Shadow Minister: One issue with the fair "commissions" ...

Its nice to see a comment that deals with the real issues in the system, as opposed to just espousing idealistic rhetoric about what "should" and "should not" happen. Thanks. Its a pity there aren't a few more.

Rstuart, I know you don't like hypotheticals, but.

Fairness in the workplace should be a two way street, but it’s not.

Take an employee. Say they like their job but they are offered another job that suits them better. Now they may have been with you for five years.

All they need do is come in one day and say they are leaving. No ifs, no buts and most certainly, no reasons. The employer does not have a legal leg to stand on providing they give the correct notice. Usually one week.

Now let’s say an employer has a job seeker turn up that, for what ever reason, they prefer this person to the current employee so they sack the current employee and give the job to the new guy.

Now here is the tricky bit. You say that this constitutes an unfair dismissal, as the employee has done nothing wrong and the employer has broken the law.

Another example. An employee for what ever reason can’t make it to work, say their child is ill. They get sick leave. On the other hand, let’s say the employers child is ill so they can’t open the business. The employer still has to pay the employees wages. Why?

Now this is exactly why the unfair dismissal system is flawed and tilted towards the employee.

If you want fairness in anything you must have a level playing field.

Now I challenge anyone to explain how this is a so-called ‘fair system’.

Anyone care to give it a shot?

So all is quiet all of a sudden hey!

Just remember, I have been in my own small business for over 20 years.

I saw the introduction of unfair dismissal, which back then included EVERY BUSINESS. Then I saw the watering down of these laws to exclude small businesses with less than X employees and now we are set to see these laws tightened once again.

What's the next step, no exemptions perhaps!

Remember, what we have is a radical unionist as the deputy leader who will stop at nothing to see her one eyed ways introduced, even if this means killing off employment.

This woman has an ajenda and she will simply blame someone, or something else when the wheels fall off, and they will!

I employ 8 people myself and there is now way I will even consider expanding now if I have to follow these one sided guidelines.

Now just going back. Someone mentioned 'just do the paper work and you will be ok'.

Many small business people are self employed because they don't have the qualifications (on paper) to land the high paid jobs.

Many of them have failed school and can't even read or write properly, many of their employees are the same.

These people WILL NOT do any additional paperwork and prefer to AVIOD' the situation so they pull thier heads in and stop expanding and ultimately stop employing.

It happened before and it will happen again.

Having run small businesses myself for more than a dozen years, there's no way I'd ever go back to being just an employee.

For most business proprietors, small business is more a way of life than a livelihood. You don't actually count the hours that you spend at the wheel, because your life and the business are actually one and the same thing. It may sound sad to some, but that's because they don't understand the buzz that you get from creating something that wasn't there before, and building a place where people actually enjoy working.

I get as cross as the next small business owner about the sheer lack of business knowledge that governments have, and the resulting stupidity of the laws they create. For the epitome of idiocy, you don't need to go past Payroll Tax, rapidly followed by FBT - both of which have no meaning to a Government Department, and therefore remain beyond their comprehension.

But IR laws pretty much pass unnoticed at my place. As an earlier poster noted, if you only employ people who actually want to work for you, rather than who only work for money and what they can extract from you, you won't have too many problems. In those dozen years, over four different businesses employing between three and twentythree people, we didn't experience a single departure that wasn't mutually agreed.

But I don't understand this throwaway line, rstuart:

>>Actually to the extent the law imposes any impost, it distorts the market in favour of small businesses<<

How so? My experience is precisely the reverse.

Now you'll have to excuse me, I have to go and collect the post, after which I can get down to the BAS, then the annual FBT return, sort out last month's Payroll Tax for two States (which is now overdue), make sure the employees' Super has reached their individual accounts, and pay ASIC their dues.

After which I might be able to get some work done.

Pericles: "small business is more a way of life than a livelihood"

Absolutely. I took the money and ran in the end because it looked like technological changes would be my undoing. Unlike you I don't miss the life style. The freedom is great, but so are the daily hassles. I prefer a more structure in my life.

Pericles: "But I don't understand this throwaway line, rstuart"

The IR laws doesn't apply to small businesses, to the extent they create extra work and costs, they distort the playing field in favour of them.

recthub, it takes me time to put my thoughts together in a coherent way, and I already spend far too much time on this site. Briefly, I lost interest in your argument when I got to the word "fair". Business has nothing to do with fairness. If it did, the baker who starts work at midnight and slaves for 16 hours a day would earn more than the used car salesman - or me, for that matter, the absentee business owner.

The bottom line is business is about making money. You seem to think the chief impediment to making money is paying the employees. In reality it has very little to do with them. The chief obstacle in making obscene amounts of money is your competition. So, for example, you probably think a sharp rise in the award wage (which is what I paid most employees) would have me trembling in fear. Nope. It would have a short term effect, but in the end my competition had the same problem, so prices would change and everything come back into balance.

What did scare me was changing of the rules, usually by the government, so some other way of doing things was better than mine. What do you think the worries the alcoholic drink manufactures more: wages or the alcoho-pops tax?

The bottom line is some arbitrary definition of fairness, be it yours or anybody elses, has no place in business. Business isn't about being fair. It is about putting systems in place that make you money.

rehctub
You have a different way of looking at things.

For a start if an employer was just able to get rid of an employee anytime a better candidate walked through the door the economic system would collapse.

Why? Because part of the protections to workers is the competition between businesses to retain and attract good staff. If another candidate walks through the door and the employer thinks she is a good sort or that the person might work for less money how is this going to enhance fairness?

An employee is not beholden to any business that it works for in the same ways as the owner. They do not benefit from the profits (generally) and they don't have the investment in the future sale of the business. They are not an equal stakeholder if you like.

If another business is willing to employ them for more money and they have a family to feed of course they will take the higher pay unless they particularly enjoy working for the current employer because other conditions might be better or they love their job.

How can it be any other way? To hold an employee against their will by making it harder to leave is hardly going to help your prouductivity.

I agree that there are many other areas the government has failed small businesses as Pericles has pointed out. The GST is the biggest burden because not only is it a nuisance for business owners but it is has the greatest potential for rorting our hard earned tax dollars. The bureacracy surrounding business ownership is the real problem.