Over the weekend, I wrote about Labor’s repositioning on WorkChoices - moving away from the rhetoric of “rip up these laws” to embedding them within broader debates on fairness and families and also signalling that flexibility is something that Labor supports.
The repositioning continues today, with Craig Emerson announcing that Labor will retain laws allowing contractors to negotiate their conditions of work. Emerson also promises “no special deals” for unions in small businesses. (Which I don’t think any unions were asking for.)
Most of this is largely a rhetorical shift. Gillard’s suggestion that employees could negotiate common law contracts (which may be given a statutory basis) to supplement collective agreements recognises both the realities of the labour market where highly skilled employees have significant bargaining power and also opens some doors for additional flexibility in the work/life balance area. Though a counter argument would be that allowing those in the best position to bargain separately weakens collective bargaining for those with fewer skills in demand, and that’s something that would give unions some concern.
Similarly, Emerson’s announcement sensibly suggests legislative tests for the genuineness of contractor status (reflecting tests used by the ATO which are derived from interpretations of common law) and also protections against sham contracting.
What Labor is trying to do is to counter government claims that unions would attain a lock hold on conditions of employment, which might be particularly worrying for those who are in a good labour market position, or who are self-employed. The government campaign of course was always largely a scare campaign.
Joe Hockey’s picked up on the shift in rhetoric, but seeks to counter it with a whole lot of bamboozling rhetoric of his own, including an attack on David McKnight, who’s hardly representative of the ALP, I’d have thought, and is also the author of one of the silliest recent op/eds I’ve seen.
But the danger for Labor remains dilution of the message. They’re moving to counter obvious ground the government has made up on IR, but they need also to keep their eyes on the prize and continue to reaffirm what’s wrong with WorkChoices.
The obvious counter to Hockey’s argument that AWAs can’t be bad if a million people have signed them is to point to whether they had a free choice to do so. The government alleges unions will deprive workers of choice. The irony is that the WorkChoices are all stacked in one direction.
Elsewhere: “New” Labor isn’t setting Ken L at Surfdom on fire with enthusiasm.
Sexist, racist union rapists, murderers, bullies and criminals are running the police and protecting them are their police unions but don’t just listen to me…
‘ …And police unions…too often turn into a political force that encourages stonewalling by incumbent governments, in the process destroying public trust. In South Australia, the states Attorney-general and Police Commissioner have knocked back requests for an independent anti-corruption body after allegations surfaced that cops were protecting drug dealers. Even in Queensland where the Fitzgerald Royal commission set the gold-standard for police corruption investigations, the Beattie government’s see-no-evil attitude towards the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island leaves the impression that the police association in that state is too strong by half.
By its very nature, police work requires a zero-tolerance attitude towards corruption within its ranks. If law enforcement is seen by the public as compromised, it loses its ability to do its job.’ - EXTRACT FROM
The Australian’s editorial - Tuesday, January 9, 2007
I think most Aussies respect Saint Kevins halo and grasp of fine detail and feel that he is generally across most pertinent issues.
The only ones he’s stumbled so far as I can see are his overbroad definition of socialism, ( lumping in healthy democratic and libertarian strands with the toxic waste that is Marxism) Then his silence of the lambs on the key question of the sacking-without-notice of at least two democratically elected xtian-socialist governments in this country and finally this knarly one above…these ugly police union gorillas in our midst.
I’m not too fussed about Labor’s fine-tuning of its IR policy, and felt that Beazley’s pledge to ‘rip-up’ the laws was problematic.
Now that the former IR system has been well and truly scrambled, in practical terms there are going to have to be compromises (with the mining industry for instance) that tend to devalue the strength of a blanket commitment to throw the laws out.
Similarly with independent contractors. Howard’s IC legislation was basically designed to legitimise getting people off payroll and passing the costs of workers comp, holiday pay, sick pay, super etc onto individual workers, maintaining the fiction that they were fierce independent entrepreneurial types even though an individual employer has effective control of their day-to-day activities.
But there are a sizeable element of the workforce (IT professionals for instance) who have traditionally worked these arrangements and to who changes would be seen as a threat.
So yes, in using the broad language of fairness Rudd’s just tapping into the zeitgeist and positioning himself to use Howard’s own mantra - ‘I don’t think we need to go too deeply into specifics, people know what I stand for’ - against him.
I agree, Christine, but I do think adopting a more nuanced position makes the political sell more difficult. Which is a bit unfortunate when you think about it!
When will the ALP learn that holding fire on policy just makes them look as opportunist as Howard. Im really tired of hearing a decent line of critique (eg, yesterdays comment on bracket creep and the extra medicare levy) followed by “but we dont have a position yet, in the fullness of time yada yada”.
Excuse me, the election is this year, losers.
This is Beazleyite timidity at its worst, parading as “strategy”. Who will rid us of this troublesome orthodoxy that the ’small target’ politics works?
It’s been noted elsewhere that the adverts run in the major nationals over the Christmas break, seeking advisors and other staff for the new ALP leader and front bench, stated that the conditions for some senior positions would be covered by AWAs. I’m surprised some folks haven’t tried to make a lot more mileage out of this, though of course the truth of the matter is that the ALP has no more ‘choice’ about it than anyone else.
Parenthetically, in more than a decade of watching such things I can’t recall seeing so many senior positions advertised at once - not even after an election. If it indicates that the ALP is seriously looking for new advice and ideas, then there might be some hope after all …
There is a general belief that vast numbers of blue-collar workers have 1) become self-employed and 2) shifted their voting behaviour as a result. This is not true as I showed at the last APSA conference, see here (pdf).
