After being fairly quiet lately, I thought I had better make an effort to put up an election eve post to sum up the campaigns and tell you how I recommend you vote tomorrow. In truth, IR did not feature very much in the campaign. The parties’ positions have had a lot of publicity over [...]
The Government has pinned its hopes on industrial relations, and especially the union movement’s influence on Labor. But it was caught lying about some ALP members, and pretending that student politics counts as industrial unionism. Besides, voters know that the Liberal frontbenches are stuffed full of business lawyers, while union leaders bring a range of [...]
The Government’s reds-under-the-bed fear campaign has been kicked up a notch, with Peter Costello accusing Julia Gillard of being a closet Communist. And isn’t it awful that Labor’s candidates come from a tradition of representing Australian workers and their families? Seriously, if the ALP was in the pockets of the unions, wouldn’t the ACTU guarantee [...]
This is one of those rare occasions when I hope John Howard is right about industrial relations policy: In a speech to a Perth business audience yesterday, the Prime Minister said “the choice is a very stark one”. “If we are defeated at the end of the year, if the Labor Party wins, then the [...]
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 [...]
Alexander Downer has suggested Australian Labor should look to the Tony Blair’s industrial regime for inspiration. Downer says the British ex-PM …saw the modernisation of his national economy as the key to job creation, fairness and equality for all workers… [and] set a strong example for future Labour leaders, both in Britain and around the [...]
The Government’s primary attack on Labor’s policy is that Rudd and Gillard are making it up as they go along, with the underlying implication that the big bad unions will walk over Rudd and Gillard. The Australian has joined in that attack by running a series of articles making false claims about the policy. In [...]
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 [...]
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