Introduction
At the beginning of the 21st century, the traditional male breadwinner model has changed towards greater participation of women in the labor force and new policies introduced by Australian companies to support families. In effect, even under the most generous provision, available only to a small proportion of the female labor force, paid maternity leaves in companies are limited to less time than the briefest statutory leave in Europe and all other advanced industrial countries. Thus, during the last two decades, women have been involved in the labor force and start to play an equal role in family income.
Main body
The great changes in the traditional male breadwinner model have been caused by new policies and laws introduced by Australian companies and the government. Both the very medical advances that have increasingly defined pregnancy and childbirth as normal conditions, requiring only a brief convalescence, and the antidiscrimination measures that have insisted that women not be disqualified from work unless physically unable to carry on have spurred the shortening of the period women are viewed as disabled. Paradoxically enough, they have therefore restricted even further the economically protected maternity leave.
The insecurities of leave policies are still further exacerbated by the lack of any firm agreement as to the period the woman will be defined as disabled at the time of a normal pregnancy and maternity (Banks 65). As noted, among the firms studied, almost all permit a woman to work to the last moment if she wishes and if her doctor concurs. Many women do stop work at some point during their ninth month of pregnancy.
Those who leave earlier are usually those who are engaged in demanding physical work. If the employer can provide a temporary alternative in the form of a less demanding job, the woman may continue to work until the time that most such women generally leave work. If the industry is such that no such alternative is possible (in some forms of agricultural work, for example), she is likely to be diagnosed as disabled earlier and thus eligible to stop work and receive benefits. Even in such cases, there are often disagreements and variations in policies across and within firms (Adkins 43).
To overcome the labor shortage, Australian employers introduced the pattern for post-childbirth paid leave. His model is far more consistent–a standard six weeks is prevailing practice–this varies too. In one company, the policy requires approval of the disability period by a company physician. The company’s medical policy is that a four-week leave is all that is warranted after normal childbirth. The consequence is that women employees who are informed and sophisticated, and know this, discuss it with their physicians who often explicitly indicate a six- or eight-week convalescence as essential (Baird 47).
These women refuse to return to work earlier, refusing even to come to the company’s clinic for a check-up. The result is that they usually do get paid for the full six to eight weeks as proposed by their physicians. Other employees, who may be less knowledgeable about their company’s practices–or less assertive–get penalized. They may take the time off but do not receive the pay and indeed may be pressured to return to work before they are ready to or want to (Bradley 54).
Generally speaking, exempt employees are treated more generously as to family benefits, especially benefit levels and duration. When out on maternity leave, their salaries are usually fully covered under some kind of salary continuation plan. If, however, they too depend on disability insurance, the benefit duration is quite similar (Batt and Valcour 189). In short, for most exempt employees the time for which they may receive salaries when out because of maternity also tends to be six to eight weeks.
However, many exempt employees have more flexibility and often more autonomy. Thus, they may even begin to work sooner after childbirth but not return to full-time work until later. The benefits are important because they relieve a family of some financial pressures. Similarly, authors (Baird 46; Broomhill & Sharp, 104) speak of the advantages of flexibility–of coming to work a half-day each week–because it permits parents to stay in touch with what is happening and to handle urgent matters. This ability, plus taking some work home that could be done there relieved her of the tension that could build up if she had been away for a longer time without any regular contact (Campbell and Charlesworth 82).
If two decades ago, for many women the complicated amalgam of sickness benefits, vacation benefits, and disability benefits often means that during the pregnancy, childbirth, and postnatal period, today they experience changing eligibility for health insurance, changes in whether they or their employers pay for the benefits, and a variety of other such changes with consequences for how they and their families are protected and at what cost. In contrast, in another firm, if an employee takes a personal leave before childbirth, as soon as she is close to giving birth-or gives birth–her status is immediately changed back to employment status for one day, so she can qualify for the full benefit coverage provided under the firm’s disability insurance plan (Whitehouse 402).
Thus, men are still playing a core role in the family. The main problem is that only several firms permit paid paternity leaves, each for three or four days. The concept here is to permit a father to take time off when his wife gives birth, to help her when she arrives home with a new infant, or, at the time of a second or subsequent childbirth, to take care of the child left at home. Although theoretically, fathers could request personal leave to take care of a newborn–or share in the care of a baby–this is not yet occurring very much (Russell and Bourke 229).
On the other hand, several women employees told us that if their husband’s employer permitted use of the employee’s sick leave to care for an ill child at home, and their mother’s employer did not, the fathers in these families were likely to take the time off and to provide the care. Although only several firms provide or plan to provide adoption benefits, all the adoption benefits discussed involve a subsidy for the costs surrounding adoption; none involves payment for a leave. Adoptive parents may be eligible for unpaid personal leave, but since adoption is not a disabling condition, it carries with it no entitlement to a cash benefit (Pocock and Labour 37).
