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The Forum > Article Comments > Employees enter a new era of rights > Comments

Employees enter a new era of rights : Comments

By Sharan Burrow, published 9/7/2009

Sharan Burrow pronounces the last rites on Work Choices

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It's pretty simple when you get past the spin. The Unions had to get a Labor win to survive. They spent a lot of their members' money (much of it from public sector unions paid from our taxes). They won. They survived. They now have to go all out to lift their profile, prove to those who have never experienced the negative impact of unions that they are necessary and seek to lift their membership levels - read power and influence. So at every step of the re-introduction of the industrial relations club they will have to trumpet their achievements. That's how it is. Get used to it.

It has little to do with working conditions or fairness or working families or worker’s rights or other motherhood statements. If you were Sharan Burrow you would probably do the same thing - fight for your own job and the survival of an organization with a clearly visible use-by date. It has nothing to do with economic reality or rationality or the good of the country. The economy will go backwards under union-induced inefficiencies and Government largesse under the cover provided by Rudd’s hammering of an all embracing global crisis. This will provide a smokescreen for who knows how many years.

Then at some point it will dawn on a voting majority that you actually have to work your way out of tough times; that you can't borrow endlessly, pay people when there is no profit and throw money to whoever may vote for you. Eventually the ad nauseum spin wears off, the hollowmen have used up their last focus group idea and more people than not concede that “Hey, it’s not working Kev”.

How much damage will be done and how far back our national economic prosperity will be set is a function of the time it takes a majority to get it. Until then we’re stuck.
Posted by ARB, Friday, 10 July 2009 2:32:38 PM
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rehctub, (I assume you are talking to me when you say "foxy" - I've never thought of myself as foxy)

It is sad that some of your customers are scratching for work. Things aren't too crash hot for tradies here in central QLD at the moment either. Hopefully they will pick up some work when the school and other infrastructure packages kick in (very soon now). However, the new regime has been in a day or so meaning that these people's problems predate that.

While it may irk some employers that employees can get up and leave if they find a more attractive offer (I bet not too many of them are doing that at present though!) while employers cannot simply sack their workers everytime someone willing to work for less walks through the door, I am glad that this is the case. Millions in the lower parts of the labour market would be so severely disadvanted by the inevitable race to the bottom that we would create a permanent underclass of poverty.

Odo, I'm not sure that you understand how the economy works in macro. If minimum wage rises automatically generated unemployment we would never have wage rises. It has long been the dilemma of the capitalists that workers are also consumers of the goods and services that the owners of capital are peddling and that forcing down wages across the board simply reduces demand for their product. In this way, it is wage cutting that is self defeating.
Posted by Fozz, Friday, 10 July 2009 4:16:58 PM
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*Put simply, if an employer simply “can’t afford” to pay the legislated minimum wage then that employer should not be in business!*

Fozz, the problem is not the minimum wage, its the many enforced
bells and whistles. Today there are no guarantees in business.
Contracts can be lost, customers go elsewhere. So employees have to
be cut. Large termination payments can shut the company down, so
everyone loses their jobs. It happened to Melba Industries:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Rudds-job-destroyer-pd20090423-RCRHL?OpenDocument&src=sph

So the best policy, is simply not to hire people in the first place,
rather then risk bankrupting the company, or go offshore, where
such stupid laws don't apply.

We are competing in the real world now. Without flexbility in
the employment scene, we'll just keep relying on mining and
agriculture for survival, forget manufacturing.

But that seems union policy now. Better no job then one not on
their terms. Fair enough, best not to bother employing them in the
first place. Let the Govt borrow the money, until it sinks.
People clearly need pain to learn.
Posted by Yabby, Friday, 10 July 2009 7:17:56 PM
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I've always been somewhat bemused by the sqwawks from employers who want to be able to dismiss workers unfairly. The union movement arose directly from the tendency of employers to do just that, or treat the workers upon whom their industries depend with similar disdain in other areas of industrial relations.

