My Blog

Category: Opinions

  • Power, Not Just Supply and Demand, Vital to Future Wage Growth

    Will a low unemployment rate be sufficient to solve the crisis in Australian wages? In this article published in The Conversation, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford argues that the historic restructuring of Australia’s labour market institutions over the last half-century (since the last time unemployment was below 4%) will continue to undermine wages, despite apparently tight labour markets.

    This table compares regulatory and institutional parameters today, compared to fifty years ago. Across multiple dimensions (including the minimum wage, the Awards system, unions and collective bargaining, and job security), workers have lost the bargaining power they need to win higher wages. Hence labour costs remain suppressed, and business profits hit records, even as unemployment declines.

    Labour Institutions Then and NowPlease see Jim’s full article, “Why there’s no magic jobless rate to increase Australians’ wages,” at The Conversation.

    The post Power, Not Just Supply and Demand, Vital to Future Wage Growth appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Of 3’s, and Other Important Labour Market Numbers

    Prime Minister Scott Morrison set tongues wagging this week with a confident pledge that Australia’s unemployment rate could have “a 3 in front of it” this year. It’s a theme that will loom large in his campaign for reelection later this year.

    In this commentary, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford considers whether a low unemployment rate is an accurate indicator of the state of the labour market — and whether, even if achieved, it would reignite wage growth and solve other problems holding back Australia’s labour market.

    The unemployment rate was 4.2% in December, so Mr Morrison’s prediction may not be as brave as might seem: it would only take a .3-point drop to achieve that magical ‘3’. The official unemployment rate often bounces by more than that (in either direction) in any given month, purely due to measurement errors or shifts in recorded labour force participation. So his prediction will likely come true. But is it the economic triumph that he and his political allies will claim?

    A lower unemployment rate is obviously better than a higher unemployment rate. But the unemployment rate itself has lost much of its value as an indicator of the state of the labour market. There are large pools of unutilised and underutilised labour in our economy that are not captured by the official unemployment measure.

    Equally important, assumptions that a historically low unemployment rate will automatically correct many of the labour market problems that Australia has experienced in recent years are misplaced. Problems like wage stagnation, falling real wages, income inequality and poverty (even among employed people), and the economic exclusion of sectors of society (such as indigenous and immigrant communities, and people with disability) all require more concerted and targeted actions to fix.

    Please see Jim’s full commentary: Of 3’s, and Other Important Labour Market Numbers.

    The post Of 3’s, and Other Important Labour Market Numbers appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • CPI Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

    Jericho shows that inflation measurements can very widely for different types of household. Those with limited incomes (including government benefit recipients), who spend more of their income on ‘non-discretionary’ items, face an especially large threat to their real living standards as inflation picks up.

    See Greg’s full column, “With inflation on the rise, Australia’s cost of living will dominate the election debate,” in the Guardian Australia.

    The post CPI Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Healthy humans drive the economy: witnessing one of the worst public policy failures in Australia’s history

    Ask chief executives where value comes from and they will credit their own smart decisions that inflate shareholder wealth. Ask logistics experts how supply chains work and they will wax eloquent about ports, terminals and trucks. Politicians, meanwhile, highlight nebulous intangibles like “investor confidence” – enhanced, presumably, by their own steady hands on the tiller.

    The reality of value-added production and supply is much more human than all of this. It is people who are the driving force behind production, distribution and supply.

    Labour – human beings getting out of bed and going to work, using their brains and brawn to produce actual goods and services – is the only thing that adds value to the “free gifts” we harvest from nature. It’s the only thing that puts food on supermarket shelves, cares for sick people and teaches our children.

    Even the technology used to enhance workers’ productivity – or sometimes even replace them – is ultimately the culmination of other human beings doing their jobs. The glorious complexity of the whole economy boils down to human beings, using raw materials extracted and tools built by other human beings, working to produce goods and services.

    A narrow, distorted economic lens

    The economy doesn’t work if people can’t work. So the first economic priority during a pandemic must be to keep people healthy enough to keep working, producing, delivering and buying.

    That some political and business leaders have, from the outset of COVID-19, consistently downplayed the economic costs of mass illness, reflects a narrow, distorted economic lens. We’re now seeing the result – one of the worst public policy failures in Australia’s history.

    The Omicron variant is tearing through Australia’s workforce, from health care and child care, to agriculture and manufacturing, to transportation and logistics, to emergency services.

