Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take the correction from the member. This legislation and its impacts will directly affect the capacity of families to meet their obligations to each other, not just their obligations to the workforce. I come from a long family line of coalminers, and there are still many working in the coalmining industry. I have to say at this point that they were still all on enterprise agreements when I last spoke to them, but they are very well paid and doing very well, given the growth in the mining and minerals sectors in recent years. When I speak to them, these are the sorts of comments I get. Firstly, most of them have wives doing part-time work, often in the retail or hospitality industries. They are concerned about the capacity of their wives to continue earning an income without being required to be available at any time that suits the employer. The reality for many women in the workplace, particularly in the retail and hospitality industries, is that they do work part-time hours. They manage that work in combination with their commitments to their families by relying on having regular and notified working hours.

Since this legislation came into practice we are seeing women being asked to sign on to AWAs where they must be available for the entire operating hours of the business. The reality for those women is that they cannot then meet the commitments they have to their families and they have to choose—this is where the real choice is in that legislation—between working and not working. If you talk to women in the retail and hospitality industries you will find ample evidence that that is exactly what they are facing.

They also have teenage or young adult children. I do not know what world the members opposite live in, but I have a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old and I regularly speak to people in those age groups. Their experiences in the workforce in the last 10 years, in their initial attempts to get work, have not been good. There was already a great deal of exploitation of young workers under the previous changes that took place.

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