These IR laws are an absolute kick up the bum and go to bed without tea for the average worker. If you are in the right industry with a skills shortage your all right...for now anyway. The bloke earning award rates or the meager casual equivalent has already lost and will continue to lose his buying power. He is already paying his mechanic well above award to fix his car as well as the power workers, construction workers and paying silly amounts for shelter. It all feeds into the cost of living which is determined on an extraordinary average wage.

No job security and an unreasonable amount of debt. Notice how Mr Howard has increased the cost of living through the GST, housing and so on then decides to chuck out your overtime so you have to work longer and harder to get by?. Must be nice for big business and the tax coffers. The unions arn't doing much better for anyone except the skills industries. I've been on both sides and the pay increases are much better on the construction side.

No votes to you from me Howie!

HedgeHog
I rether resent you lumping me in with Howard etc....

When I was middle management at a manufacturing company, my goal was that workers would be REWARDED according to their contribution !

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING HOLDS BACK
What stopped it ? Simple.. 'collective bargaining' mentality.
"good for one good for all" kind of thing. I was constantly trying to think up ways where more productive workers could actually FEEL the benefit of their labors in their paypackets, because I had some absolute 'gold' workers. I also had smartmouths and slackers !

THE ESCAPE
The simple way OUT of 'class warfare' is to leave the 'mentality' behind, stop thinking the world owes you a living, and get on with the job of becoming as financially independant as u can as fast as u can go, which might mean mowing a few lawns on the weekend, and giving up the cancer sticks and the booze etc... the largest PRISON in Australia does not have walls apart from the 'mental' ones imposed by those who mention 'class warfare'...what absolute crap ! How dare anyone 'insult' the average aussie by suggesting he cannot lift himself out of your artificially constructed 'class' system by a bit of get up and GO !

MARKET FORCES ?
You can be sure of one thing, as more an more Aussie become self employed, the demand for 'working class' as you seem to regard many people will be so HIGH that the market forces will force employers to give attractive condtions no matter how they feel about it.

THEY CANNOT TAKE OUR FREEEEEDOM ! (Braveheart)
I left 'your' world of 'class warfare' and $36k a year, and went self employed, and while it was a bit nervy watching the "J" curve of my bank balance sliding into negative at first, it then went up to an average of $20k/month for a couple of years. Then things changed (international circumstances) and now we are rebuilding and growing again, but no one tells me what to do except the police and the tax man

The Kennett Government introduced similar IR legislation in the past as is being offered now. As a result, unskilled and semi skilled workers were severely burnt; the same had happened in WA and New Zealand. Workers in Victoria went backwards in their pay and found they were being paid less than their colleagues in other States.
These are facts corroborated by a number of sources found through using Google.

All we have had from Mr. Howard is hollow promises at huge expense that IR will work well for Australia. He might as well try and convince us that pigs fly.

When Kennett reorganised the Victorian public service 50% to 75% of public service jobs disappeared.
The ACTU estimates that 10% of retrenched workers are better off, 55% of retrenched workers never work again, the rest 35% are worse off.

All of the manufacture of train and tram carriages was moved from Dandenong to France.
Tram conductors replaced by ticket machines.
Teachers were fired, and Victoria has no teachers in their 30s and 40s.
Telstra and vic gov departments outsourced IT - about 100,000 programmers lost their jobs
Electricity supply was privatised and in 2003 had 3 apprentices, Country wide in NSW has 700 apprentices.
The engineers employed by Vicroads and Board of Works were retrenched and when Transurban built the Citylink tunnel they used Canadian and South African engineers and Kiwi labourers. The slow leak in the Burnley Tunnel results from overlooking Melbourne's geology.

Most of these retrenched workers have never worked again, in some cases the retrenchment methods used led to mental breakdowns, loss of status, family breakdowns and homelessness. Catholic social services can tell you how many middle aged non-drinking, non-smoking ex-public servants were provided with emergency accommodation.

I have found large 'brand name' businesses can be more moribund than government.

I agree with Ant that the unskilled and semi-skilled workers are vulnerable but so also are back of house technical staff - watch out accountants - the newspaper Technology pages have stories about trials of outsourcing Australian tax returns to India. Sounds sensible - isn't that where the ATO computer systems and programming is done now?

A civilised society should look after the most vulnerable members of its society, which is not what these IR changes coupled with tightened social security requirements will do.

Let the Visigoths and Vandals lose and let small time "businessmen" believe the capitalist myth. Large business lobbies government to create a climate conducive to their interests.

Why should anyone get paid extra to work on weekends if that is the only time they can work.

How many of these people who bleat about weekend penalties pay double the price for their beer or milkshake they buy on a Saturday afternoon.

So why should the employer pay double for the labour if the labour does not produce double the amount.

If you work as a journalist you get paid more for working nights and weekends when these are the slowest times for news. That is you get piad more for doing less. (As part of my AWA, i tried to negotiate working weekends and late shifts for no penalties, but the union got wind of this and weren't happy. Why, because it meant I would have got all those shifts and no-one would have got their penalties because I was working. In reality, though I was doing them a favour because they hated working those shifts so much they needed extra money for doing them.)

And all these people getting morally indignant about workers being exploited - do a check throughout your house and see how many items were made in China, India, Korea or Taiwan. If your willing to pay $500 for a TV on the back of some poor Asian, instead of the couple of grand it would cost in Australia, you are a hypocrit.

Wages and conditions will never be that bad in Australia, but you are willing to profit with cheap goods through exploitation.

Get off your high horse.

t.u.s.

Real wages have dropped in Australia since 2000. To list a few examples

ANZ bank retrenched workers, then hired them back 18 months later to do the same work at 20,000 per year less.

Coles Myer advertised for staff to perform a specialised technical role that they were prepared to pay 66% of wage paid in 2001.

IT project managers who were earning $100,000 in 2000 only work if they will accept $65,000 salaries.

I am considered employed and earn on average $150 per week. I have another friend who has just finished a nursing course at TAFE and can only average 5 shifts a fortnight so she must rely on social security to top up her income so she and her daughter can get by. She has a HECS debt and needs to buy a reliable car. I think her employer a church group is cynically exploiting the Australian tax payer by not offering her enough work to earn a frugal wage.

Many people who work weekends are only prepared to work those unsociable hours because the penalty loadings allow them to earn enough money in fewer hours.

I remember my elderly neighbour who was job hunting in the 1920s when economic conditions were very similar to today. After years of searching she got a job as a domestic servant in Hawthorn and earned so little money (5 shillings) that she couldn't afford the train fare to see her familiy on her day off. Her family lived in Oakleigh where Chadstone is today.

Mum of course was paid 66% of the male wage for doing the same job. One of her colleagues had to rear children on 66% of the male wage.

Grandmother worked in a professional capacity but wasn't paid, she had to run accounts at stores and her father would pay the accounts.

From where I stand I can see the giants of corporate Australia reducing the standard of living for average Australians. As a banker said "the middle class is disappearing, 10% of the population will be very rich and the remainder will be very poor".