    The result is an unprecedented, and preventable, economic catastrophe. This catastrophe was visited upon us by leaders – NSW Premier Dom Perrotet and Prime Minister Scott Morrison in particular – on the grounds they were protecting the economy. Like a Mafia kingpin extorting money, this is the kind of “protection” that can kill you.

    NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s decision to relax COVID-19 restrictions in December has turned into both a health and economic disaster. Bianca De Marchi/AAP

    Effect as bad as lockdowns

    On a typical day in normal times, between 3% and 4% of employed Australians miss work due to their own illness. Multiple reports from NSW indicate up to half of workers are now absent due to COVID: because they contracted it, were exposed to it, or must care for someone (like children barred from child care) because of it. With infections still spreading, this will get worse in the days ahead.

    Staffing shortages have left hospitals in chaos, supermarket shelves empty, supply chains paralysed. ANZ Bank data, for example, shows economic activity in Sydney has fallen to a level lower than the worst lockdowns.

    Spending in Sydney and Melbourne now near lockdown conditions

    ANZ Research

    If relaxing health restrictions in December (as Omicron was already spreading) was motivated by a desire to boost the economy, this is an own-goal for the history books.

    Relaxing isolation rules

    Now the response to Omicron ravaging labour supply is to relax isolation requirements for workers who have contracted, or been exposed to, COVID-19.

    The first step was to shift the goalposts on “test, trace, isolate and quarantine” arrangements by redefining “close contact”.

    On December 29 the Prime Minister said it was important to move to a new definition “that enables Australia to keep moving, for people to get on with their lives”. The next day National Cabinet approved a definition such that only individuals having spent at least four hours indoors with a COVID-infected person needed to isolate.

    Australians certainly want supply chains to keep moving. That won’t happen by simply pretending someone with three hours and 59 minutes of face-to-face indoor contact with Omicron is safe. Putting asymptomatic but exposed and potentially infected people back to work will only accelerate the spread.

    The second step has been to reduce the isolation period for those who do pass this tougher “close contact” test. At its December 30 meeting National Cabinet agreed to a standard isolation period of seven days (ten days in South Australia), down from 14 days.

    For “critical workers” in essential services including food logistics, the NSW and Queensland governments have gone even further, allowing employers to call them back to work so long as they are asymptomatic.

    Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

    This follows a US precedent, despite scientific evidence indicating contagion commonly lasts longer than 5 days.

    Employers will use this change to pressure exposed and even sick workers to return to work, risking their own health, colleagues, customers, and inevitably spreading the virus further.

    Copying US COVID protocols only guarantees US-style infection rates. In fact, since 5 January, Australia’s seven-day rolling average infections per million now exceed that of the US.

    Our Wold in Data, CC BY

    From one of the best COVID responses in the world to one of the worst, Australia has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

    It’s not too late to limit the carnage

    The idea that health considerations had to be balanced with economic interests was always a false dichotomy. A healthy economy requires healthy workers and healthy consumers.

    The Omicron surge has created an economic emergency that will be difficult to endure.

    But it’s not too late to limit further avoidable contagion. Infection prevention practices (including masks, capacity limits, prohibitions on group indoor activities, PPE and distancing in workplaces, and free and accessible rapid tests) must be restored and enforced.

    Income supports for workers who stay home must be restored. Staffing strategies need to emphasise steady, secure jobs, rather than outsourcing and gig arrangements which have facilitated contagion.

    Above all, our policy makers need to remember the economy is composed of human beings, and refocus their attention on keeping people healthy. Protecting people is the only thing that can protect the economy.

    The post Healthy humans drive the economy: we’re now witnessing one of the worst public policy failures in Australia’s history appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • The great (gendered) resignation is not what you think. It’s worse

    Have you heard? The so-called great resignation is afoot. A world where an empowered workforce say “no” to bad bosses and a life dictated by work. In the US, increased job departures have been coined a “revolution in workers’ expectations”.

    Australian workers were squeezed for an average 6.1 hours unpaid overtime per week in 2021 – a substantial increase on 2020. If only expectations matched reality.

    In Australia, employers crow about shortages in low-paid, “churn and burn” jobs of which they refuse to improve the quality. Meanwhile, 700,000 people are unemployed, and 1.3 million are in jobs, but need more work. Around 1 million more aren’t looking for work, but want to work and are available. The ABS calls them “marginally attached” and “discouraged” workers.

