Page 2914 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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lifelong wish granted to him by a willing and compliant government. Big business and their mates sat back, content that at last they had been able to set workers in this country back on their knees, where big business and the coalition believe they belong.
Immediately the rot set in. Workers were sacked for no reason, on the first day of this becoming law, right across this land, including workers here in the ACT. Employees in the private sector were left wondering just what would happen to them and how little it would take for them to either lose their jobs or have their work and family life disrupted by being put on an AWA which totally changed their working conditions and dropped the pay and conditions they had enjoyed, sometimes for years at the same company.
Another year on and reports are coming thick and fast of disenfranchised workers, as well as academics, unions and even churches, and about just how WorkChoices is impacting on working Australia. Statistics are proving that some of the main issues are the eroding of longstanding work conditions—hourly pay, hours worked and now unpaid overtime. “Family friendly” WorkChoices is not.
On 10 September this year a visiting professor from Harvard University, Professor Richard Freeman, told a conference in Queensland that the WorkChoices legislation is just not necessary and that in fact it regulates rather than deregulates the workplace. He cited countries such as Denmark, where there is a strong economy, strong unionism and an emphasis on collective bargaining as the main system of workplace agreements. He stated that the WorkChoices legislation is outdated by 20 years, that that sort of legislation is just not critical to a country’s wealth and that Australia’s working conditions are now worse than those in the US. We now have a new class of people for Australia, the working poor.
Over 1,000 AWAs per day are lodged at the OWS. This has been a consistent number for some time now and the OWS has been unable to deal with the content of these AWAs. On 7 May this year, in response to the general outcry from the public about the unfairness of WorkChoices legislation, the federal government introduced a system called the fairness test. This test is supposed to scrutinise all AWAs to ensure that they comply with the conditions of employment the government now deems to be legitimate. However, do not look for redundancy in these conditions, as it is no longer a requirement for an employer under WorkChoices. Also, if you had signed a workplace contract before 7 May when this fairness test became law, then tough luck if you have a raw deal; you either have to get out of the contract—and good luck on that—or live with it, because nowhere in the legislation does it say that pre-fairness-test AWAs will be looked at.
There are some contracts coming to light now, signed for a maximum of five years, with no pay increase during the whole length of that contract. Employees working under those conditions are going to hurt and so are their families. Given that the backlog of these contracts awaiting approval is so great, how are those people and their families managing to work while the Workplace Ombudsman ploughs through tens of thousands of AWAs?
Data obtained from the Workplace Authority website indicates that since the introduction of WorkChoices and for the period from March 2006 to 30 June 2007
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