time for

She goes home to start the job that’s not yet paid and never

(an extract from the song ‘Don’t Be Too Polite, Girls!’ by Glen © 1969)

Preface

While working towards my sociology degree, completed in 1972, I had a variety of jobs which gave me first-hand experience of the exploitation of casual labour, almost no knowledge of trade unions (whose absence from the workplace was puzzling), and a lasting desire to get behind the scenes to see how mechanisms I had taken for granted in society really worked. I realised that I was one of the majority who understood little about, and therefore had minimal control over, the social institutions by which we lived from day to day either as workers, consumers or residents.

Like many women in the early 1970s I was also deeply affected by the women’s movement. It taught me to look closer to home than most sociologists are comfortable doing, and I listened more to other women and with them began to make more sense of my own experiences. International Women’s Year came and went, but I knew from my own and other women’s experience of work that changes were continuing. However, I was concerned that the working lives of thousands of women, habitually ignored by sociologists and journalists, were a significant part of Australia’s history that could easily be lost. Writing a book about them would be one way of giving their struggles some of the recognition they warrant. In personal terms, deciding to commit myself to such a project was the result of resolving an emotional crisis in favour of being independent.

I set out to see how women in Australia experienced work and in order to gain a thorough knowledge of the crucial issues sought information from a variety of sources. My starting point was a 1976 report by Des Storer, a former research officer at the Centre for Urban Research and Action. Called ‘But I Wouldn’tWant My Wife to Work Here’, it was the result of a study of migrant women in several industries in Melbourne. I planned to gather information with a broader scope, about Australian-born women as well as migrant women, and about those working in clerical and service industries as well as in factories.

During 1977 and 1978 I interviewed a hundred women working in a range of jobs. These interviews were tape-recorded and then transcribed. Extracts from them have been used to bring to life points made in discussion of statistical information and research findings. Only brief mention is made of the situation of the interviewees to preserve anonymity, and all quotes without identified sources are from these interviews.

I spoke to many other women informally, both individually and in groups, in their homes, in their workplaces at lunch times, at union meetings and at meetings of women’s organisations. Their comments, while not quoted specifically, contributed much to my understanding of the issues covered here.

I was also given access to information held by various specialist organisations, including the Women’s Trade Union Commission (Sydney), the Women’s Electoral Lobby (Sydney), the Lidcombe Workers’ Health Centre, the Trade Union Research Centre (Newcastle) and the Working Women’s Centre (Melbourne).

Interviews and other research were done in Brisbane, Lismore, Newcastle, Broken Hill, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne. While I must, therefore, admit to an eastern States basis, I can also say that although women’s jobs are affected by regional characteristics, the issues that emerge are remarkably similar nationwide. This has been confirmed at several national conferences where women from all over Australia have shared their experiences of work. At each conference or meeting further details and variety of experience are brought forward, but the fundamental issues of women’s right to work, child care, health, union involvement and increasing awareness and organisation all recur.

Chapter 5, ‘Migrant Women’, draws heavily on the work of the Centre for Urban Research and Action (CURA) and I have quoted many extracts from an article that I wrote when research officer there.

In 1979 when I began working as one of the coordinators of the Western Region Centre for Working Women, situated in Melbourne’s western suburbs, I had further contact with many women working in factories there, along with women active in unions in Melbourne. I would particularly like to thank all those people whose co-operation, practical support, encouragement and criticism were immeasurably helpful to me throughout the four years of research, writing and rewriting.

Kaye Hargreaves

Melbourne, 1980

Introduction

Having a job, or looking for one, has become part of the experience of a growing number of women in Australia.

Despite the entry of women into the paid labour force, the experience of women both in the workplace and in society generally is very different from that of men. Women experience the institution of work differently from men and, generally speaking, it is a worse experience. The response of women in the workplace and in the community generally during the 1970s has presented challenges both to the labour movement and to the nature of contemporary social relationships. These factors combine to make it important to focus on women in the workforce.

The sexual division of labour

The tradition in Australian society, no less than many others, has been for certain types of work to be done by women and other types to be done by men the ‘sexual division of labour’. Although work is now often considered to be one of the most important ways of establishing a person’s social identity and position, women have more often been defined in relation to their role as child-bearers and nurturers and as supporters and sexual partners of men. ‘Women’s work’ has been the work contained in that role, and mostly such work has been unpaid, women having to remain economically dependent. However, some women have also always worked in the paid workforce, mostly women from working-class backgrounds or married to working-class men. This fact has been frequently ignored by social scientists and historians because, at least until recent oral histories, working-class people have rarely had the opportunity to describe their own situation when history is being recorded. While many of these women especially the deserted - have had to struggle against poverty, all women in the paid workforce have been socially and economically at a disadvantage: because the jobs available to them, the preparation in the form of social expectations, education and training, and the wages offered for women’s work, have been based on the assumption that it is normal for women to have male breadwinners.

Industrial growth and development over the past, say, fifty years changed the type of work available and increased the number of paid jobs for which labour was demanded. Many of these ‘new’ jobs were filled by women. In fact, many of them were created as areas of traditionally unpaid ‘women’s work’ were industrialised and taken out of the home. For example, some manufacturing industries such as the production, processing and packaging of food, and the clothing and textile trades, grew until the mid-’60s. The service industries those concerned with dealing with people such as caring for the young, the aged,the sick or the disadvantaged, providing food, cleaning up after people along with the white-collar occupations providing back-up services to business and public administration, became major employers of women with supportive functions not too far removed from women’s traditional role.

So despite the opening up of jobs to women, the sexual division of labour has been maintained with few challenges to it in the twentieth century, apart from during the second world war when women were recruited into jobs normally done by men.¹ Some