Union attacks on gender pay-gap are hypocritical

ACTU boss Sally McManus has placed the union movement at the forefront of the campaign to close the so-called gender pay gap.

“Women’s work will continue to be undervalued unless our broken rules and institutions that govern the lives of working Australians are fixed,” she told journalists this year.

What might McManus make of an industry where top ranking executives are paid in excess of $36,000 more each year than their female counterparts? Or a business where female executives are outnumbered by males by 2.5 to one?

That is the width of the gender pay gap in the union movement that McManus represents. Analysis by the Menzies Research Centre of disclosures to the Registered Organisations Commission reveals that males employed as one of the top five officials in a major trade union take home an average pay packet of $199,580, whereas women receive $162,469.

Interestingly, the union wage gap of 20.38 per cent is roughly double the 11 per cent wage gap for the workforce at large, accounting for differences in hours worked, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released this month.

The analysis also reveals a conspicuous lack of female representation in the upper echelons of the union movement. Among the 11 largest trade unions to disclose their highest paid staff, just 14 of 53 were women.

The fact that men are 2.5 times more likely to occupy the senior ranks of a major trade union than women suggests the gender pay gap for each union’s overall workforce is likely to be far larger than the 9.86 per cent difference among their highest earners. Union officials have a median income of $79,024 — comfortably less than half the salaries of the top brass of unionists, the vast majority of whom are male.

What’s more, the proportion of women at the apex of the labour movement is roughly level with female representation in the federal cabinet (26 per cent) and on the boards of the top 100 ASX companies (30 per cent).

Three unions — the National Union of Workers, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union — had no women among their five highest-paid officials.

Another four had just one high-paid female officer, including the Health Services Union, which services predominantly female occupations such as nurses and aged-care workers.

Note too that a slim majority of union members is female, a trend likely to continue given the union movement’s long-term drift to health, education and the public service.

Against this backdrop, it’s worth recalling McManus lamenting earlier this year that Australia has “one of the most gender segregated workforces in the developed world”. One wonders whether McManus was holding a mirror up to her own lunchroom.

This analysis exposes the union movement’s attempts to blame business for the persistence of the gender pay gap as not only hypocritical but utterly disingenuous.

Just this week, ACTU president Michele O’Neil denounced “companies engaging in a race to the bottom on pay in feminised industries”, while bewailing “the systematic society-wide undervaluation of work done by women”.

O’Neil has also predictably backed Labor’s plans to force companies to release pay-gap data as a step towards making companies “publicly accountable for their performance on gender pay equity”. Will O’Neil have the courage of her convictions and recommend the ACTU’s member unions do the same?

However, the correct lesson to draw from the union pay gap is not that trade unions are mired in unconscious bias or even that their female officials are systematically undervalued.

Rather, it is entirely consistent with the wealth of evidence that one of the key drivers of the gender pay gap is that fewer women are prepared to work jobs requiring long and unpredictable hours of work.

As economist Ross Guest has recently written, senior roles in the corporate, financial and legal world pay a premium for people willing to work gruelling and inflexible hours — an observation that also holds true for medicine, the media and indeed most occupations. Guest observes that this is a trade-off that fewer women, particularly those with children, are willing to make.

Why should we expect the situation to be any different for the most senior roles in the trade union movement? After all, many trade unions have revenues in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, and function simultaneously as a workers
co-op and a 24/7 political campaigning outfit.

To be sure, addressing the reasons that lead women to opt for more stable but lower-paying jobs is an issue worthy of serious discussion.

Tax deductions for nannies, easing the costly regulatory burden on childcare centres and continuing to normalise flexible work arrangements are just some of the ways policymakers and workplaces could lighten the load on working parents.

However, the cause of women in the workforce won’t be advanced by slapdash policies that foment grievance on the baseless assumption that differences between male and female earnings can be boiled down to discrimination and bad intentions.

John Slater is a research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.