Wollongong in the 1980s

‘41 GIRLS IN 6 MONTHS’ blared the front-page headlines of the Illawarra Mercury on 30 January 1980. The article that followed revealed that a Wollongong chicken shop owner had sexually molested his female employees. From August 1979 to January 1980, 41 young women aged between 14 and 17 were told to report to his bedroom above the shop for a ‘medical examination’ as a requirement and qualification for being employed.

This scandalous example of exploitative employer behaviour took place in the context of higher than national average local unemployment.1 It came to light when two of the girls who had applied for jobs at the shop told their parents, who in turn raised it with the Shop Assistants Union, the Australian Workers Union, and members of the Wollongong Working Women’s Charter Committee. The matter was then brought to the attention of the South Coast Labour Council. Fay Campbell, organiser for the Australian Workers Union, was reported in the Mercury article as saying she intended to inform the Minister for Youth and Community Services, Rex Jackson, and would ask him to disclose the facts of the case in Parliament and to name the proprietor under Parliamentary privilege.2 The chicken shop owner, who was also found to have scammed a Commonwealth Employment Program (CEP) youth subsidy scheme during this time, was subsequently drummed out of town and prevented from opening another business in Wollongong.

Extreme as this example may be, it is a striking illustration of how gender relations and class relations shape each other, and how the sexual division of labour and its associated gender ideologies play an integral role in capitalist societies. As Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle have pointed out, an adequate understanding of the social relations of work cannot be gained without taking this fundamental relationship into account.3

Wollongong, the third largest city in New South Wales, developed around the quintessentially masculine industries steel and coal which continue to employ an overwhelmingly male workforce. While the massive migration programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed to bring European men to work in the steelworks, there were no jobs provided for the women who migrated with them. Despite the establishment of clothing factories with government grants and the late growth of a small service and community sector in the 1970s and 80s, there are relatively few jobs available for women in the region.4 Until 1994, women were prevented by law in NSW from working in underground mines and since 1927, when the Hoskins brothers from Lithgow established the first blast furnace at Port Kembla for what would become Australian Iron and Steel (AI&S),5 the steel industry has been virtually
‘off limits’ to women.

Australia’s biggest company, BHP, acquired its major subsidiary AI&S in 1935 and has since consolidated its monopoly control over the steel and coal mining industries, collecting a network of almost 400 local companies that provide goods and services to the steelworks. According to its own estimates, BHP accounted directly and indirectly for 71.6 per cent of the pay packets in the Illawarra at its peak in 1980-81.6

In April 1980, AI&S had a total workforce of 20,635. Of this number only 1,037 were women, including canteen workers, cleaners, labourers, typists, clerks, apprentices, cadets and professional staff.7 The steelworks had not retrenched at that point and although a dirty and dangerous industry, it was widely regarded as the most secure workplace in the Illawarra. Furthermore, in production ironworker classifications, men and women were paid the same rate for the job, and AI&S was the only employer in the region still advertising for labour and hiring people every day. That is, they were hiring men. Although a total of 2,061 women had applied for production ironworker steelworks jobs from 1973 to 1980, they were routinely rejected.8

Launch of the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign

The chicken shop scandal was the spark that helped to ignite a determined campaign by unemployed Wollongong women that challenged BHP’s discriminatory employment practices. On 20 April 1980 a public seminar on Women, Unemployment and Sexual Harassment was organised by the Wollongong Working Women’s Charter Committee. Led by Peggy Errey, a long-time ALP activist and organiser of the Miscellaneous Workers Union, the Charter Committee was an all female committee of the South Coast Labour Council, formed to promote a Charter of Working Women’s Rights and to lobby for its adoption by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). It was at this seminar that the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign was launched.9

The Campaign began during an economic recession that hit the Clothing and Textile Industry in particular and resulted in the loss of mainly migrant women’s jobs from local factories like Bonds, Berlei, Whitewear and King Gee. In the related retail and service sector, women’s jobs such as shop assistants and cleaners were also scarce. Some of the women pushed out of the sewing factories were forced to accept work in small private sweatshops, but many, like Hristina Treneska who later became an organiser for the Jobs for Women Campaign, preferred to work as outworkers in their own homes doing piecework for the factories, although this meant paying for their own machines and electricity and being paid a pittance. Others tried to find work in Sydney.10 Of the registered CES figures in 1980, 34 per cent of all unemployed were overseas-born.11

