Australians have for over 120 years prided themselves as a people who believe in a "fair go". Early suppression of workers rights through such British laws as the 'Master and Servant Act', were progressively cast aside in the latter part of the ninetieth centaury, alas not without a struggle, but the oppression of workers did give way to a fairer and somewhat more egalitarian society. The entitlements of workers were respected and enforced under law, with a basic wage, and later such things as sick pay, paid holidays etc became the norm for the majority of workers. The first national "Basic Wage" was established in Australia in 1907.

In 2021 it could be said many workers are once more being subjected to a new form of the 200 year old Master and Servant Act! Casualization, dubious work contracts, claims of being self employed, you name it, some employers are attempting to teardown the hard won rights Australian workers have fought to achieve over the past century and a half. There is an ongoing fight with casualization of many jobs that should be recognised as permanent, with the appropriate permanent benefits.

Now a new threat has emerged to kill workers entitlements, its the so called gig economy (A labour market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.) The ride share industry, the pizza delivery business, to name but two typically exploited operations in this gig economy. Workers in these industries operated by giant multi-national corporations are "contracted" to work for a piece rate payment, always a pittance, and with no legal or industrial protection. Labor has called out this gross exploitation of vulnerable workers, and has put forward a proposal to deal with this blatant exploitation. The word from the employer representative Innes Willox, "(the Labor proposal) risks interrupting the growth of the gig economy and all the benefits to the community that flow from it”, and from the LNP government, workers are offered their grossly unfair Industrial Relations Omnibus Bill.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/10/gig-economy-workers-labors-plan-to-boost-job-security-pay-and-entitlements

Australian workers are only underpaid because our Public Servants are overpaid !
This gross imbalance will haunt us economically until the gap is narrower !

Come off the raw prawn Paul.

We have the highest minimum wage in the world.

Draconian dismissal laws, so if an employer is unlucky enough to hire some dead head bludger he has to pay a fortune in go away money to get rid of them.

The employer is expected to train the worker at the employers expense, & you reckon the worker is oppressed.

With all these union forced oppressive hugely expensive conditions the employer had no choice but to fight back, if he was to develop a productive work force & be able to actually make any profit. Casualisation of the workforce was the obvious & logical response to excessive regulation.

I know profit is a dirty word to you, but without a profit there can be no job. Have you ever thought of working with the employer, rather than against. I have had a couple of instances where working together was good for everyone.

In the marine tourist industry where costs are basically fixed regardless of passenger numbers, I had a system where if passenger numbers numbers went up by 5% for 3 consecutive months, an extra 5% went into the wages kitty. If as usual the existing staff could handle the extra numbers, all got the 5% increase in wages, a little less if extra staff was required.

In a manufacturing business where turnover increase do not so closely equate to increased profit, the system was a 5% increase in wages for each $250,000 in turnover maintained for 3 months.

I had no problem with unions, or bludgers. As the staff realised the bludgers were bludging on them, not the company, they convinced any who did not pull their weight to move on quite quickly, with no input from me.

believe in a "fair go"
Paul1405,
Try tell the Public Service Union about that & see what their answer is !

Whatever is happening to workers is all explained in my post on Neo-Feudalism, which was sneered at by the usual 'progressive' numpties. It's not the fault of the government or the opposition, both of whom are yet to wake up to what is happening; nor is it the fault of employers. Start reading and thinking. It's probably too late to stop what is coming, but there's no point in blaming the wrong things and the wrong people.

What's up Hassy, read my post and seen red, now chocking on your $10 pizza in the back of that cheap Uber ride home from a lazy day down at gods waiting room, playing the pokies with taxpayer dollars? I'm talking about honest hardworking Australians who are being ripped off by billion dollar multi-nationals who exploit decent workers through a sham system of so called "self employed contracts", not even paid the minimum wage. This is third world exploitation, if your going to come at that, well I'd have your aged pension reduced to the same level as paid in India. BTW, when you were in the air killer squad, were you paid whilst undergoing so called training? I bet you were, a waste of taxpayers money!

