While I’m on the subject of workplace safety, today we have the disturbing news that workers will be penalised for a brief stoppage to conduct a whip-around for a widow. It is a building industry tradition that workers contribute to a fund for the widows and children of killed colleagues. In the early years of [...]
One potentially very serious aspect of the Howard Government’s IR agenda is the way it surreptitiously undermines workplace safety. While WorkChoices does not entirely exclude State workplace safety laws, it “imposes additional conditions on entering premises pursuant to State or Territory Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) legislation” — by blocking union access. Union inspections are [...]
Named after a famous left-handed baseball player, the Koufax Awards are the big annual awards for the best left-wing weblogs (mainly in the United States). This year the Best Single-Issue Blog award was won by the excellent Confined Space. Its author, Jordan Barab, is an occupational health and safety activist, who continually exposes the incredible [...]
One of the main aims of WorkChoices is to put obstacles in the way of employees trying to negotiate with their employers, by putting obstacles in the way of employee industrial action. Apart from limiting industrial action to certain fixed time periods, restricting the topics that can be the subject of industrial action, and giving [...]
The Howard Government adopted an aggressive policy of forcing public servants to sign AWAs. Last year, while Kevin Andrews was on the hustings promoting the “right to choose” an AWA, he was embarrassed by the revelation that staff in his own department were given the “choice” between signing an AWA or joining the dole queue. [...]
As more detailed reports about the Cowra 29 come to hand, it is clear that my initial assessment was correct. The Office of Workplace Services had very little to do with the company’s backdown — it was the union campaign, which placed significant political pressure on the Government, that forced the abattoir to retreat. Brad [...]
Twenty nine sacked abattoir workers have their jobs back — for now — thanks to public outcry, union pressure, and a desperate government bid for a political fix for a political problem. The Cowra abattoir, which had for some time been negotiating with the meatworkers’ union about a proposed restructure, wasted no time exercising its [...]
In an effort to demonstrate that its Office of Workplace Services will protect workers, Kevin Andrews and Amanda Vanstone held a joint press conference to announce a planned prosecution of a Canberra restaurant for underpaying its Filipino guest workers. But the announcement only highlights how the Government sat on its hands for months, until unions [...]
Victorian readers should make a trip to Fitzroy to catch Grant Hobson’s photo exhibition, The Industry of Working. The photographs depict workers after the Kennett IR reforms, in factories that have since closed down. Hobson’s exhibition is part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversay of the eight hour day, and he hopes it will [...]
The ABS released figures last week showing unions had grown by 70 000 members in the year to August 2005, although density dropped slightly. Griffith University’s David Peetz said it was “the largest increase since 1989, and brings union membership to its highest level since 1998.” What’s more, this growth was “not just a one-off fluke”, [...]
