Sally loves her job – helping people in her community navigate government services – but she loves it a fair bit less now than she did a few years ago. She has seen her job get steadily harder. Clients are more frustrated, long queues are getting longer and there are more restrictions placed on how much she can do to help people. No one she works with has had a pay rise for well over three years, except for the bosses in Canberra, and the unresolved mess over enterprise bargaining makes her wonder if anything will ever get better. Last month, Sally caught the flu from her son. It took her two weeks to get over it and she had to take three days off work. On each day of sick leave, she received a call from her supervisor asking when she'd be back at work. Sally felt even worse leaving her team even more short-staffed than normal. Thousands of permanent staff in the Department of Human Services have lost their jobs and been replaced with casuals, who just don't get the training they need to help with the out-of-control workload. The department continues to push to strip away rights and conditions that give Sally any control at all to manage the competing needs of her working and family life.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched International Women's Day last month by declaring that "workplace flexibility enables gender equality". He's right. The problem is that what's being pushed in the Department of Human Services under the Turnbull government's public sector bargaining policy would provide all the flexibility in the world to bosses and virtually none at all for staff. Sally and thousands of women like her working for the department around the country have told us that, if they lose the limited control over the hours they work, then they may need to quit and work elsewhere. Their families unsurprisingly come first. Thousands of permanent staff have been cut and replaced with casuals, who just don't get the training they need to help with the out-of-control workload. The Commonwealth public sector is often portrayed as an ivory tower for well-paid white-collar men in Canberra. In fact, nearly 60 per cent of staff are women, most on average wages. Nearly two-thirds of public sector workers are based outside of Canberra, providing secure and stable jobs that are particularly important in regional centres like Townsville.

Women dominate the Department of Human Services' workforce significantly more again, making up more than 70 per cent of staff. It's only at the department's executive levels that men mysteriously start to outnumber women. What this all means is that, despite the Prime Minister's female-friendly facade, the Turnbull government's attack on working rights in the public sector has also been an attack on the rights and indeed the equality of working women. There's been plenty of snide commentary trying to argue the Commonwealth bargaining dispute is about extravagant perks, often quoting those that only ever applied to Sally's bosses. The reality is that bread-and-butter issues like rostering work remain the real sticking points to resolution in the department and beyond. Our members in the department and other agencies realised long ago that they weren't going to secure any real improvements in this round of bargaining and have instead been fighting to maintain the rights they have. The one exception is the Community and Public Sector Union's continuing efforts to have domestic violence leave added to new agreements, which has been perversely blocked on the grounds it's an "enhancement" to existing rights.