Slobodanka Joncevska and Rosika Tot, who later joined the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign in 1980, were two of the women who gained jobs as labourers at the steelworks following an earlier successful protest by women’s liberationists who, amongst other things, chained themselves to the steelworks gates in 1973.12 But the onset of the recession from 1976, combined with a lack of maternity provisions in awards, the absence of anti-discrimination laws, and propaganda campaigns suggesting married women were depriving their sons and daughters of jobs, forced most of the women who had recently gained jobs, including Rosika and Slobodanka, out of the steelworks.

In the weeks that followed the Working Women’s Charter seminar in April 1980, 31 unemployed Wollongong women lodged complaints of sex discrimination with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board and began a legal and political challenge against AI&S, in order to win jobs at its Port Kembla steelworks. It was through the Campaign that women who’d been told ‘there are no jobs for women’ at the steelworks employment office found a political voice to express their needs and frustration and an organisational means to fight for their rights. Most of these women were migrants from Macedonia, Croatia, Turkey, Chile and Greece.

Labour movement and community support

A crucial aspect of the Campaign’s success was the fact that it was able to gain support not only from many women’s organisations, but also from 16 different unions around the country. Significantly, the Campaign gained strong support from the Port Kembla branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, the main union covering production ironworkers in the steel industry, even though the women were unemployed and not union members at the time. In addition to 11 supportive Members of Parliament, the list of over 60 organisations supporting the Campaign included the South Coast Labour Council and the ACTU, as well as 12 ethnic and community groups, 14 ALP branches and three leftwing political parties.13

During the well-publicised Jobs for Women tent embassy outside the steelworks in July 1980, leaflets in seven community languages were distributed and thousands of signatures were collected from male steelworkers on petitions supporting women’s right to work. By mid-1981, 368 women, including all the original complainants, had gained jobs at the Port Kembla steelworks (about 60 women were also employed at the Newcastle steelworks) as a result of the Campaign and negotiations by Carmel Niland, then President of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board.

The first class action anti-discrimination test case

The company began retrenching workers in 1983. Having been denied equal opportunity with men for jobs in the first place, women were among the last to be hired and therefore, according to seniority principles, the first to be fired. So, as well as taking part in the unions’ industrial action to defend jobs, the women decided to take BHP to court, claiming that the company had not only discriminated against them (directly) by denying them jobs as women, but also that they were now suffering the (indirect) effects of previous discrimination in terms of loss of seniority and the threat of, or actual retrenchment.

There were 34 complaints in the test case, which succeeded from the NSW Equal Opportunity Tribunal through to the High Court of Australia, despite BHP’s appeals at every stage. The test case had to be resolved before negotiations for settlement could begin on behalf on 709 additional complainants in a representative action. It took 14 years from the lodging of the first complaints in 1980 to the settlement of the representative complaints via conciliation. The campaign’s anti-discrimination case, Najdovska and Others versus Australian Iron and Steel (AI&S), was the first class action of its kind in Australia and was of national significance, affecting employment practices, industrial policies and manual handling legislation.14

In taking on BHP’s steel company and eventually winning, the women challenged not only a major employer but also the sexual division of labour fundamental to contemporary social relations and the ideologies of femininity and masculinity that reflect and reinforce it. The fight to get jobs in the steelworks was also part of a larger, international movement – at least in OECD countries – to transform the organisation of work, the location of women in the economy and prevailing ideas about ‘femininity’. As Canadian feminist academic Meg Luxton has pointed out, ‘the struggle to get women hired in ‘non-traditional’ jobs is at once a struggle to redefine the characteristics of those jobs and to eliminate the notion that there are such things as ‘women’s jobs’ or ‘men’s jobs’.15

The gendered division of labour

In Australia, as in other capitalist societies, the social and economic consequences of the sexual division of labour and its associated gender ideologies have been seriously detrimental, leading to a general impoverishment of women compared to men and reinforcing broader patterns of male dominance and female subordination, within the family, in the workplace and in the public realm.16

