The Fair Work Commission’s nearly finalised new pay scale for the community sector is a disaster for workers. Emergency housing workers, social work caseworkers and counsellors, alcohol and other drug service workers, disability advocates and many, many more face punitive wage cuts under the proposal.
It’s a sickening twist that these pay cuts will be imposed on a sector with an overwhelmingly female workforce, as part of the commission’s process of addressing “gender-based undervaluation”. Yes, you read that correctly. A process that is supposed to be about rectifying the historical undervaluation of women’s work is about to result in a colossal cut to pay rates for many tens of thousands of women workers.
The disastrous scale of the cuts proposed by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) is laid out in a detailed submission dated 6 February this year from the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare (CECFW), based in Melbourne. It’s absolutely damning. The contents deserve to be a public scandal.
The submission’s authors compiled a chart of eleven reasonably common roles in the community sector. They found that eight of these roles face a cut to award pay rates of between $121 and $247 per week.
Residential youth workers go backwards by $121 per week ($6,308 per year) under the newest draft from FWC, released in mid-December. House coordinators in residential services face a pay cut of $185 per week ($9,600 per year). Community and family engagement roles face a pay cut of $247 per week ($12,885 per year). Caseworkers in refugee settlement services roles will have their award pay cut by this same amount—$247 per week. Case managers face a pay cut of $203 per week, team leaders $174 per week and senior case managers $185 per week. Therapeutic specialists face a cut of $196 per week ($9,085 per year).
Only two of the eleven roles analysed in the CECFW submission actually maintain their current pay level. Another is impossible to classify due to the lack of clarity in the proposed new classification descriptors—but would most likely face a “significant” wage cut.
Thirty organisations have signed on to the CECFW submission, including major community sector employers such as Anglicare, Baptcare, Catholic Care, Uniting, Berry Street, Drummond Street, Launch and many others.
Other submissions paint a similar picture. Although many note that the latest proposal is preferable to the (even more appalling) FWC interim decision from April last year, organisations that have mapped existing staff onto the revised FWC draft have nevertheless come to bleak conclusions.
Ending Violence Against Women Queensland notes “a significant risk of wage regression”, where many experienced practitioners “are either red-circled, resulting in a wage freeze, or placed on lower starting rates”. Long time ASU delegate Robert Handelsmann predicts that many counsellors now classified at level 5 risk a pay cut of between $115 and $243 per week due to ambiguities in the definition of “supervision”. Hepatitis NSW states that the rates for Certificate III/IV qualifications and diploma-level rates fall below existing rates, “creating a clear risk of financial disadvantage”. Disability Advocacy Australia states the new proposal appears “to functionally propose significant pay cuts for disability advocates”, with those doing complex work facing a pay cut of $358 per week. Youthlaw states that the proposed new structure “still reduces pay of certain classification levels”.
Despite this, the Fair Work Commission will push this appalling attack through. This will not surprise anyone who has followed the case. Since the commission’s interim decision in April last year, which was estimated by the Australian Services Union to involve substantial pay cuts to 73 percent of the entire sector, in multiple rounds of submissions and hearings, state and federal governments, unions and many employers have implored the FWC to scrap its disastrous proposal. The FWC has refused.
What the fuck?
What got into the heads of the five members of the FWC’s “expert panel”, which came up with this appalling attack? There are a few parts to this, but all of them point to one dominant factor: sexist assumptions about women’s work and women’s pay are still baked into Australian capitalism.
It’s astonishing that it’s only now, in the 2020s, that the FWC is getting around to reviewing systematically the gendered assumptions behind low wages in majority-women industries like aged care, nursing and allied health.
The sexist reasoning behind these low wages was expressed in a ruling from the Conciliation and Arbitration Court in 1950. The court asserted that “the productivity, efficiency and the needs and the responsibilities etc. of females were substantially less than that of males in this community”. Accordingly, the court set the basic wage for female-dominated industries at 75 percent of the rate for male-dominated industries. These lower pay rates are still embedded in many awards, which set minimum wages and conditions for workers in Australia. The result is a substantial cash discount on wages for a large section of the capitalist class in this country.
From 2009, a campaign of mass protests by social and community services workers organised by the ASU challenged the entrenched low pay of the mainly women workforce in this sector. Thousands marched at regular days of action. This was the biggest union push for equal pay since the 1970s, when a long campaign by left-wing unions culminated in radical actions such as Zelda D’Aprano chaining herself to the Arbitration Commission doors and a series of strikes among the majority-women workforce in the insurance industry.
After many twists and turns, in 2012 Fair Work granted an equal remuneration order for the social and community services sector. Though the phase-in was outrageously slow (spread over nine years), the result was a pay rise of between 23 and 45 percent for each classification on the sector pay schedule in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services award.
