As for reading government publications & departmental advice about how my experience will be…. Hahahahahhahahahahahahaha

…

Laugh all you like but it is these documents that consitute workchoices, SATP and not mutant versions endorsed by bosses and their offsiders or cheersquads.

Try ‘enterprise agreement’, ‘collective agreement’. ‘greenfields agreement’, ‘EBA’. “non-union agreement” for starters – all names I’ve heard floating around my workplace, used by workers and managers alike. And all quite distinct from what anyone understood as an AWA.

If he goes to write a GHA, he will discover what I said is fair dinkum.

It is quite a mind bender, trying to decide between a collective agreement, or individual agreements. It is not easy, and advice is very mixed. Akin to being blindfolded just before coming to a fork in the road.

Advice from those who have tried each type of agreement tends to differ markedly from the advice given by those who have only observed from the sidelines.

Perhaps you could write a piece Steve, on the relative merits of each. Which would you choose to write and implement if you were stuck with workchoices? Collective or Individual?

From the style of comments above I would hazard a guess that until it was mentioned here tonight, very few commenters here had any idea that collective workplace agreements are a part of workchoices. It is not an aspect which gets much publicity, and to the less zealotic and more reasoned of those here, it should be a clue that there could be more to workchoices than they have been told by certain vested interests.

From the way he write, it is possible that his contact with workchoices is not much closer than reading about it.

I don’t have an opinion, I am simply dealing with legislation as it stands.

Politics and opinions (as such) on workchoices are largely restricted to people for whom it is an abstract concept, rather than something which is intruding into their lives.

You are getting into a terminology discussion. In all the wrangling with workchoices, I have never heard any of the forms of workplace agreement referred to, by anybody, as anything but “AWA”.

I am happy to call them anything which will please commenters. “Goodbye John Agreement” is fine with me (GJA – doesn’t roll off the tongue well enough, perhaps GHA instead?)

I am willing to share my experience with commenters. It is their choice if they wish to not believe my experiences, which like all experiences, are vastly different to what I thought they would be when attending seminars.

As for reading government publications & departmental advice about how my experience will be…. Hahahahahhahahahahahahaha…. (For example, Did anybody here have the misfortune to attend an ATO run GST-workshop? Hahahahahadoubled)

Steve: There is nothing “funny” about my not mentioning prohibited content. In the discussions of GHA’s we have not got anywhere near that stage. We are still bogged down over what is a GHA (known elsewhere as an AWA). Rather like the real life experience.

Besides, in dealing with a GHA, prohibited content is not an issue. It is prohibted, & never makes it anywhere near the process. The process is difficult enough, no need to go out finding more stuff to complicate things.

Prohibited content is something I have never heard of except as a brief point mentioned in seminars during a speedy “walk-through” of the legislation.

The negative political impact on the federal government, resulting from having implemented workchoices, is beyond dispute everywhere except at a Liberal Party press conference.

There are many aspects of the legislation for which I cannot understand the rationale. There are many aspects to the legislation for which I do not understand the ideology, (curiously, my staff pointed out what were to them perfectly sensible reasons – in their ideology – for banning of collective bargaining, this came at the end of one of the more surreal boss-worker arguments I have ever been party to, being as I have never understood why collective bargaining is banned)