Liam Mitchell
Employers are rubbing their hands with glee at the early Christmas presents PM John Howard's new industrial relations laws promise them.
The prospects of cutting labour costs, reducing or eliminating benefits such as long-service leave and being able to more easily sack workers, and of weakening trade union influence in all workplaces, are making business leaders extremely happy.
Howard has always done big business' bidding. The proposed industrial relations "reforms" are in fact being written by the Business Council of Australia, which represents many of the largest companies in Australia.
The BCA advocates the complete removal of unfair dismissal protection, the eradication of the award safety net and limits on statutory protection. These changes would give big business most of what it wants and destroy many hard-won conditions for workers.
While enterprise bargaining was good for Australian bosses at the time it was introduced, because it enabled wages and conditions to be negotiated at a company level instead of an industry level, that system is no longer enough for them. Capitalism constantly strives to lower the wages bill and other operating costs, and individual contracts — Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) — do that job. By strangling collective bargaining, the government's aim is to further break down the strength workers gain by bargaining in groups, and fully individualise working conditions. Isolating workers from each other weakens their ability to stop attacks on working conditions.
The government's laws to sideline the unions are hinged around reducing unions' ability to influence workplace bargaining by making each worker sign a consent form to allow the union to act on their behalf. The more the bosses can keep unions out of workplaces, the less will be the challenge to bosses extracting maximum profits out of workers' labour.
While it will be illegal under the new laws to force existing employees to sign AWAs, employers will be able to require new employees to sign them. Some federal government departments have already begun to implement this.
Signing an AWA will supposedly be voluntary, but bosses are already forcing workers to sign AWAs using threats and intimidation. Labour hire, which is rife with individual contracts, and nearly always casual, is rapidly getting a foothold in many industries as bosses start contracting out their work force to labour-hire companies in a bid to lower costs.
Under the new laws, benefits such as long-service leave, redundancy pay, penalty and public holiday rates, and standard hours of work are under threat. The only conditions that will nominally remain protected are the minimum wage (set by a government-appointed commission), four weeks' annual leave, parental leave, a 38-hour week and eight days' annual sick leave. Anything else not included in an AWA will not have to be paid.
This means, for example, that if there is no penalty rates provision in an AWA, overtime will be paid at the standard rate, making the 38-hour week meaningless. Wages are likely to be lower than the current going rate and employers can stop paying their superannuation contribution — another effective pay cut.
Awards that currently provide better than average conditions will be gutted and even those conditions left untouched will not necessarily be included in an AWA. With the end of the "no disadvantage test" and the certification process, AWAs are likely to provide vastly inferior conditions than current awards.
Although AWAs are supposedly individually negotiated, all employees in a workplace are generally presented with the same contract to sign. Only at the management level have different AWAs been negotiated with individual employees. Howard's talk about AWAs giving each worker more flexibility to choose his or her working conditions is a lie.
Workers will be individually pulled into meetings with management and presented with a contract that the boss has constructed with the help of lawyers, accountants and "human relations experts". Furthermore, the boss will demand that the worker sign the contract, or lose their job or take a pay cut. Those sorts of pressures will be very difficult for any worker to withstand.
The new laws will also remove workers' protection from unfair dismissal if they are employed in an enterprise of less than 100 employees — approximately 90% of the workforce. Unfair dismissal laws will be replaced by legislation that makes it unlawful to sack someone on the basis of discrimination.
Whereas at present a worker can appeal to the Industrial Relations Commission for a ruling on their sacking, discrimination will have to be proved in a court of law, a more difficult and expensive process. This change gives bosses considerably more power over their employees — the fear of being sacked will "soften" up workers to accept whatever the boss wants.
[For more information about the national campaign to stop the attacks on worker and union rights, visit .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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