New Federal IR Laws Debacle
By
Brian Boyd, VTHC Secretary 8th September 2008
The NSW and QLD State ALP Governments are holding back on their involvement in the proposed new national IR framework. This was used recently as another excuse for the delay in replacing Howard’s draconian IR legacy with a fairer system.
There has been media commentary that unions “are getting restless”. This is an understatement.
While there are no delays in freeing up the
financial markets via COAG, like reducing red tape for employers, there is no hurry to free up the
labour market by allowing Australian workers to have genuine collective bargaining rights. Such rights for workers were virtually wiped out by 12 years of Howard rule.
Big business is always calling for the lifting of restrictions on how they go about making profits. At the same time, their representative bodies like the BCA, AIG, ACCI and the Mining Industry Employers cry hypocritical tears of blood if they think the new IR Laws in anyway may allow workers to bargain for a fair price for their labour, especially via union representation.
We were informed recently that the “hollow’ media spin doctors working for Kevin Rudd apparently promote the kicking of trade unions at any opportunity. Building unions get kicked regularly. Recently the teachers union (AEU) became the new punching bag, because they dared enter into the debate about the future of education.
Julia Gillard created a ‘straw-man’ scenario when she claimed the AEU was “fighting yesterday battles” and that the federal government was “on about…every Australian child [should] get the best possible education”.
Where is the evidence that teachers and their union have ever suggested they don’t want the best possible education for Australian children? For decades the teacher unions have been an integral part of arguing for
better public school systems and
ongoing quality curriculum development. It is not a ‘yesterdays’ fight to participate in the public debate with alternative viewpoints about how to achieve this worthwhile aim. It’s a false dichotomy created by Gillard and she knows it. Further it is an old conservative trick to try to sideline teachers when the future of education is on the political agenda and being discussed. No government has a monopoly in this important debate. PM Rudd went one better, relishing some ‘argy bargy’ with the teachers. Desperate stuff and again a conservative approach to a serious issue from the supposed progressive side of politics. Not wanting to engage with the relevant union this early in the government’s term is not a good sign.
On another front employers like ACCI have shed crocodile tears about the recent spate of job losses e.g. Ford, Holden, SPC, Goodyear. They claim, at the same time: “we cannot control global forces” (Peter Anderson 27/8).Yet it is these representatives of big companies that have lobbied successive governments over many decades to expose the nations manufacturing base to those very same “global forces”.
They also call for “cuts in interest rates by the RBA”. When the interest rates were going up regularly under Howard, they said nothing. They go on to argue for federal government policy “to lift productivity and reduce business costs”. Why would workers buy into this scenario when they can’t get decent wages and well know that ‘reducing business costs’ is code for more job losses!
Rudd and Gillard bend over backwards to please the corporate sector, but get their noses rubbed in it nearly every day of the week. No assistance from this sector for the fight against global warming; sackings occur on a huge scale undermining government economic credentials; blatant ongoing use of WorkChoices is making them look silly. There is no recognition at all from the big end of town of the November 2007 mandate for a new fairer national IR System.
Gillard knows how important it is for the trade union movement to be able to acknowledge that the new IR laws will have a measurable, commensurate outcome to the sustained campaign of ‘Your Rights @Work – Worth Fighting For’.
Yet in a recent newspaper article (23/8) she mocked the efforts of the negotiators saying they get their ‘ thrills’ by making sure all the sub - clauses are in the right place “and we’re going to keep slipping the pizza to them under the door and passing the cans of coke through the service hatch until they get the details right”.
Julia Gillard might think it's a joke but many hundreds of thousands of Australian workers who marched across the nation against Howard don’t think it is funny. They expect IR laws that will give back their collective bargaining rights. They also want the government to resist the ‘push-back’ from employers intent on keeping as much of Howard’s IR legacy in place as possible. In particular, workers expect their trade union negotiators to pay a lot of attention to the detail. From hard experience workers know the cashed up employers will manipulate the law in the courts for years over any issue.
Workers have seen governments come and go, while most employers will always stay focused on paying as less as possible and limiting their right to bargain.
They saw the April 2007 National ALP IR Policy ‘revised’ in August 2007 because of employers whinging about minor matters in the lead up to the Federal election.
On recent speculation about Peter Costello staying on or not in federal politics (31/8), Julia Gillard said she would welcome Costello being on the front bench of the opposition and would relish “reminding the Australian public” that Costello was one of the key architects of the previous governments WorkChoices legislation. Fair enough, but as each day passes, as each month goes by it is Gillard being seen as the new keeper and perpetuator of that very same draconian legislation!
