Demographic Shift Highlights Carers' Responsibilities

By Anti-Discrimination Board

There have been a number of demographic and cultural shifts in recent decades that have major social policy implications.

These changes include an increasingly ageing population, a decline in fertility rates, and a decrease in the number of families that fit the traditional model of a nuclear family. All these have implications for the way caring responsibilities and paid work are managed.

Workforce changes include the increase in casualisation, increase in part-time work, the change in the spread of hours, the increasing participation of women in paid work, increased use of individual and informal contracts of employment, increase in the self-employed category and the increase in short term employment.

The Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW is working on a discussion paper that explores the legal and policy framework of carer's responsibilities as a ground for discrimination, including the relationship between flexible and family-friendly work practices, industrial changes that impact on workers' abilities to manage their work and family responsibilities, patterns of debate in Australia and overseas and public policy implications.

(Equal Time; no. 53, August 2002)