Page 2915 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
there were 406,828 workplace agreements lodged with the Workplace Authority. The majority of those contracts have no protected conditions at all. There is so much dissenting material available now in the form of reports from eminent IR specialists, organisations such as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and other valid opinions which articulate the negative impact this legislation has on the workers of this country and, indeed, in the ACT.
The committee was provided with evidence of many horror stories of people sacked for no proper reason or having their pay and conditions cut, with the attitude of “take it or leave it” by the bosses, who in many cases have been able to arrange a very different work contract for themselves. The committee was advised that these bosses have little interest in the social impact of treating their workers in such a shabby way. Too few people have the ability to go cap in hand and negotiate a decent and fair work contract for themselves, in spite of the Howard government continually flooding all forms of media with taxpayer-funded propaganda that WorkChoices is about choice. Only if you have the ability to negotiate your own contract successfully does choice become an option.
If the Howard government wins the coming election, the next round of workplace reform will almost certainly see the destruction or attempted destruction of the union movement. Deregistration of unions will be attempted, with even more disadvantage for working families. As I said before, given that there was no mandate for WorkChoices before the last election, every member of a working family should be aware that by voting in this federal government for another term they will be further eroding the rights at work of not just themselves but their children and even their grandchildren. Once these conditions are gone, which, by the way took 100 years to establish, the ability to claw them back is clearly an impossible task.
The ACT is every bit as much at risk as the rest of the country. The report has endeavoured to set out a list of recommendations which will help to inoculate the employees in this city from the worst aspects of WorkChoices legislation—if not to protect them against the far-reaching and imposing worst aspects of it, then to help to educate and inform workers and young people, in fact the most vulnerable, of their rights at work, limited as they now are.
Education of the workforce is a critical element of helping understand just what is protected and what is not. Employers and employees are finding it increasingly difficult to fathom where they stand within the law—what is a protected condition and what is not—and so much so that some employers, including the Local Government and Shires Associations of New South Wales and retail giant Spotlight, have in the last few weeks decided to opt out of WorkChoices and take their employees back to awards. The penalties for making the wrong choices about WorkChoices are just too great.
The establishment of the select committee on working families was an acknowledgement that this legislation was impacting on families in the ACT. The stories and reports of workers affected by Howard’s WorkChoices were appearing and the concern of our constituents was becoming apparent to the Assembly. It was a clear choice to have our own inquiry and to try to inoculate our workers against some of the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .