Aus Chamber Used IWD To Celebrate Penalty Rate Cuts & Twitter Is Ropeable

Happy International Women’s Day! That most wonderful time of the year where the most outrageously smug men alive crawl out of the woodwork to screech about one day on the calendar being in celebration of a gender who have been socially and economically disadvantaged for thousands of years. It’s great.

If that part doesn’t ruin the day for you, we also have brands attempting to leverage the day for personal gain in hamfisted and bizarre ways. Take this pearler from the Australian Chamber of Commerce:

Women stand to benefit from changes to penalty rates. Underemployment disproportionately affects women. #BeBoldForChange pic.twitter.com/N7Hb5GhIbR

— Australian Chamber (@AusChamber) March 8, 2017

What better way to honour women than by celebrating cuts to penalty rates to service industry jobs – cuts that will disproportionately affect women due to their higher representation in hospitality and retail? If you can’t quite follow their logic (understandable), their argument is that it will see an increase in employment in those sectors.

Sounds good, right? Well, no. If it leads to more hours for existing employees, it essentially means they will have to work more hours to earn the exact same amount of money (happy International Women’s Day!). If it leads to the employment of new staff, it means that those existing employees will just be earning less for doing the same work they were before. Yay! Women! Yay!

As Dr Jim Stanford of the Centre for Future Work told ‘The Huffington Post‘, there’s no evidence the penalty rate cuts will even increase staff hours:

Not to mention this is coming from one of the many lobby groups that, despite heavily arguing that we’re a secular society and Sundays don’t mean anything anymore, refused to answer their phones on a Sunday when the ‘Sydney Morning Herald‘ tried to get comment. Nice. 

Understandably, people online are pretty pissed:

@AusChamber Your logic is disingenuous at best & you celebrate cutting women’s pay on #IWD2017? Back inside your cave.

— Sandi Logan (@SandiHLogan) March 8, 2017

@AusChamber Now they can be underemployed and underpaid at the same time Bravo

— Socialist Wombat (@3wombats) March 8, 2017

@AusChamber tldr paying women less will help women happy women’s day

— Nick Names Nuts (@nicknamesnuts) March 8, 2017

.@AusChamber me thinking how paying women less is a good thing pic.twitter.com/NIF0PzdRM5

— )))TG o((( (@TG_Chrono) March 8, 2017

@AusChamber counterpoint, women will still be underemployed just paid less to work at inconvenient times.

— Jacob King (@jamaising) March 8, 2017

Even Greens senator Scott Ludlam got in on the action:

.@AusChamber unless this is intentional self-parody, you should strongly consider deleting your account

— Scott Ludlam (@SenatorLudlam) March 8, 2017

Be bold for change my ass.