Don't believe all the rhetoric about the unions being concerned about safety. Mining unions tried hard to block the introduction of workplace alcohol and drug testing. They didn't care if their members operated machinery under the influence. Scary.

When I first saw him, I wondered who Bill Shorten was, & why he was the spokesman for the rescue effort. He appeared to ge just pumping out hot air, for no good reason. Then I realised that he was just another politician, trying to cash in on the public interest in the effort.

One must wonder what would have happened in tassie if the AWU were not involved Howard could have done another cover up to protect his IR changes

Bill Shorten and before he arived back in Australia Paul Howes proved the AWU is still with you at work.
The snide anti union anti Shorten remarks are worthless much more exposure to the medea could come if those in control of the union wanted to release the information the familly of one miner was flown from Qld by the union and another from Newcastle at the unions cost .
And why not?unions help some every week and for most workers who are members unions are familly.
Those who know Bill Shorten are proud to do so and you can bet as always he was more than well come in Tassy.
I as a member of the AWU all my working life am proud of him, and rest asured John Howard is no sure bet in 2007 workchoices? a far worse thing than many know,yet!

I'm really ambivalent about the new I.R. laws. On the one hand, I think there will be some bad effects. However, on the other hand, I've seen my father, who used to be a very active member of the Socialist Left faction of the Labor Party, turn into one of the staunchest supporters of John Howard and the anti-union movement. The reason? Over a decade of being screwed by mindless unions and unfair dismissal tribunals, despite paying his workers well above the award and generally trying to be a "socialistic" boss (an oxymoron I know).

Perhaps if the pendulum has swung to the extreme right it's because there are plenty who had suffered under it being at the extreme left for too long. There are plenty of bosses who are good people, and plenty of them had been screwed for long enough until now, which is why there is actually broad support for Howard amongst the middle class. Why is it always about the poor little Aussie battlers and the unions, even when they are mean-spirited crooks who consider the boss "the enemy" ripe for taking down?

There's a lot of bs coming from Andrews and Howard, but there's always been an equal (if not greater) amount of bs coming from the other direction. They're all self-serving, and I trust Shorten about as much as I trust Andrews, which is to say, about as far as I could spit a rat.

If a union win’s better pay and conditions, who pays for it?

While many seem to think the funds just appear out of no where, they actually have to come from increased revenues.

The $1.00 pay rise cost the employer about a $1.50 and this with margins added translate to a $2.25 increase in the retail price required by the company to pay for the increase.

With a world price taker company, unless they can screw down production cost even more, the choice is to go offshore where this form of industrial blackmail is not as prevalent.

For a domestic business, they don’t have a real big problem as their competition have the same regulated cost structure, meaning they all just raise prices.
Inflation is the result.

The situation in many businesses today is that the “boss” earns less than many of his employees, with no guarantee on the sale of his product.
This is even before the return on capital is taken into account in extreme cases.

Maybe its about time the union movement went into business to show the present business community how to do it as they are so negative to the people that provide them the jobs they spend so much time complaining about.

It appears the proof is in our “terms of trade figures”

Even with a massive increase in our country’s income from exports, we have not been able to cover the increased purchasing of products from company’s that have opted to go offshore due to our massively high cost of production.