    Women know a thing or two about being discouraged. Far from quitting as an act of righteous agency, they’ve lost their jobs during lockdowns against their will. It’s material. Less “life’s too short to work 24/7”. More “my kids need care immediately”.

    The explosion in caring demands associated with lockdowns fell disproportionately to women – as in 2020, when women’s average hours caring for children and performing household tasks rose faster than for men, reaching 5.1 hours per day (versus 3.1 for men).

    In February 2021, 175,000 women didn’t look for work even though they were available and ready to start within four weeks because they had pressing caring responsibilities.

    Even if women loaded with caring demands wanted to retain their jobs, the odds were stacked against them. They hold the majority of low-hours insecure jobs without protections against sacking. When bosses want to shed jobs to save bottom lines, women cop it worst.

    68% of all jobs lost between May and October were held by women (205,000 jobs). Women’s participation in the job market fell 1.7 percentage points. Nearly all (90%) of women’s jobs lost were part-time.

    Little acknowledged, the latest job vacancies data mirror women’s exodus from paid work. In August, vacancies were highest in healthcare, administration and retail. These are all industries employing 50% or more women. All are in the bottom-half of industries by average weekly earnings.

    The question is, as wallets open, beers flow and economic activity resumes, what’s bringing women back to work? A couple shifts at minimum wage, and higher COVID-19 contagion risks to boot. All to pay for one day of high-cost childcare? Hardly appealing.

    An empowered workforce can walk away from bad jobs. But structural barriers stop women from participating in the first place.

    High-cost childcare is a clear barrier for women workers. Before the pandemic, over half of non-employed women with young children said high-cost childcare was the biggest influence on their decision not to work.

    Australia’s outdated paid parental scheme bakes “primary” and “secondary” carers into family structures – reinforcing the exodus of women from work, and blocking the equal participation of fathers in raising their children.

    The so-called great resignation is gendered. But women shouldn’t have to resign themselves to the revolving door of crap jobs and important caring responsibilities.

    We’ve come a long way since the 1950s when conservative norms dictated women’s labour should be unpaid and confined to the home. Women have better access to the world of paid work now. But their relegation to insecure, low-paid, and junior roles shows we have much further to go.

    And it’s government policies that holds us back.

    Australian women need genuine measures to support them in all aspects of their lives; from free early childhood care and education, better work-family balance policies, pay equity, and more opportunities for decent jobs.

    Only then, can women imagine a world where they are empowered through work.

    The post The great (gendered) resignation is not what you think. It’s worse appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic…

    COVID-19 has been reintroduced into multiple aged care homes in Victoria, in part via staff who worked in multiple locations. We have been here before, but this time, the Commonwealth government should have prevented this channel of contagion.

    The poorly-managed vaccine rollout, including inexplicable delays in vaccinating aged care residents and staff, has played a key role in the current outbreak. But there is another policy factor at play as well: multi-site, insecure, and precarious work in Australia’s aged care sector.

    There has been a dramatic expansion of insecure work in this sector: including more than doubling the share of part-time jobs in the last generation, a huge shift toward lower-qualified, frequently precarious personal care positions (rather than qualified and registered health workers), and the widespread use of labour hire and agencies to provide short-term labour (rather than creating permanent, stable jobs).

    The recent report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety identified these precarious staffing practices as a major risk to the quality and safety of care. The Commissioners criticised the over-use of temporary or agency work, and emphasised the inextricable linkage between ‘the quality of care and the quality of jobs.’ They recommended that permanent, more stable jobs are most compatible with ‘developing a skilled, career-based, stable and engaged workforce providing high quality aged care’.

    It’s not just in aged care facilities that insecure work has accelerated the spread, and magnified the consequences, of COVID-19. In fact, insecure work has generally weakened Australia’s resistance to the virus, and undermined both our health and economic responses. In aged care and beyond, precarious work enhances risks that the virus is transmitted.

    Precarious jobs do not provide the training and stability to ensure that rigorous infection control measures are implemented and followed. Workers in those jobs have low and unstable incomes, and generally lack paid sick leave: the resulting economic desperation compels many of them to work, when they should be isolating. Another tragic example of the overlap between insecure work and COVID-19 contagion was the tragic failures in hotel quarantine – where a perfect storm of poor training, low wages, and insecure work clearly contributed to the virus’s escape into the community.

    Precarious work is more than just casual work – it includes part-time (especially with unpredictable hours), casual, labour hire, sham contracting, and gig work. Around half of all Australian jobs embody one or more of those dimensions of insecurity.

