A new report is calling for the 38-hour work week to be more effectively capped, putting an end to the eternal struggle that is staying back late ‘just this once’ every fkn day of the week.
The report – which was compiled by 34 academics specialising in work and family policy – says it’s the best way to ensure gender equality in the workforce. By making it easier for men to share the load in caring duties ’round the home, it will in turn make it easier for women to participate in paid work.
“We have one of the most gendered and polarised working time regimes in the OECD,” said co-convenor Professor Sara Charlesworth. “When women become mothers they tend to work very shot part-time hours. As soon as a man becomes a father his hours of work go up. Australian male full-time hours tend to be much longer than the OECD norm.”
Essentially what happens is that when women have kids, they end up taking part-time or lower quality jobs in order to allow for flexibility that being a parent demands. The report says that worker-carers – mostly women – take on part-time or casual work to reconcile work and care.
“These jobs do not have the same security and predictability as full-time employment for which many women pay a high price: job insecurity, low life-time workforce participation and income, including in retirement,” the report says.
The idea behind putting a cap on work hours would be to even out the distribution of paid and unpaid (domestic) work, with the ultimate goal of more women rejoining the workforce in a full-time capacity, and less men getting stuck in an 8am–6pm work cycle.