Indy, you failed at the menial level of the pubic service, sacked for poor performance with the mop and bucket, was it not, been dirty on the PS ever since. I bet you run to the nearest public servant at 'Centrelink' for a whinge, if your old age welfare is five cents short, or ten seconds late.

Paul1404,
Your silliness is simply not letting up. I'm not dirty on the Public Service, I'm utterly dismayed at the symbiosis of incompetence & corruption of far too many Public Servants.
You're obviously one of them judging by your desperate attempts to draw attention away from them !
My investment over 52 years in the Old age Pension is paying off now. No complaints there from me !

Things will only get worse for workers. The tech oligarchs expect the growing influence of technically educated people to “destroy artificial inequalities” while “highlighting” the natural inequalities of the working class and the middle class. They regard themselves as being more deserving of their wealth and power than the proles. “Digital feudalism” will see most people ‘commodified’. The modern feudal overlords see themselves as enlightened people, constructing a prosperous society, but with strict supervision of the masses.

As for what the media (e.g The Guardian, and even The Australian now), a 2019 Rand report in the US shows journalism is steadily moving away from a fact-based model to one dominated by opinion. The entertainment media has also become a bastion of left-wing orthodoxy.

And, make no mistake: it is the Left behind all the problems that are starting to plague workers and the middle class that they used to champion.

Universities are in on the act, too.

Pitirim Sorikin, ‘The Crisis of Our Age’, 1992, observed in tertiary education “a frantic eagerness to know more and more about less and less”. They seemed determined to narrow the field of enquiry to obscure topics of little interest outside the universities. Academic life has grown sterile and irrelevant to most people, even as an academic degree has become more important than ever for chances of work.

Once champions of free thought and enquiry, universities have become more like a medieval model, with increasing attacks on ‘heretics’ (anyone not towing the Marxist ‘progressive’ line).

In ‘Rise of Fascism’, FL Carsten writes that the mission of universities is now to beat in a particular set of beliefs rather than to teach. He found their zeal for this reminiscent of the patterns in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. In 2018, James Barrett described university lecturers as activists, resembling “Bible-thumping” preachers rather than open-minded intellectuals.

The work/pay problems, and most of all our problems are, and will be, the fault of the so-called progressive Left and their nasty ideology. And all this zero emissions by 2050 means that there will be very few jobs outside of China anyway.

Labor's latest policy is a typical turd from the unions.

While on the face of it it sounds fair, but the fixed hours, pay based on time, overtime, leave etc is simply designed to destroy the gig economy.

Having destroyed most manufacturing jobs, the unions are disappearing and need to destroy the competition.

The flexibility of the gig economy benefits not only the businesses but the students and workers that are keen to earn a few bucks after school or their full-time jobs. While there are those that are exploited, this sledgehammer approach is the standard idiotic response from the left whingers.

More important on the job scene is the 650,000 jobs predicted to disappear thanks to Morrison's Labor-like zero emissions by 2050 bullshite. It was this sort of nonsense that lost Labor the last election, but they can now say that the difference between the two policies is negligible. Big advantage for Morrison gone - the smirk could be on the other side of his face after the 2022 election.

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everyone, except Paul, of course.
Paul you are so wrong, I don't need to add anything more, I think the guys have nailed it perfectly, even to the point of knocking you for a six.
Why you insist on trying to bankrupt Australia and Australians, escapes me.
Why can't you see that the more you expect to get paid, the more YOU have to pay, so in the end, you end up getting less for the same money.
Have you not learned anything over the many years you have lived.
And if one more moron mentions the words "Net Zero", well I'm saying it here as Graham might be having a bad day.
Suffice to say, that the words Net Zero are PC at it's best.
It's supposed to give the plebs the idea that it means NO emissions.
Well it's another GW CC lie.
What it really means is that someone is going to pay someone else that has planted some trees, to buy their "carbon credits", which are intangible, you can't touch them, or see them, or even smell them, it is just another money fleecing scam or con.
The guy who is buying these carbon credits, has done absolutely NOTHING to reduce his carbon output.
According to these govt and moronic experts, the business is now carbon neutral because the trees that were planted are sucking up the carbon he emits, and he just carries on as he always has.
Why do you think, they don't say, ZERO EMISSIONS?
Because it's NOT POSSIBLE, or another way of putting it; IT'S IMPOSSIBLE!
If the brainiacs of this world have not yet figured out this whole thing is a scam, Heaven help us!

