Page 3925 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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employee of a state or territory or an agency of a state or territory. Now that is portability.
To illustrate the disadvantage of private sector workers, take the public sector worker who starts work as a labourer, moves on to a clerical position, then on to a position with another state or territory and back to the commonwealth. This worker has all his service counted as long service leave. Take a cleaner in a shopping centre who gets a retail job in a shop in the centre, then moves to a clerical job in some professional suites, then on to a managerial position in a shop. This worker does not accumulate long service leave for all of those jobs. So a public sector worker can work for 20 years in, say, 10 separate jobs at less than five years service in each and will end up with half a year of long service leave. A private sector worker in the same circumstances, unless they are in the building and construction or contract cleaning industry, gets nothing. Is that fair?
Portability of long service leave in the building and construction and contract cleaning industries extends across employers in two discrete industries. Of the two schemes, the building and construction industry scheme is more longstanding. It has been in place in the ACT since 1981, and I remember the struggle to get portability over 20 years ago. It is a national scheme, with building and construction workers carrying their entitlement with them when they move interstate. Over the time that the scheme has been in place, the building industry has not suffered, it has grown, despite what was said by the doomsayers at its inception.
Employers have seen the benefits of a level playing field in tendering. They all pay the same rate to cover their employees for long service leave, so there is less or no attraction to manage out long service leave entitlements to bring down costs. Employees in the industry have seen the benefit of earning long service leave credits while they work on a number of jobs for different employers, even in different states. They have also seen their entitlement increase because of the growth of the fund. Their entitlements have been protected against bankruptcies, so the taxpayer has not had to foot the bill when companies fail, as they did for workers hit by the failures I mentioned earlier, such as Ansett, National Textiles, Woodlawn Mines and others since. My efforts on behalf of workers in the contract cleaning industry in 1999 have paid off, with their fund now up and running and their entitlements protected. The contract cleaning industry has not failed because of this scheme. Nor have all the businesses packed up and moved interstate, as was once claimed.
The bill I am introducing today will not disadvantage responsible ACT employers. In fact, in the long term they will probably see significant benefits. Those who will be most perturbed about the bill will be those employers who do not currently make provision for their employees’ long service leave entitlements. The experience of the building and construction industry fund is that, with judicious investment strategies, the fund’s earning capacity increases the value of assets and the levy can be lowered. Indeed, the current levy is considerably less than the costs for an employer provisioning for the entitlement.
The success of the contract cleaning legislation led me to have discussions with a range of unions covering private sector workers. They all had examples of workers who, because of company failures or commercial contract changes, had missed out on
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