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‘Family Friendly’ Policies: Distribution and Implementation in Australian Workplaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Gillian Whitehouse  and
Di Zetlin
Di Zetlin
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Queensland
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Abstract

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‘Family-friendly’ policies have recently gained a high profile in Australia, featuring increasingly in political rhetoric, company policies, industrial provisions and human resource management discourse. While initiatives to enhance the combination of work and family responsibilities may make relatively minor contributions to equal employment opportunity efforts, they do bring into consideration some of the broader social impediments to gender equity in paid employment. Some assessment of their accessibility and impact is therefore warranted. In this paper we examine the distribution of work and family provisions in the Australian labour market, and provide an assessment of their implementation in selected organisations. Our findings indicate that access to work and family provisions is uneven across the Australian labour market, particularly in the private sector; and suggest that even where provision is exemplary, the impact is at best moderate.

Type
Symposium on Parental Rights and Work/Family Balance
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , December 1999 , pp. 221 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1999

Footnotes

*

This paper is based on research funded by the Australian Research Council, and has been supported by the Reshaping Australian Institutions project at the Australian National University. We acknowledge the assistance of the Department of Workplace Relations and Small Business and the Social Science Data Archive for making the AWIRS95 data available. The authors would like to thank Kylie Rixon for assistance with statistical analysis of the AWIRS data.

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