Solidarity

In the last few days there have been two columns about AWAs that deserve a wide audience. The first was from Josh Bornstein, an industrial relations lawyer, who points out that “individual contract” is a misnomer:

Frydenberg’s rhetoric concerning AWAs and “individual choice” is intellectually bankrupt.

In practice, individual contracts such as AWAs are an efficient mechanism for employers to avoid workplace bargaining and eliminate unwanted award conditions. These pro forma contracts are drafted by employers’ lawyers and presented to workers on a “take it or leave it” basis and, in most cases, duly signed by the employee. There is, with few exceptions, no negotiation.

Take Telstra, one of Australia’s largest employers.

Nine thousand of its staff are on AWAs. According to Frydenberg’s analysis, each AWA should be individually tailored to reflect the employee’s circumstances. And yet, the fact is that all 9000 AWAs at Telstra are exactly the same. It is a pro forma document.

The second is from David Peetz, a professor of industrial relations, who first points out that the mining industry’s claims about AWAs can not be trusted:

It’s time for a reality check. Mine workers on individual contracts receive 6 per cent less a week than those on collective agreements. Workers in metal ore mining, nowadays mainly non-union and dominated by individual contracts, work 5 per cent more hours but earn 21 per cent less a week than workers in largely unionised coalmining where collective agreements dominate.

Some wild claims have been doing the rounds. According to a report issued by the mining companies’ association in March, there was a 22 per cent wage increase in mining in the year to August 2006. But the Bureau of Statistics publication they claimed as a source had not even been released. When it eventually was published, it showed just an 8.7 per cent increase.

He goes on to explain that the real reason the mining companies want AWAs is that it enables them to dictate the terms of employment, eliminating workplace democracy and denying workers a say in their terms and conditions:

Everything in terms of flexibility that you can do under an AWA, you can do under an ECA. … Perhaps the problem is that the companies don’t want workers to be able to have a right to vote on the content of their agreement. That is the key difference between an ECA and an AWA.

AWAs can be imposed upon all new employees as a condition of getting a job, meaning that, through attrition, the employer can put most of the workforce on to AWAs. But if a majority of workers don’t like a proposed ECA, it does not get up.

… It’s hard to argue that workers should not have the right to have a say, through a vote, on their terms and conditions of employment. ECAs are a simple means of promoting the flexibility the mining companies claim to want. This is where the opportunity for compromise between the Labor Opposition and the mining companies lies.