Victorian Trades Hall Council. The voice of Victorian workers since 1856.Victorian Trades Hall Council. The voice of Victorian workers since 1856.

IR Laws to Force Down Minimum Wage

The Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, has been forced to release a report which shows the new workplace relations system will provide smaller wage increases for low income earners, a central part of the union movement’s criticism of the laws.
Howard and Costello’s denials that there would be any negative impact from the new laws are in tatters and Labor has accused the Treasurer of misleading Parliament and called on him to resign.

The Treasurer came under attack after The Australian newspaper revealed the contents of a Treasury Department briefing outlining the impacts of the WorkChoices legislation.

The briefing suggests that wages for 1.6 million low-income earners will fall under the new Fair Pay Commission and that employment growth will be “not huge”. It also advises that productivity growth will be “slow” and “difficult to quantify”.

In contrast to the government’s spin of recent months, there is also “no clear difference in productivity gains between collective and individual agreements”.

The Treasury advice confirms the position the union movement has consistently held since the government first outlined its IR agenda. Namely, that this legislation contains significantly harmful measures for Australian workers and no clear benefits to the economy.

It is an ideologically driven piece of legislation that will significantly impact on the lives of working people and their families. It is bad law.

Peter Costello has come under fire for misleading Parliament over the existence of the document. He told Federal Parliament in November that no such document existed, even though the briefing had been issued in October.

His excuses are wearing thin. Papers released by Treasury detail economic modelling undertaken which predicts minimum wage increases will be significantly lower under the new Fair Pay Commission than under the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. This comes despite assurances from both Howard and Costello that this would not be the case.

Costello has even rejected the central claims of the treasury briefing, saying the advice on wage growth was “very doubtful”. This appears to suggest he is not making decisions based upon the advice he receives from his own department, a disturbing trend for the most senior economic figure in the country.

Meanwhile, people confidence in the Federal Government’s Industrial Relations regime is already falling despite the $55 million spent selling it to the Australian public.

A new set of surveys show that people are concerned about the impact of the laws on their working lives.

The Association of Professionals, Engineers, Scientists and Managers, APESMA, has released the first detailed survey on voter response to the IR laws. The survey shows respondents have serious misgivings about the laws and the impact they’ll have on Australian society.

Significantly, 29 percent of Coalition voters at the last Federal Election said they were likely to change their vote at the next election. If even one third of those actually were to change their, the government would be out of office.

According to Glen Milne in the Australian the ALP needs only 28 609 people in key seats around the country to change their vote in order to win office. It’s easy to see why the government has a lot to fear.

Opposition treasury spokesman, Wayne Swan, has released research into the impacts on workers. According to this there are 1.4 million people reliant on the awards system to set and protect their minimum wage. If the new system encourages a lower wage for them, you’d have to expect some sort of backlash against the government that brought it in. How big a backlash remains to be seen.
John Kelly
VTHC Website


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