Page 2084 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 25 October 1989
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acceptable. It has happened all too often in Australia in the past and is not conducive to good industrial relations in a self-governing ACT.
A subcontractor who relies on such work for his livelihood, who already has invested money in a site and has entered into contractual obligations with his employees, is over a barrel. They have started jobs, put workers on and they are then told to join the CERT redundancy scheme or leave the site. Redundancy schemes are not mandatory in the ACT, yet I am informed that about 90 per cent of contractors working on AFCC and BWIU sites around Canberra, including section 38 and the Chinese embassy, have been forced to join the CERT scheme or are members of that scheme. Ninety per cent is rather high considering that such schemes are not mandatory in the ACT. Some subcontractors say that they have come under such pressure that they have considered leaving the ACT at the completion of their present jobs.
We do not want a return to the good old BLF days - or the bad old days - of flexing union muscle to put the "little person" or the small businessman under such enormous pressure that he had to choose between staying within or leaving the industry, this pressure being applied only to increase the strength of the union, both financially and in membership - strength gained at the expense, I might say, of the ordinary worker or subcontractor who cannot speak out for fear of being black-banned by the big union boys. This is one of many good reasons why it is necessary to introduce an ACT redundancy scheme and not let union dominated schemes use employers funds for their own benefit when such a scheme should be for the good of the entire industry.
At present, CERT and MERT are being actively promoted in the Territory. There is a real need to state the following important point: there is already wide dissatisfaction within the industry concerning those schemes. Subcontractors and employees have commented to us that they are concerned that these schemes are union scams. These schemes basically require a contribution of $20 per week per employee, subject to an increase in October this year. On leaving a site, employees may elect to take out a payment equal to the contributions made to their benefit or to keep the contributions in the fund until retirement, dismissal, termination or redundancy.
As such, CERT and MERT are not confined to the issue of redundancy, and under current interpretations are similar to non-approved superannuation schemes. They provide over-award payments and constitute a "savings plan" for workers. Indeed, in September of this year an industrial relations judgment indicated that they were in fact over-award payments. These funds are privately managed and without statutory backing and they are being introduced in an ad hoc fashion.
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