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

‘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.