Holding fire on policy also means that the policy is not reported on in terms of what’s in the policy, and not commented on by journalists with expertise in that policy area. It means that the policy, when eventually released during the election campaign, gets hacked and stretched into the procrustean bed of the “game frame” within which the media reports elections, and gets reported on by political reporters who often aren’t intellectually equipped to understand the policy or to interpret it to the public. Latham’s Tasmanian forestry policy announcement is a case in point. Had the policy been announced two months (or more) before the last election, its political effects would have been far more positive for Labor.
True. But I don’t think that Rudd has any choice because he is technically not the employer.
Thanks for the link, Geoff. Haven’t got time right now to have a look but I’ll look forward to doing so. I’m glad someone’s done something on that. I’ve been arguing for a while based on ABS figures the size of this group has been massively overstated, but the ABS figures don’t allow you to decompose the “self-employed/contractors” etc. category.
wpd, that’s right I believe - the Department of Finance (I think) is and it’s government policy to offer AWAs for staffers above a certain level.
Emerson is actually playing a very clever game here, and using the same tactics as the labour hire industry and its Howard government supporters.
The core of the labour hire industry strategy has been to misrepresent its aims, with power buried in trivial-seeming clauses or non-legislative administrative procedures.
Emerson is basically calling their bluff. He’s saying there won’t be many changes, except we’ll just have a good test for sham contracting arrangements and a formal definition of contractor. Labour hire lobbyists fought bitterly to ensure there were no definitions of contractor, because the lack makes any court challenges extremely expensive.
Now, the absense of these in the Independent Contractors Act happen to be the two key areas that let the labour hire firms control contractors, and effectively work against genuine contracting. Howard knows this. Hockey does too. I don’t know whether Kevin Andrews gets it or not.
The labour hire industry and Howard can’t condemn this approach without admitting their own duplicity.
Some might point to the provisions against sham contracting in the Act, but those provisions are actually another illustration of duplicity, for they’re effectively useless as implemented in the Act.
I would think the labour hire lobbyists and Howard would be squirming at this stage.
Be interested in how any change would affect the courier industry as a friend of mine works there and is employed as a subbie,but gets 100% of her income from one source she gets no holiday pay sickies nothing at all shits me off as I think she is being exploited.
Always thought that a lot of subbies were very dodgie,and the working for one employer was a trick,I dont think I,m to far wrong
I’m wondering if there is some confusion here - and probably a bit deliberately by all parties involved. There are “contractors” of which “independent contractors” are a sub-set. The test must be for independence.
A couple of years ago, before the big IR changes, about 30% of employment agreements were common law contracts. At that time about 2.5% were AWAs. That proportion won’t have stayed the same as the number of AWA’s have grown.
I’m currently employed under a common law contract, but wouldn’t consider myself to be a “contractor” in any other aspect of my employment relationship. But there’s alot of us out there.
Kevin Rudd probably does have a choice about whether his senior staff are employed on a AWA or under the Members of Parliament Staff Certified Agreement. He can offer higher pay and better conditions with an AWA (in federal parliamentary employment relationships).
And a change of leader and the flow on of a reshuffle will result in jobs being spilled in some places, with some people and being picked up elsewhere.
As a small business person I should be happy with Howard’s IR law changes. And some aspects do serve my interests. But this is legislation that should never have happened. The cause of it is a monummental failure of ALL levels of Australian government to develop a coordinated strategic regional plan coupled with the smug greed of the near retirement baby boomers who hold a significant chunk of Australain real estate.
Australia should be a mosaic or 20 or so medium sized workable cities of 800,000 to 1,200,000 people with 5 or so larger centres. Instead we have marginally workable 4 monolithic cities which are now increasing required to raid resources (water, energy) from surrounding communities to stay viable. Add to that the consequences of the last 14 years of low interest rates with no lending restraints seen in the form of runaway real estate prices. The end result is mass commercial enslavement of those who are able to “hook into” property ownership, isolation of those people with low incomes, and a steady consolidation of overall wealth in the hands of an ever smaller group of situationally lucky people.
With house prices of $500,000 to 1,000,000 being now common the plight of people on incomes of $18 per hour is truly bleak. How can they ever hope to fit into the Australian life cycle. They are stalled at the beginning.
And the natural economic forces which should have incomes increase to over come the imbalance have been distorted in their effect.
So here we have the field of forces laid out. In one corner we have a bunch of smuggly wealthy propery owners. In another corner we have a bunch of people keen to join the first bunch. In a third corner we have a bunch of business people who know that hey will have to foot the bill if bunch “b” is to join bunch “a”. In the forth corner is a gateway to “goodies”, which has appeal to all parties. By increasing the divide between bunch “a” and bunch “b”, bunch “c” has become vulnerable to the universal appeal of goodies gateway “d”. How this system resolves itself will most likely be influenced more by circumstance than by constraint. It is entirely possible that environmental forces will overide all prior interests, and rearrange all needs. A kind of system reset, much as global war tends to do.
The IR changes are an attempt to suppress the natural balancing process. But as we are all intuitively aware, the greater the forces in a system the more unstable it becomes.
There is an ever present need to keep our working relationships relevent to our environment. Howards IR changes are a necessary consequence of an ever changing world. I would, however, prefer to see them implemented with an “equal human” flavour rather than a “master and slave” flavour. This is what Rudd is about.