This issue is something I’d planned to write about but have lacked time to do so. Some very important changes to the legal regulation of working conditions are being made in this country largely beneath the radar of media scrutiny - outside the business press. So I’m happy to post this contribution from Greens Senator for Western Australia, Rachel Siewert. - MB
Senator Rachel Siewert is the Australian Greens spokesperson on Industrial Relations.
Massive upheaval is occurring to Australia’s standard employment conditions and minimum wages, with little to no understanding or public attention.
The ‘award modernisation’ process currently underway in the AIRC, following a request from the Workplace Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, will impact on all Australian workers … either directly through loss of conditions or indirectly through lowering the base from which agreements can be made.
While the Rudd Government likes to compare its IR policy with Work Choices (…so it can say things are slightly better than they might have been), a better way of evaluating their policy is to look at the industrial relations system that existed in Australia before the aberration of Work Choices. On this test the Government is failing to provide adequate protection for workers.
Surprisingly, when it comes to stripping awards, this ALP Government is going further than Howard and Reith were able to (before the Coalition had the numbers in the Senate) in reducing award conditions and fundamentally changing the nature of the award system.
The award system, while not perfect, provided a comprehensive safety net of wages and conditions which for a century underpinned the rights of workers and preserved the relative equity of Australian society.
The term ‘modernisation’ hides the reality of a reduced safety net, continuing AWAs by another name (ITEAs) … and the politicisation of our minimum standards of work.
The key changes being made to the award system by the ALP government are:
* Reducing the number of conditions in awards to 10 (awards often have up to 30 conditions);
* Reducing the number of awards;
* Introducing a ‘flexibility clause’ into all awards;
* Ensuring the AIRC will only be able to alter awards in accordance with a request from the Minister, or at four yearly reviews; and
* Removing the ability of the AIRC to hear and determine cases on appropriate award conditions.
The reduction in the numbers of awards and the number of conditions in each award will lead inevitably to a reduced safety net, with some workers not only losing actual conditions but also having their safety net conditions watered down. There is no other result possible – some workers will lose conditions, including take home pay.
The ‘flexibility clauses’ which are mandatory in all awards (and collective agreements) effectively create an ‘AWA-Lite’. They will allow employers to enter into individual agreements to alter certain award matters, including penalty rates, overtime rates and allowances. We have been told that these agreements will be subject to an overall no-disadvantage test, although there is no word yet on how this will be enforced.
This is a worrying development for a couple of crucial reasons.
Firstly, award workers are by definition low-paid and face significant barriers to participating in fair bargaining (…that is why they are award workers and not on another form of agreement). These clauses operate like AWAs for these workers, and given that they can affect penalty and overtime rates, they can potentially lead to even less take-home pay.
While Work Choices AWAs received the most attention, AWAs existed before Work Choices, and used a similar no-disadvantage test as that in the proposed flexibility clauses. Prior to Work Choices, AWAs weren’t used very much across most of Australia, but we picked up more in my home state of WA after the Court Government’s state-based individual workplace contracts were overturned.
The evidence shows that these pre-Work Choices AWAs also led to reduced conditions and take home pay for workers.
Secondly, individual agreements undermine the safety net. Can we really continue to call it a safety net when key conditions can be bargained away?
There are serious questions of fairness about these clauses and how they will work. Most of the conditions Australian workers enjoy in the workplaces today came about through the award system – annual leave, sick leave, carers leave, parental leave, penalty rates, overtime rates, termination and redundancy rights and pay … and more recently, rights to flexible hours on return to work after maternity leave.
The value of the AIRC determining contemporary community standards though award ‘test cases’ lay with the open, transparent and independent way in which they were processed, with stakeholders able to bring application for changes that were then evaluated by the Commission.
Awards will now become static instruments. However, our workplaces and our society will remain changing, dynamic systems, far from static. We need to ensure there is sufficient ability in the new system to respond to changing circumstances.
From what we can gather from the ALP’s policy, new modern awards will only be able to be changed by Fair Work Australia following a request from the Minister or at 4 yearly reviews.
This process politicises our minimum conditions. Do we have faith that federal governments will respond appropriately to changes in workplace and our labour market into the future?