Jump forward a decade, and we find the Health Services Union applying to the commission to boost wages in the aged care industry. The newly elected Labor government nudged this case along by guaranteeing funding for any increased wages and by adding the promotion of “gender equity” to the objects of the Fair Work Act.
The limitations are obvious though. “Gender equity” is just one object of the act, along with the promotion of “national economic prosperity” and providing a legal regime that is “flexible for businesses”. In practice, this means the commission pays a lot of attention to profits and the costs to business and government of higher wages, despite these not being mentioned in the Fair Work Act.
So even at best, the measure of “gender equity” doled out by the commission is limited to what won’t encroach significantly on business profits or government costs. One example is the Aged Care Case (Stage 3) decision, finalised in 2025. Many aged care workers, especially those involved in “direct” care, received a 15 percent pay increase in 2023 and a series of smaller increases totalling around 10 percent by August 2026.
However, other essential staff in aged care didn’t fare so well. Eighty-one percent of food services assistants in aged care are women. So are 88 percent of cleaning staff and 88 percent of laundry staff. Yet workers in these three occupational groups received pay rises totalling just 6.96 percent from the FWC review of the aged care sector.
Things got even worse when the commission came back around to the social and community services sector as part of their review of awards for gender undervaluation. The ASU, among other participants in the process, assumed that the commission would leave the rates established by the 2012 Equal Remuneration Order intact: after all, these pay rates had already been increased to remedy sexist low pay.
This assumption proved wrong, however. Instead, the commissioners insisted on totally rewriting the classifications to make them comparable to what they had handed down in the Aged Care Decision.
Various commissioners were offended by the multiple ways in which workers in the sector could be classified at a particular level. Custom and practice in the community sector have evolved so that employers commonly pay staff at a higher rate than the most miserly, rock-bottom rate that could potentially be justified under the existing award. Several members of the commission grumbled that community services workers appeared to be “over-classified” as a result.
Given the commission’s inbuilt veneration of cost control, it must have seemed totally natural for these functionaries of the ruling class to strip back classification descriptors, eliminate progression paths and remove “ambiguities” by making qualification levels the key determinant in classifying community services staff. The result was the appalling wage-cutting interim decision from April last year.
So in explaining the disastrous, perverse result of a process that is meant to eliminate gender-based undervaluation in fact cutting women’s wages on a massive scale, we have an obsession with cost control and a technocratic mania for stripping back “ambiguities”—even if that crashes the established pay rates in a female-dominated sector.
To these we can add a third factor. The members of the FWC who make up the “expert panel” in this matter live in a different world to the rest of us. The three deputy presidents (Alexandra Grayson, Bernadette O’Neill and Tony Slevin) are on a package of $533,000 per year; vice-president Ingrid Asbury is on $659,000 per year and president Adam Hatcher is on total remuneration of $661,174, plus a judge’s pension. Being paid $10,000 per week or more as a functionary of a state institution bound to keep watch over wage rates and ensure “business flexibility” is a sure-fire recipe for favouring ruling-class priorities over working-class wages, dignity or anything else.
Fighting back
This is why the FWC and its predecessors have been popularly, and correctly, described as a “bosses’ court”. Historically, the only way workers have been able to guarantee a decent outcome from these bodies—whether on equal pay or anything else that matters—is by using strike action to win on the ground or by creating a political problem for the ruling class and their highly paid functionaries, or both.
The ASU campaign that won the Equal Remuneration Order in 2012 was centred on regular, thousands-strong street mobilisations rather than industrial action. Nevertheless, it was strong enough that when Julia Gillard’s Labor government announced in late 2010 that her government wouldn’t back equal pay in the community sector because of the cost, the government had to backtrack in the face of union and community fury and the promise of further rallies and even strikes.
The ASU in Victoria is planning a meeting on 30 April to discuss its work value case for the community sector. This case is intended to reverse the damage from the wage-cutting outcome from the gender-based undervaluation review that the commission is now finalising and to win a wage rise across the sector.
However, 30 April is more than four months since the close-to-final form of the FWC’s wage-cutting pay structure was announced, on 16 December. As of the time of writing, it seems that the ASU has not publicised the disastrous wage cuts that will occur if the commission implements the current draft. This represents a missed opportunity to explain what’s at stake and prepare for sector-wide mobilisations.
Relying on reasoned argument at Fair Work didn’t win a good outcome on gender-based undervaluation from the bosses’ court last year. In fact, the opposite. Significantly increasing the scale and pace of worker mobilisations is essential to eliminating, once and for all, the gross sexist underpayment of majority-women workforces that are endemic to Australian capitalism in 2026.
ASU Socialists’ Instagram page features regularly updated material on the fight against the attacks on community sector pay and an open letter calling for a stepped-up campaign from the ASU.