Biological assumptions about physical and reproductive capacity and ‘natural’ affinities as well as the unsubstantiated presumption that most women are supported by breadwinner husbands and not responsible for any legal dependents, have been used repeatedly to justify the continuation of lower wages and different classifications for women and the undervaluing of women’s work in general.17
A report for the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board explains:

Segregation of workers by sex into certain occupations and industries is held largely responsible for the lower overall wage structure for female workers. Typically, females are crowded into industrial jobs which involve precision and dexterity. Traditionally, these jobs have been assessed by industrial tribunals as having a relatively low work value.18

The gendered division of labour has been challenged most noticeably by women’s increased participation in the workforce. The increasing employment of married women since the 1960s has also led to at least a partial redistribution of work in the home, as husbands or defacto partners of women workers have been gradually persuaded to take a more active role in their children’s care and in other ‘feminised’ domestic chores like cooking and cleaning.19

The disparity between women’s and men’s earnings in the paid workforce has been challenged to some extent by demands for ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ in so called ‘women’s jobs’. However in the context of a rigidly sex segregated labour force and the persistence of ideas that reinforce sexual inequality through the undervaluing of women’s work, interpretations of the slogan ‘equal pay for equal work’ (rather than ‘one rate for the job’) have had generally unfavourable consequences for women.

Progress has been made since the majority of female workers received only 54 per cent of the male weekly rate before and during World War II.20 Yet even today, women’s average earnings are well below that of men’s and occupations traditionally seen as ‘women’s jobs’ such as in Hospitality and Retail areas remain the lowest paid.21

Women in ‘non-traditional’ jobs during World War II

Significantly, none of the conservative ideas about women as wage labourers have prevented women from being called upon to enter the paid workforce whenever economic or social conditions required an expanded labour force. During World War II, tens of thousands of Australian women quickly learned how to perform jobs which had previously been considered beyond their abilities in a range of defence and civilian occupations hitherto regarded as male domains, including telegraph operating and munitions and aircraft manufacturing. At the peak of female employment in 1943, there were more than 800,000 women in the workforce, an increase of 157,000 since the outbreak of war in 1939.22

While women were expected to fill ‘male’ jobs, the question of what rates they were to be paid was so contentious that a special Women’s Employment Board was appointed for the duration of the war to oversee women’s working conditions including the wages of women in non-traditional jobs. The Board awarded rates between 60 per cent to 90 per cent of the male rate to between 80,000 and 90,000 women, provoking bitter opposition from employers23 and indicating that women’s productivity and capacity was considered relatively lower than men’s. The remaining 715,000 women employed in traditional female type jobs received wages set at about 54 per cent of the basic male rate before the war and pegged since the start of the war.24

In order to maintain the cheap and expendable source of labour provided by women, employers resorted to reinstituting strict job segregation and squeezing out almost all the women employed in non-traditional jobs in favour of returned servicemen as quickly as possible after the war.25

Limited job classifications for women

It had become obvious during wartime that work performed by women which was usually regarded as ‘men’s work’ was ‘neither more arduous nor more skilled than much of the ‘women’s work’ for which women got less pay. However, it should be noted that in Australia at least, the iron and steel industry was a ‘reserve’ industry during the war and although some ‘male’ positions were opened up to females, women did not work in all the classifications available to men in the steel and metal industries and were specifically barred from certain jobs due to the operation of the weight limit restrictions under section 36 of the Factories, Shops and Industries Act, upheld by the Women’s Employment Board. The trade union movement had also made it clear during the war that it would not tolerate women entering male occupations at cheaper rates of pay and, due to the disparity in women’s wages created by the Board’s much higher wage setting for some, there was a high level of industrial strike action and disputation by women.26

The fact that there were limited classifications in which Australian women actually worked in steel and metal occupations during the war is made clear in one of the many incidents where male trade unionists objected to women working in ‘male’ jobs. In this case, metal trades unions disputed the right of women to work as coremakers at Metters Ltd on the grounds that they hadn’t had sufficient training. The dispute ran for two years from 1942 to 1944. Due to successful lobbying by Muriel Heagney and others, the women were eventually allowed to join the Australian Engineering Union and a motion supporting equal pay for women was passed at a metal unions conference in 1943, although in 1944 the Moulders’ Federation voted overwhelmingly against admitting female coremakers, fearing that demands for equal pay would lower the basic rate for men.27

