Thanks for posting - I really don't think any of the policy makers (or enforcers!) are aware of what these changes will actually mean.

One thing however - I read earlier that unfairly dismissed employees WILL have a way to fight for their job back - in court, at the expense of the sacked employee.
Nitpickers will say this is a right to recourse when we know in reality it's not, seeing as the extremely high cost of going to court and representation is unlikely to be embarked upon by someone who has just lost their job.

I think we DO need IR reform, I feel sorry for those small businesses who are left crippled by paperwork and too timid to employ new people because they are so damn hard to get rid of if they don't work out...but these changes are not going to help them, the laws are going to enable large businesses (ones who are already doing everything in their power to screw the worker) to (more easily) put profits first and people second.

Come on - let's do a reality check here. How many big companies would be able to break themselves up into units of less than 100 employees and continue to function efficiently.

Not only is it totally unfeasible but even the suggestion would imply a complete lack of understanding of the way business works - probably dulled by too long an exposure to the ALP (please see

The Australian Labor Party: incestuous, secretive, sclerotic
Domestic Politics - Peter McMahon - 13/7/2005 issue of Online Opinion)

Ken McKay provides concise examples of how the abolishment of unfair dismissal laws will provide employers with unrestrained powers to bully workers and implement systems of punitive “three strikes and your out” work cultures. As a unionist all my life I deplore and fear this kind of culture infesting Australian work places. It’s a pity that more builders and tradies and factory workers don’t log onto this site and give account.

Trust and work place comradary between peers AND between bosses and workers will be replaced with suspicion, pimping, and discriminatory practices that will not have any third party arbitration and conciliation. As Mckay has already testified these working conditions already exist, but will soon prosper and mushroom once Howard introduces his bastardized reforms in September – which by far the most sinister wedge politick card Howard has played. This is no doubt his last trump card before retirement, it is his ideological dream, his selfish desire to take on the unions one last time – but it will be Australian workers who will suffer.

If union membership over the last decade has dwindled it is not because unions have become irrelevant to working Australians but because workers have enjoyed working conditions that unions and workers have created over a longer period of time. This unconscious privilege of non-union members is well known to union organizers and advocates such as Mckay. But this knowledge must now be used carefully.

Workers who feel the wrath of Howard’s IR reforms, or simply those workers who do not support this radical change to work cultures will want their votes to count in the next federal election. Unions can ensure this by staking a claim outside the Labor party for all workers. To simply ask workers to tie a yellow ribbon around Labor’s oak tree at the next election will not suffice. This is a bigger issue than getting Labor back into government.

How many businesses could effectively divide into companies employing less than 100 employees? I'd write the answer, but I think I'd get RSI from typing so many digits! Businesses are VERY effective with book-keeping. If you believe that businesses will be ethical and not try to bend the rules, you're very faithful and trusting, and could be exploited even more than workers will be by these proposals, which is quite a feat. Just as the first example of executive skullduggery I can think of, I bet if I promised to give $5 to everyone who reads this who pays less tax than Kerry Packer, I wouldn't have to open up my wallet.

Tim Carter.

Creative sacking. Thirty years ago we were working seven day weeks, 10 hours a day. We also had about a twenty-mile drive to work. After work I would help Mum and Dad with farm work. I was a dutiful worker. But horror of horrors - I had long hair. Lovely long hair. Thus i was a communist, a homosexual (not that that is a problem really), a this - a that - and the other. Sunday afternoon the boss says: "Don't bother showing up for work tommorrow with that hair." I says: "Whose gonna cut me hair tonight." He says: "That's not my problem."
Next day I show without hair cut and I am sent to the office. I explain that I have a hair net and the health inspectors are content. They check - the health inspectors back me up. I retain my job. After about an hour, i am removed from the line where I was doing light, fast, repetitive work and sent down to do a job that involved very heavy lifting. As a skinny little seventeen year old, i couldn't handle that job and when I told the boss so, he said that I had quit and marched me to the office to collect my pay. Seventeen, inarticulate, a weak company union, a 2IC with very aggressive manner - I was out the gate before I knew what hit me. John Howard and the Liberals must condone that kind of unfair treatment.

continued Is it just me or is there something really worrying about a Prime Minister who is so caught up in his ideology to the point that he actually argues for unfairness? Sheltered life in affluent suburbs;limited life experiences; no imagination to instill empathy; never had the split lip; couldn't sink a post hole if his life depended on it; taxpayers money at his disposal to fund PR to back up arguments that will hurt those very taxpayers; spin maths, 40,000 folk out of 86,000 in a conservative electorate with a slack oppositon equals a John Howard mandate (Orwell said they would tell you 2+2 = 5); a morbid fixation on getting rid of unions; a clear-down-the-noise attitude to labour voters; a complete faith in the universal holiness of employers whilst the kid serving down at the fast food is out to rob his multi-national franchise boss blind and thus bring the nation to its knees; and spin, spin, spin ,spin; and a huge case of downward neural flush; and more spin - billions of our dollars worth of spin (As the saying goes: "If you need PR; it is because you need PR.") I think it would be grossly fair to sack all Liberals - the saving in spin money would be big as a cane-farmers verandah; but of course the actual unemployment level would rise which would give the numbers men and women a chance to exercise their creative side so that the unemployment level remained the same