Just ask, for example, workers in Telstra and in federal public service. Managers continue to push non-union and individual agreements. No recognition of the federal governments policy of supporting collective and good faith bargaining. Where do they get comfort to be so confrontational and contemptible of their respective workforces?
Recently the CPSU asked the AIRC to prescribe good faith bargaining rules for the federal public sector, saying that numerous federal agencies – including Minister Gillard’s DEEWR – are failing to comply with new requirements to give employees the chance to opt for a union-negotiated agreement.
In its application the CPSU highlighted what it says were shortcomings in the processes used by agencies including the DEEWR, National Film and Sound Archive, Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism and Department of Finance and Deregulation and Centrelink.
The union said the agencies were failing to comply with the spirit and intent of the good faith obligations under the
Australian Government Employment Bargaining Framework, which requires agencies to “genuinely bargain” when making agreements and to “genuinely consult” employees on their preferred form of agreement.
The union said the agencies’ conduct was also at odds with the Federal Government’s policy position on good faith bargaining.
Here we have the government’s own bureaucracy treating it with disdain.
Conservative newspapers like The Australian like to bash organised labour at every opportunity. In a recent Editorial (2/8/08) it gloated pathetically: “The unions’ costly investment in the [2007 Federal] election…will not save them from extinction. “Union membership is in decline in most globalised economics as the labour force adapts to the logic and benefits of the free market”.
Well the so called ‘benefits’ of the free market have just seen over 5000 Victorian jobs, mainly in manufacturing, disappear. Those sacked workers and many others who have seen them go out the factory gate are
not adapting to these consequences of globalisation. They are angry.
The same editorial claimed: Unions…. “must recognise their contribution to their own downfall…[through their]… obsession with old-fashioned collective bargaining has sealed its fate”.
The facts are that countless thousands of Australian workers are demanding the protection of a union negotiated collective bargain. With interest rates remaining high, high petrol prices, higher food prices etc they do not want to be working under the whim of individual arrangements, dictated by an employer.
This is why there is growing pressure on the Rudd/Gillard government to deliver a fair IR system sooner rather than later. Those same workers are wary of some of the language coming out of
Canberra.
Kevin Rudd said recently he’s governing from the “reforming centre” political framework. Julia Gillard around the same time said she’s from the “progressive centre” of the political spectrum.
Where was this explained in the lead up to November 2007 and, more importantly, what does it really mean?
We should remember Howard had no qualms about governing from and/on behalf of the far right, conservative and big business side of politics. No apologies and no regrets, even when he finally hit the fence.
Yet the ALP leaders feel they need to play around in some magical ‘middle ground’ sand pit, as if it’s righteous and well meaning.
They were not voted in in order to trivialise what had to be fixed – the anti-worker, draconian IR laws of John Howard.
There are warning signs for what might be in the yet to be released substantive IR Bill.
The
undebated ALP Policy Implementation Plan of August 2007, launched by Julia Gillard nearly four months after the 2007 Federal ALP National Conference, contains a lot of verbiage designed to placate the employers:
“Labor will support collective enterprise bargaining regardless of whether employees choose to negotiate through a union or without a union. Labor will also ensure that within the framework of collective enterprise agreements there is the flexibility for an employer and employee to make additional arrangements on an individual level”.
Under Labor’s proposed agreements, where “employees do not wish to be represented by a union, employers and employees will be able to bargain collectively…without any union involvement”.
All collective agreements will also be required to contain flexibility clauses giving the employer and individual employee the means to directly negotiate over certain conditions of employment, such as hours of work and removal of award conditions when employees are paid more than a certain rate.
The latest overview in the
Journal of Industrial Relations of
Labor’s IR policy proposals is unequivocal in its conclusions as to the level of choice employers will have under the current ALP proposals. The editorial says in its assessment of the longer-term implications of Labor’s new IR policy regime, “For employers with award employees there are new opportunities and incentives to seek more flexible arrangements: new flexibility clauses, the continuation of enterprise awards,
non-union collective agreements and, if all else fails, easy access to common law individual contracts”.
The emphasis on the individual is absurd.
In fact these P.I.P. references would, on their own, explain why employers like Telstra, BHP, the Federal Public Service bureaucrats and so on feel so comfortable in taking on their employees.
The ‘Your Rights@Work” campaign needs to be cranked up.