Dear Paul,

What right have you to categorise people, telling them: "you are an employer", "you are an employee" or "you are a contractor", etc. and that therefore they must do this and not do that?

I cannot find any moral or philosophical justification for the imposed structures that you praise and seem to be proud about - can you?
Just claiming, "It is nice" or "It works", is not good enough.

Why talk of "worker's rights" when every living being is a worker: no-body can survive without at least working on maintaining their body, notwithstanding that many also work to help in so many ways their family, friends and others, even without any formal agreements.

If people deserve to live in dignity and have the basic things that are needed for decent living, then this surely is unconditional and must not depend on whatever agreements they make or don't make between them.

In other words, the fact that you are entitled to live, to eat properly, to have a warm bed, to receive good medical care, etc., should have nothing to do with your happening to sign some contract with another person that includes, possibly among other things, clauses that say that you will perform such-and-such work for them and that they will give you a certain amount of money.

If you (like myself) oppose slavery, then you must not support any form of it, including when people need to sign "employment" contracts just in order to survive.

Once the above is clear, what possibly justifies your forcibly complicating other people's lives and interfering with the contents of agreements/contracts that other people make between them? Whatever they happen to agree about is their private matter - if you commendably think that none of them should starve (unless of course they want to), then instead please deal DIRECTLY with this issue of how to prevent starvation and make sure they nobody does, not just "workers"!

As far as you guys are concerned,

Who was the party pooper who outlawed slavery in our glorious free enterprise society? I have a number of unpaid contracted positions at my place. Alti, I would like you to work as my unpaid door greeter, you can pass on your favorited words of endearment to my gay and aboriginal friends when they arrive. Shonkyminister, can there be any other position for you other than cook, being a connoisseur of the home delivered cheap pizza and sloppy burger as you are. Yuyu, its unpaid no contract work for you in my garden, a place where you can while away the hours passing on your words of wisdom to the fairies who reside there. It goes without saying that Indy will be my mop and bucket man, having spent years in that noble profession. ttbn, you little charmer I'll have a position for you, one that suits your talents, chook feeder. Then of course there is Hassy, what position would suit the skills of Mr Hasbeen? Yep, Hassy, your job will be to do nothing, a position befitting one of such abilities.

Up at at em' boys works a calling!

On a more serious note;

"A food delivery cyclist has died in the Sydney suburb of Redfern after being struck by a truck carrying an excavator. ... He is the fifth delivery worker known to have died in Australia since late September 2020, following the deaths of Bijoy Paul, Dede Fredy, Xiaojun Chen and Chow Khai Shien."

As long as the cheap pizza and bag of soggy burgers and fries keeps arriving on time you guys have no concern that exploited workers should die in the delivery of your 'happy meal'. Unless of course it should result in delivery being inconveniently late, and your pizza and burgers are cold! You're not paying your regular pittance for a cold dinner, now are you.

Pauliar,

No one could ever accuse you of being rational. The moment anyone challenges your BS on wages you go to slavery, for racism you go to Nazis etc.

You also lack the IQ to consider the consequences of implementing Labor's idiotic policies like putting many of the gig workers out of work.

Just what Aus needs coming out of the Covid recession is Labor destroying jobs.

Dear Paul,

May I understand from your cryptic response that you have no objection to slavery, provided that you rather than others, are the slave-master?

It is regrettable that meal-deliverers die on the road.
What is your solution? Would dying with more money in their pockets be more humane?
I have never ordered or received food delivery. If I want any ready food I go out and buy it myself.

where I work, we have had no pay rise since 2018.