    Sick pay is unavailable in most of these roles: casual and self-employed workers have none, while even permanent part-timers accumulate only partial credits. When the pandemic hit, 37% of all employed Australians (including self-employed) had no paid sick leave entitlement. Unwell workers thus faced the economic compulsion to work when they should have stayed home.

    Workers in insecure jobs experienced the lion’s share of initial job loss in the early days of the pandemic, cruelly concentrating the costs of the downturn on those who could least afford it. Casual workers lost employment eight times faster than those in permanent jobs. Part-time workers lost work three times faster than full-time workers, and insecure self-employed workers (those without incorporation or without any employees) lost work four times faster than those in more stable small businesses.

    Now, however, the rebound of employment since the initial lockdowns is being dominated by a surge in insecure jobs. Casual jobs account for almost 60% of all waged jobs created since the trough of the recession. Part-time work accounts for almost two-thirds of all new jobs. And very insecure positions (including own-account contractors and ‘gigs’) account for most of the rebound in self-employment.

    So without measures to improve job stability, the post-COVID labour market will clearly be dominated by insecure work – setting us up for future economic, social, and public health risks in the future.

    Multiple job-holding provides further evidence that the labour market, for many people, provides only fractured, incomplete, precarious opportunity. In the December quarter of 2020, there were over a million ‘secondary jobs’ in Australia (where a person is working that job in addition to another role) – the highest in history. Secondary jobs surged by 27% from June through December 2020 (alongside other types of insecure work).

    These jobs now account for 7.2% of all employment in Australia – also the highest in history. As we have tragically been reminded, multiple job holding poses enormous risks: not just on workers forced to juggle multiple positions to make ends meet, but for quality of care and public health.

    Finally, the broader social and familial stresses unleashed by the pandemic have also been exacerbated by insecure work. This problem has a particularly gendered slant: women do most of the unpaid work in our society, and carrying this burden of unpaid work is made even more difficult when paid work is precarious and unreliable. Family demands do not suddenly disappear when there is an opportunity to pick up a casual shift. And for the worker, the consequences of turning down that shift can be damaging and long-term – likely leading to fewer hours subsequently offered by that employer.

    Avoidable outbreaks of COVID-19 provide further proof that Australia needs to roll back precarious work, and ensure all workers have basic security, stability and entitlements.

    Australia has among the highest reliance on insecure work arrangements of any industrial country. That precarity is not natural or inevitable, it is the result of deliberate policy choices. And in the wake of COVID-19, Australia should be making different ones.

    The post If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic, Wait Till You See The Figures Now appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Why is Job Quality Worsening?

    In this update on job insecurity in Australia, Alison Pennington reviews the ongoing erosion of full-time, traditional “good” jobs, growth in COVID-era “gig” work, and outlines how business trends and labour market policies have facilitated both lower worker bargaining power and a dramatic rise in insecure work.

    For more on reducing the incidence and consequences of insecure work, see our recent submission to the Select Committee on Job Insecurity, by Dan Nahum.

    The post Why is Job Quality Worsening? appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Rage & Optimism as an Activist Economist

    Alison Pennington explains how rage about how the economy works powers her activist economics.

  • Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most

    In this commentary, Senior Economist Alison Pennington explains how new casuals measures and the government’s wider economic policies – including in industrial relations, childcare, welfare, and fiscal spending – significantly undermine the economic security of women, entrench pay inequality, and ultimately, increase their vulnerability to gendered violence.

    This commentary was originally published in Michael West Media.

    Crocodile tears no mask for Coalition’s economic war on women

    Well may Scott Morrison tear up as he relates how his daughters, wife and widowed mother drive his every decision. The facts are that every move of the Coalition government ensures women are poorer, more insecure at work and more vulnerable to violence on the job. The Industrial Relations bill pushed through last week is a final nail in the coffin for women. Alison Pennington reports.

    After a month of anger from women around the country about sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the workplace, federal parliament passed legislation last week that will strike a massive, lasting blow to women’s job quality and pay, entrenching pay inequality and exacerbating women’s economic insecurity.

    The mainstream media has mainly focused on the fact that most of the Industrial Relations bill didn’t pass. But the cornerstone of the legislation – and the primary reason for its inception, pre-pandemic, by business lobbyists – did.

    A new legal definition of casual work will allow employers to call any job a casual one. Jobs can now look and smell like permanent jobs, except that employers can legally engage you as a casual, stripping away your legal entitlements at will.

