Page 3137 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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leave scheme and lift female participation rates in Australian workplaces” and “ensure union right of entry provisions are sensible and fair”. Unfortunately, history has taught us to be wary when the Liberals talk about fairness and flexibility in the workplace.
In the draft legislation before the Senate, it seems on the surface that this scepticism is vindicated. As Ms Berry’s motion asserts, there are some deeply concerning elements of this legislation. In seeking to offer supposed flexibility and a better deal for underpaid workers, individual flexible arrangements have emerged. Some will say they offer nominal flexibility for when a change in working arrangements suits employer and employee. At face value this idea works okay, and we did see some companies and workers negotiating in good faith to save jobs during the GFC.
However, the GFC experience suggests there is no real impediment to this type of flexibility in the system today and the general fear is that the individual flexibility arrangements once again throw the bargaining relationship out of balance and take protections from vulnerable workers. The Liberals have a historical misunderstanding of the power imbalance that exists between employer and employee. When government rightly steps in to provide a wage safety net, the legislation needs to be strong and robust. We do not need amendments which blow holes in this safety net and offer new ways to drive wages down.
Looking at the commitment to deliver a genuine paid parental leave scheme, we know some of the changes that have been made to this scheme and the cuts that were made in the budget process. However, in the amendments to the Fair Work Act, it seems that support for parental leave is waning even further. It is set to become harder for people to seek extended unpaid parental leave, as the onus on employers to say yes is removed. Instead, the onus is on the worker to sit down and persuade their employer to keep them on the books while they care for their child. Again arises the assumption that any employee can sit down with their employer with equal power and “discuss” a request for leave. New transfer of business provisions appear to give new opportunities for clever organisational restructuring to get around company obligations to workers. Again, when it comes to basic workers’ rights around wages and entitlements, government should be closing loopholes not opening them up.
Finally, the amendments go back into the space of union right of entry. Perversely, in an effort supposedly designed to improve productivity, new requirements seek, at best, to force new red tape on businesses in order to accommodate union officials. Reading between the lines, of course, it is a clear effort to reduce union access. How would this work in Canberra? It would certainly give the building unions less access to building sites to ensure that safety requirements were being met. We know how important they have been in recent years, with the high rates of workplace accidents that have existed on ACT construction sites and the many times they have gone onto those sites with WorkSafe and ensured that those sites were shut down until appropriate action had been taken.
Also, there are unions like the CPSU, with lesser access to public servants on the brink of redundancy to explain their rights and provide supports, and United Voice, with less access to cleaners who work in office buildings across the city, for workers
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