Failing to live up to the promise: the politics of equal pay in ‘new’ workplace and industrial relations institutions

Workplace and industrial relations regulations are key sites for policy intervention to address Australia's gender pay gap, which, at 15.3 per cent, is almost as large as it was in 1997. In both the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth) the goal of equal pay has a more central place than it did in predecessor legislation. In particular, the Fair Work Act has the potential to deliver more gender-equitable wage structures through addressing systemic gender-based undervaluation at the industry level. Adopting a feminist institutional approach this article examines equal pay policy in the operations of workplace and industrial relations regulation to ask why, despite some recent successes, this potential appears unlikely to be realised.     

'Safe space' as counter‐space: women, environmental illness and 'corporeal chaos'

Women constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of people diagnosed with environmental illness (EI), a contentious condition in which patients react adversely to everyday chemicals in the environment at levels politically conceived to be 'safe'. Whilst the diverse range of somatic symptoms constitutes a biomedical anomaly, in this paper I present an alternative means of conceiving environmentally ill bodies. Women (and environmental health practitioners at the Environmental Health Centre, Nova Scotia) have begun to view their bodies as complex systems that have been nudged into a state of 'corporeal chaos', in which minute quantities of chemicals trigger disproportionate somatic symptoms. This chaos extends into 'corporeal space'[ Moss and Dyck (1999a) ] as the diagnosis of environmental illness is experienced simultaneously through both material and discursive bodies. This diagnosis also carries with it a means to mitigate corporeal chaos through a series of body‐ and environment‐based modifications that replace risky bodies with 'safe space'. As a discursive construct, safe space is associated with an absence of chemicals, and in order to mitigate chaos, should ideally be stable, predictable, controllable and communicative. I finalise this paper with some examples of body modifications and illustrate how safe space materialises in the home environment .     

"It is God who Speaks in the Thunder . . .": Mediating Ontologies of Faith and Fear in Aboriginal Christianity>

The connection between Christianity and the ancestral law of Aboriginal culture has generated considerable debate within Australian Christianity. I explore the intersubjective flow between faith and fear emergent within these two systems and show how external influences have impacted ruptures of ontological thought and experience. These ruptures have both emerged from and shaped social and political change for Yolngu from Galiwin'ku in north-east Arnhem Land. I examine a range of discourses of religious rupture and argue that Christian influences have, at different times, variously competed with, moulded, and naturalized Yolngu ancestral understanding, leading to a surveillance of the social, spiritual, and political relationship between the Gospel and Culture by Yolngu Christians.