What a sad sack apolagist for the exploitation of workers. Billy's Cleaning company. Mary's aged care. Freds Security. Employers-i think not.
A rose by any other name........

Hedgehog. Let's hear a reasoned argument detailing your concerns about the material in the paper instead of a name calling diatribe. This is supposed to be a forum where educated debate takes place.

Ken seems to have overlooked the second part of the standard: "while at the same time ensuring that individuals in an employment relationship have the protection they are due".

Labour law should be about protecting the interests of workers, not promoting employers commercial interests.

For a brief period I worked in direct marketing - little more than door to door sales. In order to do this job, I had to become an independent contractor. It was a key part of the job, and you couldn't do it if you didn't have an ABN.

The salary of this job was entirely commission based - they work on a pyramid scheme of sorts, where the new entrants make sales, they get $50 or so for each person signed up (this particular mob was about convincing people to sign up to charities) and the group leader got $20 or so for each sale made by their plebians. The manager of that outlet of the organisation got a piece, and presumably, some went to world headquarters.

This ultimately, is the epitome of the free market system, though I can't help but wonder when are people going to realise that extreme free market ideology is just as flawed as communist practices when taken to the limits.

There is a natural order in all things, which sways like a pendulum. Economics, Politics, Animal populations, Demographics, you name it.

Now history has shown us that the government can't effectively take control of the market. It doesn't work, and the capitalist notion of greed is an essential requirement. Yippee for capitalism.

Now the central notion of the socialist argument is that capitalism leads to excessive accumulation of wealth into fewer hands.
They've been proven right - we're headed for extreme capitalism, where a handful can control billions - yet we're still loathe to accept that this is a problem with capitalism. Anyone who does is labelled a communist, or these days, accused of stifling trade.

It is when people acknowledge that capitalism has it's problems too, and they need addressing, that we will truly be "facing reality"

VK3AUU, an educated debate does not need to be long and convaluted.
Just because someone writes a long article,trying to dress up a wolf in sheeps clothing doesnt mean it cant be countered by a brusque response. My point is clear enough. Calling working people 'Companies' doesnt make them so.The common law test of what and who is an employee still exposes the sham nature of many arrangements. The trucking industry is another prime example of the rort of dodging responsibility.

Let's step back for a moment.

The ILO is an agency of the United Nations. The UN - while being a necessary construct, in that if it didn't exist we would have to invent it - is about as relevant to our daily lives as the price of gasoline in Caracas (about 3.5c a litre, since you ask).

Of course, there are two constituencies who will be delighted that the ILO has decided finally to back capitalism. Governments like our own, who want to encourage the notion that weighting the scales in favour of employers is somehow going to protect our way of life. And governments in emerging countries, who need to drive up their own economies without the inconvenience of international restraint on their treatment of their workers.

The author alludes to the origins of the ILO, and suggests that circumstances have changed.

>>The ILO was formed in 1919 at the end of World War I, on a belief that the war was in part a consequence of conflict between labour and capital. This was an understandable view early last century.<<

I suggest that he takes a closer look at the tensions between the haves and the have-not economies of today's world, and asks whether we are quite so distanced from those root causes as he would like to believe. Because it was never as much about "class warfare", as about unfairness.

And that ain't changed a lot.