Mirko is just pushing the Govt. and employers line. The Union movement never declared that mass sackings would occur. The simple fact is the whole legislation is designed to give all power to employers. It is an act of bastardry that Howard will pay dearly for.
Witness SA and Qlnd elections. Watch Victoria on Nov. 25 and NSW in March `07.
Then Mirko you will realise that the punter has a good memory.

hedgehog,
Another fall in the average weekly wage the other day, 1.2% =$13 for the second consecutive quarter since the rodent introduced workchoices, a policy he said was about higher wages, when will the blind see?

Last year Bagaric wrote an article about the acceptance of some level and kind of torture in certain circumstances for prisoners detained on suspicion of terrorist activities...so much for the rights of prisoners.

Sometime after that - and following a less than encouraging response to the abovementioned article - Bagaric wrote an article about the apparently appauling conditions in Indonesian prisons and thus concern for prisoner's rights.

Now Bagaric seems to be sending the message that we apparently don't need to be concerned about worker's rights in Australian under the new, and as yet not fully played out IR laws. To be sure, the legislation is cumulative in terms of its impact and one probably couldn’t draw any hard and confident generalized conclusions about the impacts of the new IR laws for probably another year or so. Empirically, there have indeed been cases which indicate a negative impact on worker’s rights, but there have also been instances of little change. Any firm and *generalised* conclusions are highly problematic.

I would hope/assume Professor Bagaric’s sweeping and confident generalizations about the impacts of the erstwhile IR laws have been informed by rigorous, comprehensive studies of workers (male and female, across a range of age groups) in a range of geographic locations and industries. Also, that a range of measures have been used to assess the rights impacts of these IR laws.
I am personally unaware of such studies and would welcome Professor Bagaric providing explicit reference to such studies in support of his confident and bold generalizations, and indeed providing a solid basis for refuting counter studies.
Pointing to overseas examples/comparisons, such as France, is not entirely useful or accurate for a range of reasons that I dont have the space to explicate. Of course, using such an example does deliver an emotive response from readers who are unaware of the actual context of France's uneamployment rate and reality of their labour market situation.

I wonder which audience this commentator is attempting to gain the attention of...

Perhaps when and if the audience changes in 2007...