As Edna Ryan has noted, the metal trades unions need not have been so worried. A comparison between the Metal Trades Award of December 1941 and the Women’s Employment Board schedule of January 1943 showed that out of 243 classifications, women had gained permission to work in 81 and in 4 special sub-classifications. Women could work in non-trades positions such as machinists 3^rd class, welders 2^nd and 3^rd class, electroplaters 2^nd class and so on. The pay women were awarded in 1943 strictly followed the Metal Trades Award of 1941. Women’s jobs that came under the Federated Ironworkers’ award in the steel industry, such as munitions workers and crane drivers, were awarded 90 per cent of the basic male rate in 1944 by the Board. In no case did women get 100 per cent of the male rate in the steel and metal trades at that time.28

Impact of ‘protective’ legislation

Historically, the Factories, Shops and Industries Act, together with other NSW statutes such as the Construction Safety Act (1912) and the Industrial Arbitration Act (1940), regulated the working conditions of employees in manufacturing, retailing and basic industry. The Act itself was introduced in 1896; section 36, which imposes manual handling weight limits on women and junior males, dates from an amendment in 1912.29 Ostensibly designed to protect women from harmful work environments, an alternative interpretation of the ‘protective’ nature of such legislation, based on the historical explanation of its development, has suggested that section 36 was intended to exclude women from heavy manufacturing industry and protect men’s jobs from intrusion by women. In the years leading up to the introduction of the Act, there had been an expansion of women’s employment in factories. Between 1897-1910, the per centage of women in factories rose from 23.7 per cent to 33.1 per cent in NSW.30 The annual report on the Factories, Shops and industries Act in 1911 expressed a concern to restrict female employment.31

Furthermore, the possibility of section 36 acting as protective safety law has been limited by the fact that it has only covered industries where women are not often employed and not the industries where women commonly work, such as nursing and childcare.32 While the Women’s Employment Board was dismantled after the war, the operation of section 36 of the Factories, Shops and Industries Act remained as a constraint on women’s employment opportunities in a range of male dominated industries such as steel.

It was this section 36 of the Act that Australian Iron and Steel cited in their defence for the first time on 15 August 1980 at the one and only attempted conciliation meeting between the Wollongong women complainants and AI&S in the Anti-Discrimination Board’s former offices in Bent St, Sydney. Section 36 was never given as a reason for rejecting women when they applied at the AI&S Employment Office in Cringila.33

While the Jobs for Women campaigners went back to Wollongong to hold a protest outside the steelworks employment office, the then Counsellor for Equal Opportunity, Carmel Niland, initiated a study of the application of manual handling laws at Australian Iron and Steel to assist the investigation of the women’s complaints.34

The results of the Anti-Discrimination Board study and other evidence produced at the hearings of the NSW Equal Opportunity tribunal between May 1984 and May 1985 showed that restrictions on women’s employment at the steelworks were not due to the weight limit but rather to sexist attitudes of the steelworks’ management and poor employment practices. Such practices included repeatedly refusing to hire women as production ironworkers; placing women’s names on a separate waiting list for up to seven years while men were usually hired straight away; and labelling 98 per cent of jobs ‘men only’ when most of these jobs did not require lifting over the 35 lb (16 kg) specified in the weight limit law.35

Researcher for the study, Chloe Mason36 explains how, by imposing restrictions on women, section 36 contributed to the maintenance of the sex-segregated labour market:

Section 36 provides a statutory basis by which women are clustered into certain types of factory jobs which only require light lifting. Its effect, however, reaches beyond the horizontal segregation of the labour market. It also operates to segregate vertically by blocking women from promotion. For instance, if a line of progression contains a job which is barred to women on account of section 36, then women could either be blocked from promotion up the line, or barred from entering that promotional stream altogether because of their statutory inability to gain experience in
all prerequisite jobs.37

Changing industrial work: impact of the Women’s Liberation Movement

The growth and impact of the women’s liberation movement from the early 1970s called renewed attention to the marked sex segregation of the workforce and the inequalities experienced by women in terms of job opportunities, pay and promotion in Australia and in other OECD countries such as the United States and Canada. In the United States, following the displacement of women by men returning from the war, it took an affirmative action court order filed on 15 April 1974 before jobs would once again be opened up to women in the steel industry – this time on an equal footing with men.38

Nine major steel companies and the United Steelworkers Union of America agreed to establish an affirmative action program for many ‘male’ jobs. At the peak of their employment, women represented 14,500 of the maintenance and production workers in basic steel.39 However almost as soon as they were hired, the women were displaced again – this time by the ravages of ‘de-industrialisation’.40

Nevertheless, the implementation of effective affirmative action legislation in the USA and Canada has meant that a generation of women in those countries who have worked in underground mines, steel and metal manufacturing and a range of other non-traditional jobs are now retiring after 30 years in the workforce.

