Page 1125 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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workforce, but where labour hire arrangements are genuinely required we can now ensure that we are engaging companies that can demonstrate their positive credentials. Companies that do the right thing by their workers and meet current obligations have nothing to worry about with this new law. This process will ensure that regulatory action can be taken against the bad grapes in the bunch but will allow for flexibility to assist businesses that are trying to do the right thing to identify where they need to improve, provided they have a reasonable reason for noncompliance. Our community expects that workers, regardless of how they are engaged, will be adequately paid, provided with their entitlements and respected in the workplace. And our progressive ACT Labor government will continue to do everything we can to support the workers of the ACT. I commend this bill to the Assembly.
MR PETTERSSON (Yerrabi) (5.23): It is with great pleasure that I rise today to speak for the Labour Hire Licensing Bill 2020. For too long rogue labour hire companies have exploited and taken advantage of workers. They have undermined safety in the workplace and they have faced no repercussions for immoral behaviour. A few years ago, I chaired the education, employment and youth affairs committee through the inquiry into the extent, nature and consequences of labour hire in the ACT. In my opinion, one of the most important recommendations from Mr Steel and me was that labour hire should be licensed in the ACT.
In the ACT there are roughly between 4,000 and 8,000 locals working in labour hire positions. It changes. It is hard to measure. I wish I could be more specific with that number but, put simply, the data simply is not there. The industries that these workers are placed in vary from manufacturing, construction and health care to social assistance and even the public service, cleaning, security and IT. Labour hire has permeated through nearly every industry in our city. Labour hire companies establish and trade through multiple corporate entities to avoid tax and liabilities. They do not do this for flexibility; they do it so that they can dilute the chain of responsibility and even to avoid the responsibilities entirely.
Labour hire is infamously easy to phoenix. The company has no assets. It simply, for the most part, operates off a call sheet. It can move the cash out of the business as soon as it desires. While it appears a very simple business, labour hire is filled with multiple levels of contracting and sham contracting. It is not the case that you are always employed by one company and report directly to the one placement company. No; often you are employed or contracted by one company, which contracts you to another company and then to another.
Often, workers engaged through labour hire are paid at rates lower than the workers they work alongside. You never have certainty of how much work you will get, and you often do not know just how much has been sliced off the top from your hourly wage to pay for the middleman. Through the chain of contracting, with people taking their slice of the pie, even less is left for the worker. All of this often occurs to the most vulnerable workers in our community—those making the lowest wages and those with the least in savings. It is hard to argue that labour hire is a choice, when people are faced with unemployment if they do not partake in this rigged set-up.
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