Solidarity

“Are you now or have you ever been…?” was the joking title of a recent post at Larvatus Prodeo. It was responding to a despicable Government/Gazette tag-team attack on academics whose research found that WorkChoices and AWAs were slashing wages.

Because there was no basis for attacking the merits of the findings, the research team was criticised for its personal support for unionism. It doesn’t matter that the research was peer-reviewed and partly funded by the Government’s Australian Research Council, or that the academics involved regularly do work for business groups, government, or institutions including the Reserve Bank — there’s reds under the bed.

But when Mercurious put up his post, he couldn’t have known how accurate the headline was. Another report, released yesterday, suggests that WorkChoices has emboldened bosses to sack pregnant women. An hour before it was due to be released, RMIT’s Dr Sara Charlesworth received a phone call from DEWR:

Dr Charlesworth said the officer asked her about the contents of the report before saying, “I have to ask you, have you been a union official? Are you now or have you been a union official?”

“I laughed because I thought it was such an outrageous question,” Dr Charlesworth said. “She said, ‘I know, I’m really sorry, but have you?’.”

The Government has decided that since it win the ball, it will play the man instead. The academics involved, on the other hand, are quite happy to debate their findings. Dr Brigid can Wanrooy put up a guest post at Blogocracy today, and has been answering questions in the comments thread.

When Joe Hockey manages to mumble something about ABS statistics, he gets it dead wrong. First, the ABS said it hasn’t done any analysis of post-WorkChoices AWAs; and second, independent analysis of the existing data disagrees with Hockey’s version:

Professor Alison Preston, from Curtin Business School, says the same bureau data actually supports the findings of the University of Sydney study that low-skilled workers on AWAs earn significantly less on average than those covered by collective agreements. “[Mr] Hockey has recently dismissed data released by the Workplace Research Centre at Sydney University showing that low-skilled workers on collective agreements earned roughly $100 more per week than low-skilled workers on AWAs,” she said.

“The wage gaps uncovered by the Sydney University researchers would be on a par with average wage gaps estimated using official ABS data.”

Professor Preston’s analysis of detailed figures collected in May last year, but not published by the bureau, showed non-managerial workers on federal AWAs earned $76 a week less than their counterparts on collective agreements. For women on AWAs the weekly earnings disadvantage compared with those on collective agreements was around $110.

Of course, if the Government was really serious about ensuring proper academic study of WorkChoices, it wouldn’t be doing everything possible to cover up the raw information. The Workplace Authority’s Barbara Bennett has been flat out lying about the privacy issues involved with releasing information to academics. In the past, the information has been released with personal details blacked out, but that’s all too hard for our new post-WorkChoices regulators:

Ms Bennett defended her decision, saying all AWAs were now lodged electronically, making it more difficult to mask who the parties were.

Asked if the authority should simply print out the agreements and use a black marker to obscure names and addresses, she said, “It isn’t a conspiracy.”

Incompetence, then.