In Australia it would take another decade and another major campaign before affirmative action policies were introduced in any fashion in the private industrial sector. The impact of the Wollongong Jobs for Women case exposed and changed practices and attitudes to the employment of women, aiding the implementation of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies. Ironically, from June 1984 on, while the case was being heard in the Equal Opportunity Tribunal, BHP was a participant in the Federal Government’s pilot Affirmative Action (AA) program, adopting AA programs at two of its subsidiaries at Whyalla and Mount Isa, although not at Australian Iron and Steel. However, following the outcome of the Tribunal hearings, the Federal Government introduced compulsory affirmative action policies for private sector employers of over 100 workers in 1986.

Due to the influence of the feminist movement in the late 1970s, the 1980s Jobs for Women Campaign was able to utilise a greater range of legal, political and even financial resources to empower its challenge to BHP than earlier attempts to open up steelworks jobs for women. The NSW Anti-Discrimination Act was introduced in 1977 and the newly established Anti-Discrimination Board took a pro-active stand with support from the Premier and feminists within the state bureaucracy. The Wran (Labour) Government established a Women’s Directorate in the Department of Industrial Relations to advise the Government on women’s employment issues and the Women’s Advisory Council (1976) and Women’s Coordination Unit (1977) to advise the Premier on feminist issues.41 The so-called ‘femocrats’, employed in these now-defunct bodies, provided some valuable practical support to the Campaign in the form of financial assistance when, after 16 months of hard lobbying and legal argument in four repeat applications to the NSW Legal Aid Commission by solicitors from the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the unemployed women complainants had still not received legal aid to test their case before the Equal Opportunity Tribunal. As the campaigners stated in a leaflet distributed at the Women and Labour Conference in Brisbane in 1984, the rejection of legal aid for their test case raised the question ‘Who really has access to the law?’42 A one-off grant of $10,000 from the Women’s Coordination Unit came to the rescue on the eve of the Tribunal hearings and enabled the women to start paying their barrister, John Basten, until, after a deputation to the premier Neville Wran, legal aid at last came through on the third day in court.

Some outcomes

One of the outcomes of the Campaign’s test case was to bring about changes to section 36 of the NSW Factories, Shops and Industries Act that led to it being extended to cover all workers. In response to the case and the Anti-Discrimination Board report, a Code of Practice for Safe Manual Handling was developed by the ACTU and the Federal Government and adopted in every Australian state under revised Occupational Health and Safety laws. These policies were ratified at the ACTU’s 1985 Congress and are codified in its Action Plan for Women Workers in a booklet titled BHP/Australian Iron and Steel Equal Opportunity Case: Implications for Unions (1985).43

While the Tribunal’s decision in favour of the complainants did not actually over ride the ‘last on, first off’ principle, it did call into question the effect of the practice where it has been used in conjunction with discriminatory hiring practices. This meant that all the women who were employed in the steelworks as a result of the Campaign gained backdated seniority to the time of their original application. Thus, all the women who had been retrenched were reinstated in their jobs and retained their seniority in terms of future opportunities for promotion. The only men with greater seniority who were retrenched were those who were not union members and who therefore had no defence.

The actual impact of the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign is yet to be fully examined and assessed and there are many further questions to be explored. However, at a time of industrial turmoil and when racism was becoming recognised as a major issue for the labour movement and for feminism, the Jobs for Women Campaign may be seen as an example of solidarity and support amongst women of different class and cultural backgrounds. The Campaign was able to win widespread community support, particularly the support of the labour movement, and its use of available resources and opportunities helped to empower a group of otherwise marginalised women of mainly non-English speaking backgrounds to utilise the law effectively and gain access to steel industry jobs.