As a partner in a small business that employs people, I have no problems at all with treating my staff fairly, as defined by their award and by ordinary standards of common decency. We employ less than 10 people, and all are skilled casuals or trainees who are paid the award wage.

Our business is in a small country town, and neither Work Choices nor the Fair Work Act will make an iota of difference to us. We select and train our staff carefully and treat them well. We don't make very much money, but we can all pay our bills and we provide some essential services to our community.

Work Choices sucked badly and seriously eroded the rights of employees - who are always in a less powerful position individually than their employers, despite the bleating of some. Collective bargaining only evens the balance.

I'm not a great fan of Rudd nor his government, but I think that the Fair Work Act is a positive act of redress - and was, after all, one of their election promises. Now that I think of it, it's pleasingly novel to have a Prime Minister who keeps his promises :)
Posted by CJ Morgan, Friday, 10 July 2009 8:10:19 PM
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Yabby, which bells and whistles is it that particularly aggrieve you?

If I remember correctly, unfair dismissal came in a few years after I left high school and was only slashed back with the introduction of workchoices. The whole period in which unfair dismissal was in place was one of continual economic growth, particularly strong towards the end. Unemployment fell to a generational low (not nearly as good as the 2.5% average that we had for the 3 decades that Australian governments both left and right provided conditions that were conducive to full employment but that’s a topic for another thread).

So more than a decade of unfair dismissal clearly did not prevent business from hiring people. Why should it do so now?

The offshoring of manufacturing type jobs has a lot more to do with the pulling down of trade barriers than anything else. No matter how “flexible” (a term that always arouses my suspicion when I hear it) we make our labour force, that fact is that we will NEVER be able to compete with the rice bowl countries on the basis of who can produce more cheaply, with their low wages, poor conditions and low currencies (sometimes manipulated to keep them that way!). 21 million people will never match the output potential of 1.6 billion in China, almost a billion in India, 200 million in Indonesia etc.

We could introduce the same sort of “flexibility” into our manufacturing sector by pulling the wage/condition floor out from under our workers, but what purpose would that serve? We would surely become much more competitive in manufacturing (production cost-wise) but in slashing manufacturing workers wages and thereby destroying their ability to spend money would only result in that percentage of the workforce being subtracted from aggregate demand – an economic depressant.
Posted by Fozz, Saturday, 11 July 2009 7:32:07 AM
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Fozz, things like redundancy pay and pro rata long service leave
pay, are the sorts of things that can sink a company. Did
you read the URL which I posted, written by Robert Gottliebson?

Fact is that when economies turn down, companies have to adjust
and if adjusting sends them broke, everyone loses, including
employees who might have retained their jobs.

Right now there is much talk in agriculture, about new "awards".
Penalty payments for milking cows, shearing sheep on weekends,
or picking fruit and veggies etc. Are you consumers going to pay
extra, because they were picked on Sunday? No, you want them
cheaper. So that will just be another nail in the coffin for
those growers, more will close their doors.

People who have never run a business, seem to forget what it
actually costs to hire people per hour.

Lets even take a base rate of claimed 15$ an hour.

Add bells and whistles costs, (holiday pay, public holidays, sick
leave, compassionate leave, long service leave etc, it adds at
least 20%, which is also the casual rate addition.

Thats another 3$ an hour so thats 18$.

Add another 9% super, adds another 1.60 an hour, so thats 19.60

Depending on industry, add 6% workers comp and another 6%
payroll tax, its costing 22$ an hour for that worker. That needs
to be paid for by consumers, or the business goes broke.

Now, if we include penalty rates, plus redundancy pay, it blows
out even more.

Last time I checked, China only provided 16% of our imports, so
clearly goods from Europe, Japan, USA, Korea, Singapore etc, all relatively
high wage countries, are a far bigger threat. But I doubt it they
pay their workers Australian bells and whistles
Posted by Yabby, Saturday, 11 July 2009 2:22:17 PM
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