Tony Eardley

Working But Poor? Low Pay and Poverty in Australia

The decentralisation of wage bargaining in Australia has led to a widening of the earnings gap. There has been talk of a new phenomenon of ‘working poverty’, where incomes in a significant number of households fall below the poverty line even when family members are in paid employment. This paper examines the growth of working poverty in Australia from the beginning of the 1980s to the mid-1990s. The analysis suggests that the phenomenon of working poverty is real and has been growing. Low pay on an hourly basis does not in itself equal poverty, and the biggest increase in family poverty has been among employees not in low pay. Yet the proportion of low-paid workers who are also in poor families has grown considerably. In the light of these findings the paper discusses the possible impact of policy approaches such as tax credits and higher minimum wages.

Sexing the Enterprise: Gender, Work and Resource Allocation in Self-Employed Households

Growth in self-employment was a particularly striking feature of labour market change in Britain during the 1980s, and one significant aspect of such growth was the comparatively rapid expansion of this way of working among women. Data from the Labour Force Survey indicate that self-employment is still predominantly a male activity: in the winter of 1995/6 nearly 800,000 women were self-employed compared with just over 2.4 million men (Department of Employment, 1996). Nevertheless, between 1979 and 1990 the number of women recorded as working for themselves rose by more than 150 per cent, nearly twice the rate of increase for men (Department of Employment, 1993).

Rent Assistance Policy for Residents of Retirement Villages

Objectives: To assess whether policies on rent assistance for retirement village residents are targeting help towards those who need it, and to provide an information base for future policy decisions on eligibility for assistance.

The Impact of Breaching and Financial Penalties on Income Support Recipients

‘Breaching’, or the imposition of financial penalties for infringing income support rules and obligations, has been highly controversial in recent years. This is mainly because of a large increase in the number of breaches imposed between 1999 and 2002 in the context of an intensified ‘mutual obligation’ regime. Welfare advocacy groups have argued that these penalties are unnecessarily harsh and tend to fall most heavily on the more vulnerable income support recipients. However, there has been little systematic examination of the impact of breaching, either in terms of hardship or in terms of its effect on future compliance with obligations. This article discusses the results of the first large-scale study of these impacts, commissioned by the Department of Family and Community Services and carried out by the Social Policy Research Centre in 2002/03. The research involved a review of existing literature, a national telephone survey of breached income support recipients, together with in-depth interviews with a small number of survey respondents, and a national postal survey of welfare agencies.