    So-called “permanency conversion” rights in the legislation are so weak that employers will easily craft employment arrangements to lock in casual jobs long-term.

    Employers will simply vary rosters

    Employers will vary rosters sufficiently to ensure that employees will never reach the benchmarks of six and 12 months of regular schedules that should lead to permanency. In any case, employers will be allowed to refuse offers on “reasonable grounds”. And small businesses, which employ a huge 44% of all private sector employees, are exempted entirely.

    The federal government’s new casual laws will expand the incidence of casual work. Women will disproportionately suffer in a labour market with diminishing opportunities to obtain secure, decent jobs because women are more likely to be in casual roles (filling 54% of all casual positions). And women’s vulnerability to casualisation is growing. Women accounted for 62% of all new casual jobs created in the period from May to November 2020.

    Casual workers are not compensated

    Despite claims from employers that casual workers are compensated for the loss of entitlements and lack of predictability in rosters and tenure, nothing could be further from the truth.

    Casual workers are, on average, paid far less than employees in permanent roles. Median weekly earnings of full-time casuals were 23% lower ($1080 per week) than those in permanent roles ($1400 per week), and 45% lower for casual part-time workers ($390 per week) compared with permanent part-time workers on $720 per week.

    The expansion of the power of employers to use casual work in a jobs market awash with many hungry mouths desperate for paid work means more women in lower-paying, insecure jobs.

    The government’s decision to subject the unemployed to a below-poverty JobSeeker rate means more women reliant on employers to survive. At every move the Liberal National party government is making Australian women poorer, more insecure and more vulnerable to violence on the job.

    Women return to lower quality jobs

    Treasurer Josh Frydenberg celebrates the recent fall in the unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent, claiming the recovery is well under way. But the detailed job quality data tell a very different story for women.

    Women workers are “snapping back” to a world of paid work on inferior terms compared with men – fewer hours, less pay and less security.

    Casual jobs accounted for 64.3% of the total growth in women’s employment from May to November last year.

    Alarmingly, more than half of all the growth in women’s employment over the six-month period was in both low-hours and insecure work, with 52.4% of total growth in employees in part-time casual jobs.

    Traditional full-time permanent jobs with normal entitlements (such as paid sick leave, holidays and superannuation) represented a dismal 10.4% of female employment growth from May through November.

    It’s a crude fact that as women’s casual jobs were booming, business lobbyists were pushing for passage of the IR Bill on the basis that employers “lacked confidence” to hire casuals due to legal “uncertainty”. Australia was simultaneously experiencing the largest and fastest increase in casual employment in its history.

    More fuel for gender pay gap fire

    The consequences of an employment recovery overwhelmingly concentrated in part-time and casual jobs for women is more fuel for the gender pay gap fire.

    The gender pay gap is most often measured by comparing the earnings of men and women in full-time jobs. But women face persistent barriers to workforce participation – including unaffordable childcare, lack of family-friendly work arrangements, and workplace discrimination. Consequently, almost half (45.1%) of all employed women are in part-time work.

    Measuring the gender pay gap using total average earnings data (including both full-time and part-time workers, and bonuses and overtime as well as ordinary time wages) indicates that the gender pay gap is 31% across all jobs – a more dire, but more accurate, measure of the pay gap.

    Ironically, the gender pay gap narrowed in the early stages of pandemic and recession. From late-2019 to May 2020, the gap between male and female total wage incomes declined from 31.4% to 29.6% – down by 1.8 percentage points.

    But this did not represent “progress” in pay equality. The gap only closed because more than 300,000 women in low-paid casual roles lost their jobs, which increased the average earnings of those women who were able to stay connected to the workforce.

    How good’s “snap back”?

    As the economy recovered from May last year, an influx of women’s lower-paying jobs widened the gender pay gap again, just as quickly. How good’s “snap back”?

    Instead of improving the quantity and quality of jobs for women, governments have actively pursued policies that will exacerbate pay inequality this year and into the future.

    In addition to casual work changes pushed through in the IR bill, two other policies create higher barriers to women’s participation in paid work, and suppress their pay once they get on the job.

    The federal government and all states and territories (bar Tasmania and Victoria) have imposed punitive and counterproductive public sector wage freezes and caps on their workforces. This suppression of public sector pay hurts women most because they account for 61.7% of all public sector jobs.

