Here’s an interesting story: Dancers at the WA Ballet, Australia’s oldest ballet company, yesterday borrowed a lawyer from the union for boilermakers and welders, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, to take on management over dancers’ pay, which the Industrial Relations Commission heard described as scandalous yesterday. That’s what solidarity is about — workers sticking up [...]
I had planned to take a break from blogging on Tristar for a while, but when I read Joe Hockey’s latest comments I had to post a response — they are simply wrong. The Minister reportedly told ABC radio that “Tristar and Work Choices are not on the same plate, they are different issues.” Wrong, [...]
The Office of Workplace Services has launched a prosecution against Tristar in the Federal Court. It alleges that because workers have not been provided with work, they have effectively been made redundant. OWS will push for these employees to be paid out their full entitlements — up to four times what Joe Hockey got for [...]
While Joe Hockey tells parliament “[t]here is no doubt small business has embraced the removal of the unfair dismissal laws and seen it [sic] as an opportunity to employ more people”, the experts in the Treasury Department are more circumspect. Treasury’s top economist, David Parker, told a Senate committee that it wasn’t possible to say [...]
There was a flurry of coverage last week of an academic paper presented by Professor David Peetz. In Brave New Work Choices (pdf), Peetz argues that WorkChoices has led to a loss of conditions, lower wages, and no discernable productivity increase. He says women have been hit hard, taking a pay cut even as businesses [...]
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