Pay rises for community sector workers are on the horizon and this is great news for the vast army of women – many of them carers – who work in this sector.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has committed $2 billion over six years to fund gradual wage rises to about 150,000 low-paid workers in the social and community services sector from December next year.

However the federal Coalition has refused to back the idea, claiming the move will change the workplace landscape and fuel wage pressures across the economy.

Unions have condemned the Coalition’s stance, calling it an ‘insult to working women’. They have called on the Coalition to explain why employees who work with the elderly and with vulnerable children or people with a disability should have their work undervalued.

But the Coalition has stood firm, with Opposition workplace relations spokesman Eric Abetz saying that such a decision would have negative flow-on effects across the economy and ‘change the landscape’ in workplaces, leading to other low-paid industries re-evaluating their wages.

Workplace Relations Minister Chris Evans has gone on the offensive saying: "This is an attack on the right of low-paid women to get equal pay and it reflects the fact that the Liberal Party's priorities are all wrong… they won't support an effort to lift the pay of low-paid women so they get equal pay in the 21st century.”

ACTU president Ged Kearney said the Coalition should: “explain to community workers, including carers of the elderly, people with a disability, the injured and social workers supporting some of our most vulnerable children, why they should continue to receive pay that undervalues the work they do and the qualifications they have.”

Ms Kearney also said the Coalition needed to explain why social and community sector workers should have to ‘wait years more to receive wage justice’ and why women should not be paid the same as men because ‘equal pay is a workplace right and a human right’.

In backing the proposal for equal pay for women, the federal government intervened in last month’s wage case for 150,000 community service workers.

Prime Minister Gillard said the wage push for low-paid social services staff, 80 per cent of them women, was an important step towards closing the pay gap.

“Workers in this sector have been underpaid for too long because their work was viewed as women's work,” Ms Gillard said.

“In 2011, it is unacceptable that women earn on average one fifth less than men full-time – the equivalent of working nearly seven weeks a year for free,” she said.

The federal government indicated last December it would back an equal-pay case being led by the Australian Services Union and will make a joint submission with the ASU to the independent workplace umpire Fair Work Australia.

The Government believes that if the submission is accepted, the workers will for the first time be given ‘a fair day's pay for a fair day's work’.

Of the 150,000 workers in the sector, 120,000 are women. Fair Work Australia has already found that their work is undervalued because of gender considerations.