Dare I point out that if your husband was in a unionised work place you could make your views known about the measliness of 2 days paid paternity leave without risking your husband's position.

In my experience unionised work places are more likely to offer conditions like
- paid parental leave
- paid carers leave
- more generous long service leave
- more concern over safe working conditions
- pursuing employers to pay workers compensation to injured workers
- paid over time - rather than you are staff - you get paid enough to work all night

Remember that some of the largest supporters of the IR reforms are the large mining companies like Xstrata and those of the Rio Tinto Group. BTW the largest shareholder of Rio Tinto is Her Majesty, the Queen.

Best of luck with your family.

What you have shown is that there are serious problems at home.
You discuss serious problems while cleaning your teeth and meddle in what your husband should be doing, negoting on behalf of his family. You wear the pants while he works.

oh please GlenWriter your full of it.
Great piece and great post lucky buggar on the beach.

Rebecca
Good on you. Please send a copy of this to John Howard, Kevin Andrews and Peter Costello. Not that you will get any sympathy from them as this is the brave new world they want for all of us. Workchoice - you get to work under whatever conditions the boss determines or you can choose to have no job. Don't worry, according to John and Kevin there are just thousands of jobs out there just waiting for someone like your husband. Too bad if you are unskilled or can't move because of something like family commitments

The argument that people will upskill to get a job where they can bargain for their working conditions is a little glib.

How long does it take to train for a professional job? Well often kids chose their subjects in year 11. They finish high school then spend 4 years at university. Then in a technical field might need 2 or 3 years experience to really be in a position to command a good salary.
So the workers at the peak of their bargaining capacity have 7 years training behind them and are probably in their late 20s or early 30s.

The other point about bargaining capacity is if you are a world expert looking to change employers in Australia you probably have no bargaining power because your skills are often not transferable to another employer. Know a fellow who faced just this problem.

Those people who have a weakened bargaining capacity are

- those in regional areas who are committed to the area through family or real estate
- skilled workers who skills are no longer flavour of the month
- skilled workers with no alternative employers near by

I can remember my father was a professional engineer working for a government department in the 1960s. His wages remained the same for the whole decade and he often used to grumble that the government wouldn't negotiate with them because they didn't draw attention to their pay claim by striking. [No point in striking as you wouldn't notice that they weren't working]. There is precedence not to trust the generosity of government departments in pay negotiations.

So what is the purchasing power of a salary that remains unchanged for a decade. Pretty grim, even though mum went back to work, by the end of the decade it was really tight feeding and clothing her ravenous teenagers. This was most pronounced because 2 kids finished university and started working the year Whitlam came to power and wages rose.

I worry about families who are just starting the mortgage, babies, school thing.

None of this is hardly surprising.

Due to a sustained attempt to demonise, malign and vilify fathers, then fathers have become almost criminalized, or they are now regarded as being second-grade parents or second-class citizens.

*Few government web-sites or government literature will now contain the word “father”, while the word “mother” will be frequently mentioned.

*No political party to my knowledge has a written policy for fathers, or even for men or boys.

*One high profile federal senator has a number of portfolios including “Work and Family”, but does not even have the word “father” contained anywhere in her web-site.

*There are a number of books recently released on “parenting”, that do not even mention the word “father”.

*Many organisations continuously repeat words such as “women and their children”, but never words such as “men and their children”

*There are a number of academics and feminists who could only be regarded as anti-father, as they will never say a positive word about fathers.

*It is almost impossible, (or extremely difficult), for a separated father to have custody of a child, or even have 50/50 shared parenting.

So it’s not that surprising that some businesses do not acknowledge or value fathers either. They are simply following government, academics, feminists etc

This article infers that the father should be of use to the mother and the new-born baby (i.e “a measly two days to care for his new-born child and wife, who had just given birth.”).

Maybe the father should be of use to the mother and the new-born baby, but recent research into fathers reveals that if the father spends about 2 weeks in close contact with the new-born baby, it helps to create a deeper emotional bonding between the father and the child. Even special hormones can be released in the father’s body during this time, which are believed to play a part in this emotional bonding process.

But any possibility of such deep emotional bonding occurring between the father and the child is surely something feminists would want to avoid