Billie, I was not even thinking of Northern Australia or what
happened 30 years ago. Today most NW cattle are shipped to
Indonesia as the most viable option. If its a win-win situation,
so be it.

West Australia is a huge place, a third of Aus. It also generates
by far the most exports, to pay ES bills. Yet we do it with
10% of the population. The crisis in the meat industry has
been in the SW. Export contracts to Japan were being lost,
due to lack of labour. The work is not seasonal, its all year.

Locals are offered training, but you can't put them in chains
and drag them to work. In reality, anyone in WA who is employable
and wants employment, is employed, the State is booming overall.

One of the works involved is a grower owned Coop, not some Sydney
or Melbourne based operator. Trucking a million sheep east is
not the solution either.

In this sort of situation, where Aussies don't want the jobs,
exports are being lost, contract workers from overseas make
perfect sense. They make as much in a month as they would earn
in a year at home. We get the export $ and the job done. Its
a win-win all round. I have yet to see a good reason why it
should not happen. You or Socrates haven't named any yet

I'm afraid its not as simple as saying AWA's are either good or bad Chris, although Kim Beazley has certainly drawn a line in the sand by promising to abolish them.

The likely fact of the matter is that certain workers are well suited to AWA's and others not so well suited.

For example, why do you think professional sports people are engaged on individual contracts and not collective agreements?

The answer is that the greater the talent the greater the pay packet.

Industry is similar. Individuals who strive and are more productive are likely to be rewarded for that productivity with an AWA.

Of course, there are certain other types of workers, who only do just enough not to earn the ire of their supervisors. They always use their allotted sickies and they are generally the last to arrive and the first to leave. They are more than happy to hide inside the protection of collective agreements and reap the bonuses that others earn on their behalf.

I expect that there were plenty of these guys out there today with their comrade unionists protesting against Work Choices. Who can blame them?

Rejecting Work Choices will benefit them. But it definitely won't benefit the business they work for, or the consumer, who will ultimately pay an inflated price for their product, due to the inflated labour production cost.

Nope, definitely not good economic management Chris.

Yabby, like you I am concerned about vast numbers of Australians being disengaged from the society in which they live, I don’t think that having large numbers of people rotting on the dole is a good thing. Today each Australian is responsible for their own training, they make their decisions based on their perceptions of future employment opportunities and knowledge of past experiences.

How long does it take to retrain for a new career – at least 4 years if you have to go back to high school then undertake a 3 year course, then perhaps you have to get another years experience before you have final accreditation and perhaps you have to move to get the training and wait for a place to become available. So some one has to be pretty keen to undertake retraining and confident that they will get an opportunity to practice and in these days of paying for tuition you want to be sure that the additional income offsets the costs of retraining.

It may take 3 years to become a qualified slaughterman, how long has WA had its shortage of slaughtermen? How mobile is the workforce? Remember that Australia’s average age is 34. Why would a 50 year old, who owns house, kids finishing high school, has friends in the local community move for work? Can 50 year olds still work on a production line or do they suffer muscular and skeletal injuries from their middle aged bodies?

This is all about timing. Over what time frame do businesses look to make a profit? Actually large Australian corporations only look 12 months out.

Fyrdman your ability to negotiate for extraordinary wages depends on how effectively you can differentiate yourself from the other suppliers, not how efficient you are.
Isn’t it obscene that we pay sportsmen so much as well as pay their tuition at AIS?
If ANZ were serious about efficiency they could have dispensed with their arrangements with card services and got the job done far cheaper and more effectively using the same technology as Medicare.

Billie, I have negotiated my terms and conditions since the mid 1970’s by resigning when I found them unsatisfactory and deciding whether to accept what was offered to keep me and all that without having a union involved.

I recall a lot of the problems with slaughter houses was due to intense and unreasonable union demands for non-sustainable conditions.

As for suggesting there is a shortage of skilled labour, well that means that finding alternative jobs is comparatively easier and certainly a hell of a lot easier than when we had 12% unemployment under labor.

Now “Today each Australian is responsible for their own training, they make their decisions based on their perceptions of future employment opportunities and knowledge of past experiences.”

Darn it, I have always considered myself responsible for my own training, decisions based on future employment opportunities and knowledge of the past.

I am absolutely certain such significant research and choices are too important to be left in the hand of any government and never, ever in the hands of unelected union officials (maybe that explains how I got to become, to use your words, a “key worker who has been able to negotiate better employment conditions.”)

Either way, what Beazley and the author of the article think is going to make no difference, unions are a spent force in this age of change, the power elites of the union movement know they are gasping their past breaths, hence the desparate attempts at TV advertising and fraudulent hardship claims.
Beazley is not making speeches, he is merely mouthing the death rattle of the passing era of labour union influence.

Col you are very fortunate to be such a key player that you can negotiate your own contracts. How do you know you are fairly paid? Before I sign a contract I check what people who are doing similar work are earning and that includes checking that I am getting better than award pay and conditions.

Your lack of concern over training indicates that you possibly have limited formal qualifications. Hmmm, there aren't very many industries that will take on unqualified and inexperienced people these days. Only sales really.
So how do people get the information they need to select a career to train for?
How do we train people for future industries?
Or do we just hire in skilled people from overseas so Australians become the poor white trash of Asia.

Billie, the problem is that the WA economy is quite different from
that in the East, but we are sucked up in general policy. People
like Beasley, simply don't understand that, even the present Govt
has problems there.

I know of three regional meatworks, which all train their staff.
They just need people who are willing to work, turn up every day,
and who aren't on drugs. Thats a far bigger problem then it seems.
Ice seems to be taking over from speed with alot of the young and
as its far more addictive, its virtually impossible to employ
people on ice and hand them a knife, considering worksafe etc.

We have few people claiming the dole, apart from some unemployable.
The majority that do evade work are on some kind of disability
pension. You can't drag them to work in chains!

People also seem unwilling to leave family and friends, to find
employment. Once again, you can't force them to move interstate
or move to where the work is.

So the WA meat industry issue is not about training, not about
pay, not about corporations thinking short term. Its about a
booming economy here. People would rather sit on a machine for
BHP for big money, then on a kill floor. Meatworks work is not
what alot of people would like to do for a living.

Meantime the industry still needs staff. Trucking a million sheep
over East, is not an answer. If Aussies simply don't want these
jobs, there seems no other option. Bring in contract labour from
SE Asia. Its no further from here then Sydney. We'll keep
creating export $ here, but give us a break. Don't lump us in
with what you guys are doing over there.