    The failure of government to provide affordable, quality childcare presents another major barrier to women’s paid work opportunities. After dangling free childcare in front of families early in the pandemic, the federal government cut supports and reintroduced fees after just three months.

    The return of full-fee, high-cost childcare prices women out of paid work. More than half of women with young children outside the workforce list childcare costs as a key factor in their decision not to work. A childcare system that lets a small number of profit-driven providers determine access denies families and their children access to critical developmental education and much-needed community bonds as people emerge from pandemic-era isolation.

    Rebuilding women’s economic security requires a very different approach from the bankrupt austerity agenda of government. Women need more and better quality jobs, free childcare, a superannuation system that provides genuine income security and an employment relations system that works to lift the quality, pay and safety of their jobs, not undermine it.

    The post Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Wrecking superannuation, not protecting women, is the government’s priority

    Women deserve so much more than what Jane Hume is proposing, writes Alison Pennington. Photo: AAP

    It doesn’t matter what the crisis, when it comes to the Morrison government the message is clear: you’re on your own.

    As women across Australia lead historic mobilisations demanding government action on gendered violence week, the federal government encouraged women facing domestic abuse to raid their own superannuation accounts.

    Calling superannuation withdrawal measures of up to $10,000 “an important last resort lifeline” for women experiencing domestic violence, Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy Jane Hume later announced the policy would be reviewed following concerns from frontline workers about victim coercion.

    Minister Hume now proposes to strengthen the “integrity” of the scheme with safeguards protecting the free withdrawal of funds. But additional steps for accessing women’s retirement funds do not change the policy’s message: survivors of abuse must fund their own crisis supports. All the while abusers roam free – an addition of intolerable insult to injury.

    Safeguards may stop abusive partners forcing women to raid their retirement savings, but it’s not stopping the federal government. The early-release scheme is entirely consistent with the government’s clear established priorities: dismantling the superannuation system – rain, hail or shine.

    Women marching for economic security and safety are not just ignored by the government. The Coalition’s anti-superannuation crusade to transform the system into an emergency personal bank account actively exploits women’s heightened COVID-era economic vulnerability.

    Women worse off since COVID

    In the initial COVID shutdowns, women experienced greater losses of jobs and hours. Against this backdrop of women’s desperation, the federal government introduced the superannuation early release scheme. Significantly, this was introduced two weeks before the introduction of the Coronavirus Supplement and the JobKeeper wage subsidy.

    Between April and December 2020, 1.5 million women drew down their super, one-quarter of the entire female workforce. $14.9 billion was stripped from women’s already meagre retirement savings. Some 345,000 women completely emptied their accounts. Many more women aged under 20, and also those aged 36-55 (prime working years pre-retirement), withdrew from their superannuation compared to men.

    In 2018, the Coalition announced domestic violence would be added to the list of early release “compassionate grounds”. Frontline domestic violence services voiced concern back then too. Now, pressured by intensifying calls for a proactive government addressing gendered violence, the Coalition suggests “safeguards”.

    The federal government acknowledged heightened gendered violence risks during COVID. But it has still failed to give sufficient funding to the domestic violence sector, lift critical income supports for vulnerable women fleeing abuse, or introduce paid domestic violence leave into minimum labour laws. In fact, $1 million was cut from anti-domestic violence education programs in schools in the 2020 October Budget.

    Early release scheme exacerbates disadvantage

    Women already face systematic disadvantage in the superannuation system and have much lower retirement incomes: they retire with barely half the retirement savings of men. There urgently needs to be targeted reforms to prevent labour market inequalities that reduce women’s career earnings from being baked into the superannuation system as well.

    Abolishing the $450 per month minimum threshold, closing the ‘motherhood gap’ by making super payable for all paid and unpaid care-related absences, and proceeding with the legislated increase in the superannuation guarantee (to 12 per cent) are all important to boosting women’s economic security and safety.

    In the absence of real action on gendered workplace and domestic violence, the government’s superannuation early release scheme for domestic violence victims only exacerbates women’s economic insecurity.

    Women desperate for incomes to survive are more reliant on abusive partners and low-wage casual jobs, more helpless to the threat of ‘handsy’ bosses and colleagues, and below-poverty welfare payments in the future. This latest policy only increases the risks of gendered violence over women’s lifetimes.

    For women experiencing job loss, financial hardship or domestic violence, the message from the federal government is one we are getting sick of hearing: in a crisis, you’re on your own.

    Australian women deserve so much more.

    The post Wrecking superannuation, not protecting women, is the government’s priority appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.