In yet another admission that WorkChoices is a failed policy, the head of the OEA, Peter McIlwain, has been demoteed. His organisation is being renamed the Workplace Authority, and its new director is Barbara Bennett. As Mark Bahnisch points out, this is part of a spin exercise. This is how the Minister explained the new [...]
John Robertson is under fire for making the perfectly reasonable promise that the union movement would keep campaigning in workers’ interests even if Kevin Rudd wins the election. Dean Mighell was expelled from the ALP for using ETU members’ venacular when discussing the (legal) bargaining tactics he has used to win higher than expected pay [...]
The Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations today published a scathing criticism of WorkChoices, saying it is biased towards bosses. Denis Peters’ AAP story is quite good — it mentions the long list of problems with WorkChoices, including “the minimum wage, minimum conditions and bargaining, unfair dismissals and the role of unions.” But Peters gets [...]
A recent episode of Channel 9′s drama McLeod’s Daughters showed how AWAs are introduced as take-it-or-leave it contracts that cut pay and conditions. The script was apparently inspired by the real-life case of Bill Schultze, an Adelaide teenager who was pressured to sign an AWA by BP — it cut his pay by $2/hour, supposedly [...]
Labor’s new industrial relations policy, Forward with Fairness, includes a commitment to abolish AWAs in favour of collective agreements. The policy is very good: Collective enterprise agreement making and democracy will be the heart of Labor’s industrial relations system. Collective bargaining allows balanced, cooperative arrangements that foster improved productivity across a business and provide the [...]
Another day, another IR expert supporting Labor’s IR plan. This time it’s the director of the University of Sydney’s Workplace Research Centre, Dr John Buchanan: What ALP policy does stop is employers using individual contracts to undermine collective agreements and unions. This is a basic principle of labour law in all Western democracies and recognised [...]
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 [...]
This Hinze cartoon sums up the Government’s new so-called “fairness test” beautifully. An interview on The World Today explained that this is “more rhetoric than substance”: EMMA ALBERICI: The Government is selling its changes to WorkChoices as a strengthening of the safety net but has stopped short of telling workers they’ll be no worse off [...]
There’s a pattern emerging in the criticism of Labor’s IR policy. The critics are driven by vested interests and partisan loyalty to the Liberal Party. First, we’ve got the major media critic, the News Ltd group of newspapers (especially The Australian). Why would they be such vocal barrackers for WorkChoices? Because the company uses AWAs [...]
Last week we heard about the Priceline decision, which upheld the right of a company to sack its workers to cut costs. It didn’t take long for other companies to cotton on to that strategy. Workers at Vopak Terminals in Sydney have been trying to negotiate a collective agreement. Vopak has been refusing to negotiate, [...]
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