The continued lack of paid maternity leave suggests Governments are not particularly willing to adopt new standards in workplace conditions even when there is significant support for a new measure.
There can be no question that our awards need to be updated. Many awards do not reflect contemporary work practices or standards, and the award system languished in the decade under Howard. However, there is a huge difference between genuinely updating awards to reflect modern workplaces … and stripping conditions out of the safety net.
The process being undertaken by the AIRC is also of grave concern. It is a huge task to re-create a new award system – yet insufficient time is being given to this task. In the rush to simplify awards by 2010 to appease big business, the Government is leaving workers behind.
In the end we have an ALP Government accepting in large part the fundamental ideological shift made by the Howard Government to abandon conciliation and arbitration along with the role of worker and employer representatives in that system.
The ALP is not “ripping up” Work Choices or even significantly rolling it back – rather this Government is explicitly accepting the basic architecture of the Howard plan, including the trashing of the award system.
It will be interesting to see how much longer Australian workers and their unions continue to put up with it…
Senator Rachel Siewert.
Cross-posted at Greensblog.
This was quite a good post.
The ALP is not “ripping up” Work Choices or even significantly rolling it back – rather this Government is explicitly accepting the basic architecture of the Howard plan, including the trashing of the award system.
It will be interesting to see how much longer Australian workers and their unions continue to put up with it…
A large part of the anti-Workchoices campaign conducted by the unions amounted to little more than pro-ALP election support. This is a great shame, as one of the few positive things that can be said about Workchoices is that it gave unions and workers a reason and opportunity to organise and fight for better pay and conditions. The ‘anyone but Howard’ mentality has seen the ALP elected (largely on the back of swings in blue-collar areas), but nothing much has been gained by workers in the meantime.
Complete ignorance of the award system. Plenty of workers on awards are anything but low-paid. Have a look at public sector awards.
Excellent post and thanks for it. Makes one wonder about all those meetings with Business Gillard and Rudd had prior to the election.
Without condoning what Government Rudd is doing, surely there is value in seeing this issue as integral to the Climate Change adjustments yet to come: that flexibility is required for an economy that will necessarily shift. Again, not to agree with it, yet Govt Rudd with much to juggle within the Australian agenda let alone any effects of possible world downturns may be wanting to keep as many balls in the air as possible. (I don’t think “growing them” is a fair criticism in this perspective; it’s a case of getting the policy mix IR and CC right, whatever that is).
The point here is also to acknowledge the difficulty of managing for the future in testing times. With a passing thought this is pressing now against the backdrop of the wasted years.
Complete ignorance of the award system. Plenty of workers on awards are anything but low-paid. Have a look at public sector awards.
Wrong. Federal public sector ‘Awards’ are in fact collective agreements. Paid rates awards have not been permitted in the federal jurisdiction since the WRA 1996.
State awards come closer to your mark, but the point about bargaining establishes the point made here by Siewert. State public sector workers are able to bargain collectively.
Get over the fact that neoliberal labour market approaches are as popular as a pork chop in a synagogue, and stop calling people ‘ignorant’ when you are misleading people either deliberately or inadvertantly about an important point.
Conciliation and arbitration as central processes in Australian IR were abandoned in the 1980s. Unions will cease to put up with the rolling back of arbitration as soon as they and their members cease to benefit from EBAs.
Yes. I welcome the rejection of the principle that wages and conditions should be set only by worker and boss.
The basic problem is that the Bereton-Keating 1990s IR model implicitly assumed that most workers would be union members negotiating EBAs. This wasn’t case then and now is even less so. The AIRC was thinking about this problem in 1995. if individual contracts are discouraged how are non-unionised workers going to keep up?
Just repeal the laws against closed shops, and the laws establishing non-union membership as a protected class of political expression that may not be discriminated against, and it’ll all fix itself up.
Come someone point me to a cogent argument as to why a government body, whether the AIRC or FWA or whatever, should mandate that a worker in one industry is entitled to a minimum wage, or other conditions, that are lower than the minimum award wage prevailing in another industry? Perhaps I am misunderstanding exactly what the award system does; does the award system say, for example, that a carpenter should be paid more than a plumber?
BBB
Who cares? IR is soooo 2007.