Paid parental leave and the ‘ideal worker’: a step towards the ‘worker-carer’ in Australian labour law

Abstract

The Paid Parental Leave Act 2010 (Cth) was enacted in June 2010 and provides up to 18 weeks of payment to parents of a newborn or newly adopted child. After decades of campaigning, the implementation of a national scheme of paid parental leave has been hailed as a step towards rectifying gendered workplace inequality. This article considers the normative impacts of the Act on the place of the ‘ideal worker’ in Australian labour law. It argues that paid parental leave presents a challenge to the legal and cultural construction of an ‘ideal worker’; an unencumbered (male) citizen available for long hours without home and care responsibilities. It concludes that the Act represents an important step towards greater recognition of the ‘worker–carer’ in Australian labour law, but that further support remains necessary to encourage equal sharing of unpaid care work and paid work.

Keywords:

• paid parental leave
• ideal worker
• worker–carer
• ; Harvester case

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Anna Chapman for her help in the preparation of this article. The author is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. There is an abundance of statistical information relating to the participation of women in the paid workforce, available with regular updates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. See www.abs.gov.au.

2. See the Equal Pay Cases (1969) 127 CAR 1142; (1972) 147 CAR 172 culminating in the National Wage Case (1974) 157 CAR 293 after which the Industrial Relations Commission formally abandoned the concept of the family wage.

3. The ‘worker-carer’ is defined by K Lee Adams (2005: 18–19) as someone who holds ‘simultaneous responsibilities of paid market labour and unpaid caring obligations in the home’.

4. The development of the legal rights from maternity leave to parental leave has been analysed in greater detail elsewhere. The chronology of maternity leave and parental leave entitlements in this article draws on the work of a number of authors. See especially, Brennan (2009), Baird (2005) and Owens et al. (2011: 377–82).

5. The right to 52 weeks’ unpaid maternity leave was established by the Maternity Leave Test Case (1979) 218 CAR 120 and extended to paternity leave in the Parental Leave Test Case (Unreported, AIRC, Full Bench, 26 July 1990).

6. The other country was the United States of America, which continues not to have a comprehensive national scheme of paid parental leave.

7. As Owens et al. (2011: 381 note 357) note, pressure to create binding national standards based on paid parental leave gained momentum from 2002 with the release of the HREOC report Valuing Parenthood\ Options for Paid Maternity Leave. Other sources to which the authors attribute the mounting pressure include Belinda Smith (2002) and Luke Raffin (2005).

8. For the purposes of the PPL Act, the national minimum wage is taken to be the national minimum wage order for employees, in relation to which see FWA s 287(2).