Jobs comment draws women’s ire

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 1

Jobs comment draws women’s ire

Women’s groups in Christchurch were outraged yesterday by a suggestion by the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, that it was more desirable for girls leaving school to have jobs than for married women to be working.

Speaking in a radio interview, which was reported front-page in “The Press” yesterday, Mr Muldoon had said that young women were the group worst hit by unemployment. “We have to weigh up the desirability of having a young woman in the workforce ... and a second income in the family of a married woman whose husband is in employment,” he said.

He said that few women would be supporting families where the husband was out of work. Women without husbands but supporting children were “normally a social welfare situation.” The co-ordinator for the National Organisation for Women, Mrs Betty Roberts, said that members of her organisation were “appalled” at the discrimination shown by Mr Muldoon towards three groups of women: older women, married women, and solo parents. “Women are tired of being compelled into the work-force in times of economic expansion and dismissed without a thought in times of recession, but expected to do unpaid social work,” she said.

N.O.W. was concerned about youth unemployment, but making a scapegoat of married women was not the solution to the problem. A whole new look at the workplace was needed.

“No-one would dream of suggesting that boys and mature men are interchangeable in jobs, but they have no hesitation in implying that that is the situation for women,” she said.

Mrs Roberts said that many married women had to work in order to make ends meet. She also took issue with Mr Muldoon’s comment that solo mothers were in a “social welfare situation.” In the past women on benefits had been described as bludgers; now if they worked they were depriving young people of jobs. They were in a “no win” situation.

The Values Party spokeswoman on women’s issues, Ms Pat Wilkinson, said Mr Muldoon was trying to exploit “the lowest and oldest anti-women prejudices” to cover up the Government’s total failure to manage the economy.

“The Prime Minister may want to use women as cheap labour until they marry and then chain them to the sink for the rest of their lives but women will no longer tolerate this treatment,” she said.

Women were entitled to career opportunities, whether or not they were married.

“Women are bearing the brunt of unemployment and the National Party could not care less,” she said. “Two-thirds of the unemployed are women, but now we see the Prime Minister attacking the right of married women to work. This is merely a feeble attempt to justify youth rates designed to give a few greedy employers cheap labour.”

The Labour Party’s spokeswoman on women’s affairs and social welfare, Mrs Ann Hercus, said that she was “tired of Mr Muldoon’s continual promotion of tatty myths and prejudices about women.”

The suggestion that married women should give up their jobs for schoolleavers would do nothing to change the unemployment problem. It would merely alter the composition of the dole queue, she said. In many instances, it would be totally impractical for school-leavers to take over from trained and experienced women workers. Mr Muldoon’s assumption that women did not need to work if their husbands were

employed ignored the fact that many women had to work to keep their families above the poverty level. “Even if every married woman in New Zealand worked for the sheer satisfaction of using their skills and talent, what right has the Prime Minister to single them out and say they cannot, and make them feel guilty when they do,” she said.

Mrs Hercus also disputed the suggestion that most solo parents live on Social Welfare benefits. Half the solo parents in New Zealand never asked for a benefit. The rest were on the benefit for an average of only three years before returning to work.