The ACTU has released polling which finds that 53% of respondents believe that Tony Abbott would reintroduce WorkChoices under another name.
Abbott’s been addressing some business functions of late, no doubt because he has to build some bridges and mend some fences on economic issues, and raise some campaign dosh. It’s had nowhere near as prominent a part in reporting as his remarks on virginity and ironing, but I did notice that he’d been preaching the virtues of “flexibility” in industrial relations. No detail, but it’s not hard to deconstruct the message he’s sending.
Update: Via Andrew Reynolds in comments, a link to the poll.
Update: Abbott wants to scrap penalty rates and bring back statutory individual employment agreements.
Julia Gillard has criticised the decision of the Fair Pay Commission to award no increase in the federal minimum wage. She accurately notes that the decision will have an impact on other workers as well, because the safety net is the floor which underpins bargaining.
However, Gillard and Kevin Rudd might themselves bear some of the responsibility for this decision, which will – rightly – be a political problem for the Labor government. The Commission was heavily criticised by Labor in opposition, and next year it’s due to be abolished, its functions rolled into the AIRC’s replacement – Fair Work Australia. If the criticisms made of the process and of the narrow economic orthodoxy of its chair, Professor Ian Harper, have merit, it surely should have been open to the ALP to hand back the wage setting powers to the AIRC earlier. The ’softly, softly’ approach to IR reform is full of contradictions, one of which will unfortunately now impact on those least able to afford to shrug their shoulders at the political game. It isn’t a good look for a Labor government.
Elsewhere: Via Andos in comments on another thread, a link to a useful interview on ABC Radio with ACOSS. The point is made that research from the OECD (and from other sources, I might add) debunks the notion that there is a strong correlation between small rises in minimum wages and unemployment.
Update: Matt C notes in comments that the FPC’s own modelling of its previous decisions shows only a minimal effect on unemployment of a decision not to increase the rate.
Elsewhere: Rob Corr.
Update: New post.
Probably one of the most laudable steps taken by the Rudd government has been the attention given by Senator John Faulkner as Special Minister of State to cleaning up the electoral system. Admittedly, this isn’t one of the funky and sexy issues the media likes to highlight, but the importance of the Green Paper on Electoral Reform is profound.
But while most Australians probably had other things on their mind, John Howard’s former Workplace Relations advisor and Alexander Downer’s replacement as Mayo MP, Jamie Briggs, found time on Boxing Day to denounce third party campaigns as a “a growing cancer in our democracy”.
Briggs named GetUp! and the ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign as examples of what he was talking about.
I don’t have any particular problem with disclosure of funding for third party campaigns, though I would object to caps on donations. But the hyperbole from Briggs (and no doubt his views are shared by Nick Minchin and others) is absurd and dangerous. Props to Andrew Norton for sounding the alarm. Norton refers to Briggs’ call for disclosure and observes:
Continue reading ‘The vigilance of (il)Liberalism never sleeps’
Julia Gillard is certainly capable of a sophisticated negotiating strategy, and it’s been interesting to observe that the process of formulating the legislation to implement Forward With Fairness and replace WorkChoices – while managed largely behind closed doors – was accompanied over the year by a fair bit of crowing from business that they’d extracted more concessions than in the two documents released before last year’s election. However, the ALP caucus and the ACTU also belatedly secured more of what they wanted – particularly in last resort arbitration, multi-enterprise bargaining for low paid workers, good faith bargaining and union entry and records inspections rights. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such changes were always contemplated, and certainly explicit attention to the needs of workers with poor bargaining power spread across a number of work sites (for instance cleaners or employees in light manufacturing) was part of the election policy. What is entirely predictable is the tenor of the business reaction, which you can get a sense of quickly by reading this story from yesterday’s Australian. Unions are back and the sky will fall in! In fact, the points business objects to really just serve to underpin bargaining. There’s an element of balancing equity with efficiency, which has always been part of the IR framework in Australia, but we certainly haven’t “gone back to the future”. In many ways, the legislation could legitimately have gone further in redressing some of the imbalance of power in the bargaining process.
If, although as one would imagine there’s some equivocation going on, the opposition allow the laws to pass substantially unaltered, the business whining will be futile. That in itself may push the opposition into a more negative stance. The passage of the laws through the Senate early next year could get interesting.
…45% of Australians think so, according to this fortnight’s Essential Research poll. As a bit of an addendum to my earlier post about Julia Gillard’s speech last week to the National Press Club on the detail of the Forward with Fairness bills which will shortly be introduced into parliament, I should also note that many Labor MPs have been concerned by reports they’re receiving from constituents about continuing abuses of workplace power. This is more the everyday bastardry that WorkChoices encouraged, rather than the headline anti-union moves of big corporations like Telstra. A lot of voters assumed that WorkChoices had already been “torn up”, and there’s significant pressure on Gillard to bring forward some of the implementation dates for aspects of the new legislation.
The whole “keep business satisfied” implementation agenda might have seemed like a good idea last year. It’s not looking so flash now, particularly as the ACTU finally wakes up to the fact that they’ve effectively been locked out of the policy making process.
Elsewhere: More discussion of the poll at The Poll Bludger. Also interesting is the comparison with ratings of attributes between Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd (with the proviso that the data on Rudd dates from June). Turnbull will be worried at the 47% “out of touch” figure. How do you actually turn that around? Brendan Nelson didn’t do so by emoting and going trucking.
Earlier in the year, writing in On Line Opinion, I thought that Labor’s “Forward With Fairness” industrial relations policy was best interpreted as an attempt to entrench a new workplace settlement acceptable to all parties – and I still think that’s the Rudd government’s main game. However, it’s now becoming clearer that an element of union bashing is involved – the tired old Third Way game of establishing supposedly electorally popular distance from teh evil labour movement, and also that the “balance” being struck is tilted quite significantly in the direction of employers. Among other things, this explains the dissent in the ranks of unions toward the lacklustre public performance in holding Labor accountable from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence. It’s also becoming clearer – with the resurrection of demands for “statutory individual contracts” by Julie Bishop as a condition of Senate passage – that the model hasn’t succeeded in producing consensus.
Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.
It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.
Continue reading ‘Julia Gillard and the unions’
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