Gender, Class and Work: The Council of Action for Equal Pay and the Equal Pay Campaign in Australia During World War II

Abstract

On 22 May 1937, the NSW Clerks' Union convened an equal pay conference. Held in Sargents' Meeting Rooms in Market Street, Sydney, the opening session began in the afternoon at 2.00pm sharp. The evening session was to take place at the Sydney School of Arts. 'Equal pay for the sexes' was an issue of topical interest and the conference, the first of its kind, had generated tremendous excitement and a sense of purpose. Representatives from 53 groups and organisations were in attendance ? including the public servants', teachers', hairdressers', textile and rubber workers' unions, the United Associations of Women, the Feminist Club, the Women's Justice Association, the Communist Party, the Unemployed and Relief Workers' Association and Women Today magazine.2 The Assistant Secretary of the NSW Clerks' Union, John Hughes, took the floor and delivered a report compiled by his union's equal pay committee. It was lucid, militant and staunchly feminist. Friedrich Engels' influential work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, was deferred to and informed the socialist feminist position assumed in the report.3 The report associated female emancipation with women's greater participation in social production, and argued that while unequal wage rates based on sex still existed, emancipation would be forestalled. Hughes said 'Equal pay means the establishment of economic independence for women, and provides a basis upon which they can struggle to secure the consummation of full equality.' Other arguments for equal pay were touched upon; more particularly that of women providing a cheap labour source for the capitalists.4 This was a familiar trade union argument and its underlying contradictions with regard to feminist philosophy were not apparent. The Clerks' Union report was indicative of the later politics of the equal pay lobby group, called the Council of Action for Equal Pay, that emerged from this conference. The interplay between feminist and trade unionist motives provided the early equal pay movement with its dynamic as well as with the seeds of its demise. The Council of Action for Equal Pay functioned from 1937 to 1948 as a single issue affiliate body, predominantly composed of trade unions and several women's organisations. Its primary aim was to agitate for the implementation of equal pay, and its formation heralded the advent of the first conscious equal pay movement in Australia. This immediately provided the hitherto disparate sources of equal pay agitation with a central organisational base. Originally intended as the NSW Branch of a larger federal organisation, the CAEP in Sydney was compelled to conduct campaigns for the whole of Australia. Councils were formed in Brisbane and Newcastle, but these were comparatively unsuccessful owing to the lack of committed members.5