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Off To The Senate

By Brian Boyd, VTHC Secretary
February 2009

The VTHC has sent in a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the draft Fair Work Bill.  The Fair Work Bill is supposed to replace the WorkChoices and WR Acts from the Howard era.As the debate around the new IR bill occurs, some Liberal-National Party MP’s do not want to acknowledge that they lost the November 2007 federal election.  The fact is that most Australians rejected the draconian nature of the former government’s IR laws.

The debate around the proposed new legislation has been hijacked by employer and business associations who have been supposedly hysterical about key aspects of the Bill.  Slandering trade unions has been particularly over the top, but their main agenda is trying to stop workers winning back their rights at work.

These employer bodies of course have short memories.  After the 2004 federal election, when Mr Howard won unexpectedly the control of the Senate, they had no problems over the summer of December 04-February 05 rushing to Canberra with their legal teams.  They had been invited by John Howard to brainstorm the creation of WorkChoices.  No even handedness or concern from due process in that lawyers feast!  Everything and anything was thrown on the table that could reduce Australian workers rights at work.

Two issues were high on the list when Work Choices was in its creation phase: replacing genuine Collective Bargaining with individual contracts AWA’s and severely restricting trade unions from fairly and effectively representing workers.  These aims were further underpinned with severe regulations directed at denying workable Right of Entry provisions and gutting rights to industrial action.

Although the new draft Rudd/Gillard IR legislation puts collective bargaining notionally back in the main frame, it still contains restrictions on what the parties can bargain about and continues to impose restrictions on the bargaining process per se.

It doesn’t matter how much the employers yell and spin about the proposed right of entry provisions in the new legislation, in essence it retains the Work Choices right of entry rules.  Similarly, the proposed new bargaining regime has Work Choices-type restrictions.

The Bill does not assist in any practical way the longstanding rights of workers to have access in the workplace to union assistance, advice and support.  For over a hundred years, it has never been demonstrated that trade unions have systematically abused the right of entry practice.  In fact, there is no demonstrable need to give any consideration to impose safeguards in relation to this matter.

The current misrepresentation of the right of entry question by employers is, to be frank, disgusting. This well established, matter of fact practice has been around for ever.  Simply, restrictions were imposed on the Building Industry in 2004 and were opportunistically grabbed by all other employers during the drafting of Work Choices in 2005.  Right of Entry was not something that was recently invented.  It began as a logical practice when unions began to come into being and when their respective organisational structures by necessity, required regular dialogue with their constituency.

As an issue, employers have never raised it as a central or core issue before.  The 2004 development in the building industry (and this was imposed via connivance) was seized on, as a precedent to be exploited and expanded upon.

Now it’s being claimed that right of entry is something new, terrible, and unheard of.

If the government is sincere about replacing AWA’s with genuine collective bargaining, then it needs to allow the interested parties to be able to bargain freely as per ILO conventions, with unions in particular being able to represent workers freely, without hindrance as again per ILO conventions.

The Senate hearings offer us an opportunity to highlight our ongoing concerns about the Fair Work Bill.