Liam Mitchell
The federal government's spin doctoring has gone into overdrive with the announcement of more details of its latest planned attack on workers. Prime Minister John Howard has been effusive about the possibilities opened up for workers by his industrial relations "reforms", while refusing to publicly recognise what bosses are forcing on their employees.
The spin in the government's WorkChoices booklet is that the proposed new IR laws will "provide more choice and flexibility for both employees and employers in their workplaces, so we can find better ways to reward effort, increase wages, and balance work and family life". It also claims the proposed laws will create a "simpler, fairer system" of IR regulations.
That rhetoric is hollow. The talk of greater flexibility and individual workers' ability to negotiate their own conditions will not be embraced by the bosses. No company manager wants to balance multiple penalty rates or annual leave provisions among workers doing the same job.
The simplification process is also very clearly spelt out — deregulation of the labour market, removal of "red-tape" (i.e., of legal checks on bosses' ability to force workers onto individual contracts) and the simplification of awards (i.e., stripping away hard-won gains).
Individual contracts
We are being told that no-one will be forced to sign an Australian Workplace Agreement (individual contract), that workers will have a choice between their existing conditions or an AWA. We re told that a company manager and a worker can negotiate as equals.
But this argument goes against even recent history. Once the government announced its intention to change the IR laws, employers started undermining workers' rights and conditions.
Workers are already being forced to sign AWAs and have even been dismissed for questioning the content of the agreement or not signing it, both of which are forbidden under existing laws and are supposedly to be forbidden under the new laws.
Workers are being placed on conditions that are worse than the relevant award and are being told that signing the agreement is a condition of starting a job. Some workers have found their employment transferred to a labour-hire company where they have to sign an inferior AWA to do the same job.
With this happening before the new laws are enacted (and even before the detail in the proposed new laws has been revealed), we can see what the future will hold.
Cutting labour costs has always been a primary goal of employers and the planned new IR legislation is designed to allow more ways of doing this legally.
The changes will even give an employer at a new work site the right to decide what is in the AWA before any employees are hired! Signing the AWA would then be a condition of being hired.
Many young workers, particularly those going for their first job, have signed an AWA that has left them without penalty rates and other entitlements, and receiving less real income than the award would have given them.
The fact remains that the outcome of any sort of negotiations between workers and bosses depends on a relationship of bargaining strength between them. A strong, united work force can win far better conditions and pay than an individual worker can against a company and its "human resources" managers, corporate lawyers and accountants.
While collective bargaining won t be illegal under Howard s new laws, many more measures for bosses to get around collective agreements will be incorporated into the system.
'Protected by law'
The government is continually telling us that our rights will be "protected by law". Yet an examination of what will be protected reveals that it won t be much.
A minimum set of working conditions will be written into legislation, including public holidays, meal breaks, annual leave loading and penalty, shift and overtime rates. However, each of these will also be up for "negotiation" between bosses and workers, meaning many workers will be forced to work overtime or on public holidays or do night shifts at a standard rate of pay.
A minimum of four weeks annual leave, 10 days' paid sick/carers leave and a maximum 38-hour work week will also be legislated. However, two weeks annual leave will be able to be cashed in upon "agreement" with the boss. The standard working week will become irrelevant to many workers as their overtime rates are taken away and they work a longer week at standard rates.
The minimum wage and casual leave loadings, both set by the new "Fair Pay Commission", will also be "protected by law". But this only means that many workers will be forced to agree to individual contracts that give them little more in pay than this minimum.
Fifty-two weeks unpaid parental leave will be the standard, but restrictions will be placed on both parents taking leave at the same time, leading to a reduction of the amount of parental leave available.
Conditions in awards that are more generous than that being legislated for will be removed from new (rewritten) awards. This will include long-service leave, superannuation and notice of termination.
Under cover of legal protection, conditions of workers who have had most success in improving their entitlements will be cut when the government-appointed Award Review Taskforce reviews their awards.
Even if an AWA doesn't meet the minimum standards set, it may still be possible for a company to get away with forcing its employees to accept it.
Currently, all AWAs have to be approved by the Office of the Employment Advocate and need to pass a "no disadvantage test" (although many get through that wouldn t). The Office of Workplace Services (the revamped OEA) will in future merely accept lodgement of an AWA and will not have to certify the agreement.
Workers will also be "protected by law" from "unlawful" dismissal. But the government's listing of what sort of dismissal would be illegal is contained in other legislation and offers no real new protection to workers. What the government's new laws do though is take away the right of a worker to appeal an unfair dismissal, unless she or he is employed at a workplace with at least 99 other employees.
Even the method of counting the number of employees is designed to make it difficult — casuals employed for less than 12 months will not be counted. Seasonal workers will also not have access to unfair dismissal provisions. Probationary periods (where a worker can be sacked with no reason given) are to be extended from three to six months.
About the only provisions that will actually be protected by law are the minimum wage and casual loadings (set by the Fair Pay Commission) and sick/carers leave. Most other legal protection will be set out in other laws.
Howard says the legislation will change the way we work by increasing flexibility and productivity. The real reason for the legislation is far more sinister: to enable to employers to reduce their labour costs and weaken the greatest barrier to achieving that — the trade unions.
As well as hoping to sideline unions by making individual contracts the norm, the laws will have specific provisions to make it more difficult for unions to represent their members.
The right of entry to workplaces for union officials will be restricted, with the government deciding who is eligible to exercise this right and a reason for entering a work site having to be given to the company. Employers will be given direct control of the union official s activity on the work site.
By limiting the effectiveness of union organising, the government is trying to make it easier for bosses to do what they see as their God-given right — making more money out of us by driving down our standard of living.
[Liam Mitchell is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 26, 2005.
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