Marginal Matters: Gender, Skill, Unions and the Commonwealth Arbitration Court: A Case Study of the Australian Printing Industry, 1925-1937

Abstract

For over a decade, feminist scholars both in Australia and overseas have devoted considerable attention to the problem of how to account for the sexual division of labour under capitalism. There is general agreement that at least part of the explanation for women's concentration in poorly paid, low status work lies in the activities of male unionists who fought successfully to exclude cheaper female labour from the better paid male crafts. Whether this tactic on the part of working class men was motivated by men's class or gender interests is a matter of some dispute: historians are divided over whether women's exclusion was a defence of the privileges of working class men in relation to working class women, or whether it was primarily a necessary defence of the position of male workers against attempts by employers to erode their pay and conditions. The former argument stresses sexism as an explanation; the latter places more emphasis on the defence of the position of the male breadwinner as a defence of the working class family as a whole.2 While this issue still remains unresolved, more recent attention has focused on the related question of skill in an attempt to understand why it is that men's and women's work is rewarded so differently. Is it because men's work is really more skilled than women's, or is it simply that men have been more successful in claiming recognition for their skills? Feminist responses to this question have tended to follow the 'social construction' approach to skill which argues that certain types of work are not intrinsically more skilled than others but that workers doing some kinds of work have been able to claim their work as skilled because of the exercise of industrial power. Historically, men have had more industrial power than women and have therefore been more successful in achieving recognition as skilled workers.3 Australian research has tended to reflect these theoretical developments, but has assumed a distinctive quality because of the role of state wage-fixing bodies, and especially the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, in setting margins for skill. Laura Bennett's work is especially important in this regard. She has argued that skilled male workers perform