Most employees who took maternity leave at the companies return within six months after childbirth, and the general trend is for more employees to return each year, and to do so sooner. There are variations, however, in how employees respond once they know they are pregnant, and these seem to reflect their ways of coping with company policy, or at least their perceptions of such policy.
Most employees seem to announce they are pregnant as soon as they know and immediately request information about their entitlements, especially health insurance coverage and leaves. Some, who wish to keep their personal lives private or fear that their pregnancy will lead to some subtle form of discrimination in, for example, promotional opportunities, wait until their condition is obvious (Pocock 82).
Most employers have no special policies requiring that they be informed but urge employees to do so and to be sure that they are covered for all relevant benefits. Some employees resign immediately at the time of childbirth even though they are entitled to a paid leave. They have decided to stop working and they want to define their status that way and not take a benefit that they are “not entitled to” despite the validity of their entitlement (Heiligers 143).
Others leave at the end of their paid sickness or disability leave. If they have created the impression that they will return (technically the premise of all sickness and temporary disability benefits), the company may be making do with temporary help or extra-work coverage by fellow workers. The enlightened view seems to be that the employee should exercise her rights but let it be known that in fact, she plans to resign (Connell 54). Many employers acknowledge, however, that current policies almost require a charade, whereby a woman employee announces a planned return because otherwise she is viewed as resigning or quitting and, therefore, not qualifying for benefit protection (Hernes 43).
The traditional male breadwinner model has been changed by a gender-free policy accepted by modem society. Although the concept of a gender-free policy is attractive it should not be accepted as an excuse for the perpetuation of contradictions and inconsistencies in the interpretations of equal employment opportunities indication of the primitive nature of maternity policies even now. There are many legal, administrative, and legislative roads to clarity, all of which could be explored, but few have been tried (Eisenstein 82).
Many legal experts today are convinced that while establishing a special maternity leave would be against the law, a special parental or child care leave is not. Thus, a gender-free policy can be maintained providing special protection for a newborn and the parent-child relationship. Such a policy would enable employers to permit a somewhat longer post-childbirth leave, even if unpaid, for those who want a little more time and can manage it economically. Most of the takers would probably be women, which has the most liberal of policies (Dickens 14).
The parenting and child development components of a maternity leave constitute a significant aspect of the policy that has received nowhere near the attention it warrants. So far the concern has been primarily with protecting women against job loss and the loss of other existing, related entitlements. Job protection and health insurance protection have been primary, supplemented by concern for a modest amount of income protection for a brief period.
These are worthy objectives and we have outlined areas for improvement. That disability insurance represented a readily available device for providing a benefit seems clear. It is less clear whether the choice of the disability route ever embodied any real concern for parent-child relationships (Castles 43). Or, if there was a concern, whether it was displaced onto the argument of those who opposed mothers’ employment altogether.
Regardless, current national policy has slighted maternity as a condition leading to parenthood and overlooked the welfare of the baby as well. Using disability insurance as a device for protecting against income loss at the time of maternity may be understandable, and even reasonable, in a country with no national health insurance system. Losing track of maternity as parenthood and treating it as if it really were an illness is neither.
The Canadians, after all, use unemployment insurance for the same purpose-to protect against income loss at the time of maternity. Certainly, that is at least as imperfect a device as disability insurance. However,
- it is part of their national social insurance system,
- they separate the special unemployment insurance benefit providing maternity protection from the conventional types of unemployment benefit (Human Right and Equal Opportunity Commission 2006).
Conclusion
In sum, the traditional male breadwinner model has changed towards greater involvement of women in the labor force. These changes become possible because of new legislation and new policies introduced by Australian companies for working mothers. As a consequence, job protection is mandated nationally for seventeen weeks and in-come protection for fifteen. This seeming loss of the baby–and parenthood–in setting our maternity policy seems especially strange in the country that leads the world in expertise in child development research. Furthermore, the issue of equity is ever-present.
For most working women, whether or not they have any kind of job and income protection at the time of childbirth is a function of where they live, where they work, whether or not they are married, and where their husbands work. Surely, this suggests that something is awry in the country. Larger corporations also appear remarkably willing to grant maternity leaves to new employees. However, corporations are less consistent in allowing sick pay for absence days resulting from pregnancy: about two-thirds make these payments. Legislation outlawing discrimination at work and provided a possible route for expanding rights and protections for women. The growing women’s rights movement had begun to focus on issues of equity for women as individuals and workers, not women as wives and mothers.
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