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 [...]
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, [...]
It looks like Howard is worried by the Priceline operational reasons decision. He is now pretending that this kind of cost-cutting was not supposed to be covered by operational reasons, “either under this legislation or under previous legislation”. But that’s misleading: the operational reasons loophole didn’t exist under the old legislation. As the IRC pointed [...]
A recent Industrial Relations Commission decision is terrible news for workers — if your company wants to sack you to cut your wages, that’s entirely legal under the new WorkChoices “operational reasons” rule. This means companies over the 100-employee threshold will be able to dodge unfair dismissal claims by arguing they needed to save money. [...]
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 [...]
The Industrial Relations Commission handed down a landmark decision today. This is the first time the full bench has considered the meaning of “genuine operational reasons” under WorkChoices, and it has upheld a very broad definition that allows big companies to sidestep unfair dismissal laws. Warren Carter had worked for Village Roadshow cinemas for 19 [...]
Kevin Andrews at a doorstop interview on 1 June 2006: First of all the concept of operational reasons is not something which is new in WorkChoices. This is something … which is a part of the workplace relations law in Australia for some … period of time. So this idea of operation reasons is not [...]
With every ABS release of new unemployment figures, Kevin Andrews claims WorkChoices is generating jobs. Is it really? In this morning’s Financial Review (p69; unavailable online), two labour market economists had a go at answering that question. They agree that if WorkChoices is going to be a job-creator, it would be because of the removal [...]
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