I know a couple who for many years ran an industrial cladding business with projects all around Qld and elsewhere. I asked the wife about their experiences with superannuation. She said that right up until they sold their business a couple of years ago they were continually hiring experienced workers who had never been paid super by other employers.

To me this means that a government’s policy is to be judged not on the laws they pass but on the laws they are willing to enforce. I assume, then, that the Howard government believes that super should be optional rather than mandatory.

I think that some of the people who told your wife that they couldn’t help lied to her. What they should have said is that they didn’t want to help, or weren’t funded to help.

I wonder what the local member has to say. I’ve noticed that the surest way to get action seems to be to get the media involved, although not everyone wants to go down that road. I’d be reluctant myself. Afterall you can be sure that Annette Harris only had her conditions restored because of the media exposure.

I’ll say it. *Even Kim Beazley* can get elected on this one. And I mean against Howard. Easy.

Witness the dark horse of your electoral death galloping, Coalition. Its name is Workchoices.

That’s another reason to regret the trashing of my old dept, the CES network. If an employer stuffed around with working conditions then, the wage subsidy agreement was simply torn up and subsidies not paid.

Although the Job Network supposedly replaced the CES, they apparently have neither the power nor the labour market expertise to do this, and don’t.

That’s not quite right, though it’s not far off. Agreements that are randomly selected for checking, and happen to contain “prohibited content”, the OEA will write to the employer for an explanation. If no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming, the OEA will remove the prohibited content. The rest of the agreement stands.

However, this only applies to things like allowing paid union safety training. Agreements that undercut the “protected by law” minimum conditions will not be modified — they’ll be registered regardless, and it will be up to the parties or the OWS to take action in the courts to fix them.

So quite the nice little earner for employers taking advantage of SerfChoices.

On the question of supervision of agreements, an agreement can’t become lawful unless it’s registered with the Office of Employment Advocate. However during Senate Estimates last week OEA head Peter Macilwaine acknowledged they were registered automatically, regardless of contents.

You wouldn’t want to be without it, really.

This is where the Kennett deregulatory award system and later its handballing of IR to the Commonwealth went seriously off the rails in the 90s. In Western Vic the old DLI retained a couple of staff at Geelong to explain things to employers and the odd persistent employee. But it was almost impossible to get through to them.

It became maddening to employers in very small businesses who would ring us (at the CES, albeit we had no role, other than general experience with awards) in despair. The Canberra number we had for such things was even more frustrating. A business person could waste several hours trying to get through and even then not get reliable information.

There are, as Obby has made clear, many (possibly most) employers trying to do the right thing by employees and adhere to the law if they knew what it was.

An award sounded a bit red-tapish, but it actually simplified things for many employers. As AWAs came in, most employers in our district simply borrowed from the old awards. Just as it was simpler to take tax and accounting issues to an accountant, so it was easier to work from established guidelines, especially for areas like OH&S. I probably missed a business opportunity by not setting up as an award/IR”consultant”,notwithstanding that my expertise was not in that field.

There will be quite a few rogue elements like Spotlight and the various meatworks who exploit this new situation. That will create plenty more Howard-haters among employees. There are probably plenty of other employers who want to do the right thing, cannot get prompt or reliable government advice, who will want to talk to unions not for industrial peace but to try and make sense of employment conditions. A lot of them may also thing about a change of government.

1. a federal minimum wage, minimum award classification rates of pay, and casual loadings set by the Australian Fair Pay Commission;

2. four weeks paid annual leave per year (five weeks for continouos shift employees) up to two weeks of which can be cashed out in a workplace agreement;

3. ten days paid personal/carer’s leave per year and two days compassionate leave per occasion;

4. up to 52 weeks unpaid parental leave (maternity, paternity and adoption); and,

5. maximum ordinary hours of work limited to 38 hours per week (which can be averaged over twelve months in an agreement or award) and reasonable additional hours.

My source is a printout of the official pamphlet which was attached to the online Spotlight job application form. I say was, because it seems to have been taken down from the net.

Andrews was lauding his AWAs as a U-beaut agreement with rolled gold solid safety net conditions. So you not only get a job but you get these extra conditions as well. These conditions are seen as a privilege rather than as a right.

I’m not sure about superannuation. Wouldn’t it be included in ther federal minimum wage, and covered by other legislation?

This raises the issue of supervision. I’m not sure of the technicalities here, but I did hear that the supervisory body was not investigating every individual complaint. Rather it was looking for patterns and relying on exemplarary interventions to keep employers in order. The effect of this can erode drastically over time if there are staff cuts to the regulatory body to the point where it becomes irrelevant to the practice in the real world.

Here in Warrnambool ( a resort town with lots of weekend opening), Spotlight does not open Sundays. Until very recently it did not open Saturday afternoons, but I think they might now have extended to 5pm. Sundays are still out.

It is possible that the new conditions might lead to Sunday openings. So from the other side you could argue that service is being extended. But the decision to open or not is likely to depend on demand (fairly weak for a specialty store).

In my post Spotlight (link in Mark’s post) I said:

The net effect is a shift from wages to profits of up to $91 per week for each worker.

I suspect the savings to the employer could be more if other conditions that don’t turn up as pay in the weekly wage are stripped away. Afterall the employer has to budget for these as ‘on-costs’.

Opening hours vary from state to state, but I imagine Coff’s Harbour may be open on Sundays for the same reasons that resort towns in Qld usually are.