EBA was rejected late last year because not enough packpay.

Times do suit employers at moment, at least for lower skilled workers.

A serious, real, problem about work is - who is going to be doing jobs in the future? If it’s millenials, society is in for a big shock. There will be no need to make up nonsense about awful employers, underpayment and slavery as we have been subjected to here.

I recently came across an article written by a Shannon Molloy, in 2017. The article was titled, ‘We’ve raised Generation Hopeless: Millenials who lack basic life and workplace skills. And it’s a big issue’.

These kiddies are “always on line”. They have no small talk, critical thinking and problems-solving skills. They can’t cook, and they can’t budget.

One educator, Michaela Launerts, who has felt the need to write a book called ‘Girlcode’ on the subject, points to a steep decline in interpersonal skills. Therefore, regardless of school results, they are going to struggle to get a job.

With online shopping and apps for everything, they are not used to speaking to people in person. It terrifies them.

In the US, a poll found that 65% of young people don’t feel comfortable dealing face-to-face. 80% preferred to converse digitally. They are less likely to understand how other people feel.

They are no good at dealing with workplace conflict; terrible at time management - but they desire senior work roles immediately they start work; ones they can’t possibly hold down.

Many recruiters are astounded by the conduct of young applicants. They have grown up online where they don’t learn the social conventions that are still expected of them, but they are naively confident of their abilities, wanting middle management jobs immediately.

This communistic whining and blaming other people for imagined and made up situations is the least of our worries on the work front.

This would have to be a Paul gripe.
Obviously some here have never worked out how much income some of their employees bring into the business or company. For a business to be profitable the employee needs to create six times their wages in most private companies. The public service does not need to make any income, as they are carried by the taxes of the private sector.

Given Green serial number 1405's penchant for earbashing about how good hard-left New Zealand is, this is as good a place as any to recommend that fun-lover conservatives read Tim Blair's "The Nicest Country They Couldn't Wait To Leave" in Quadrant Online (no paywall) 14th. February.

Paul, I'm glad you brought up this example.
Although I think it is very low of you to use the death of innocent people in an insane attempt and exaggerating in desperation to ram home your vacuous points.
Why can't you get it through your left wing head, that a person works at a particular job because that's the best they can hope for, otherwise they would be working somewhere else.
You are being disingenuous and lying by promoting this "slavery" mantra.
And you know it.
Paul, when YOU decide YOU want to start a business, please call in your left leaning, labor voting comrades.
I'll be parked down the road to get in first, when the liquidation sales happens, and it will inevitably happen.
Paul, stop preaching about things you know nothing about.
As a lefty, you are harboring a very unsavoury and distasteful attitude towards those who are creating the employment you and your mates, detest so much.
It's the classic, "shooting yourself in the foot".
The last/worse thing you can do is push up wages, which pushes up costs, which pushes up inflation.
Why don't you and your lot learn to live within your means, instead of chasing your tails, and trying to make unrealistic demands.
Tell your stupid ilk and their offspring to settle on a 3 X 1 house, instead of a two story, un-affordable, 5 X 4 with a pool, 3 car garage and all the other superfluous trimmings that they cannot, afford and, should NOT have.
Which brings me to another associated fall-out of this arrogant extravagance.
If all the females with children looked after their kids instead of their ego's, there would be plenty of jobs available, and any shortages after the men/fathers had been gainfully employed/hired, then and only then should it be possible for the females to take the job.
This PC crap is killing the traditional family structure and it's unity and strength.
No Paul, sorry, but no matter which way you look at it, your/labors way is one of destructive regression, not one of constructive progression.

So Paul thinks our minimum wage, the highest in the world, is slavery. Typical of the garbage we get from green/communists. But Paul does make a couple of valid points, although he didn't mean to.

He tells us that a number of food delivery cyclists have been killed in the inner city suburbs of Sydney, thus he highlights 2 evils. Firstly cyclists should be banned from all public roads, particularly in old suburbs with roads too narrow to accommodate them safely.

In this user pays society it is time cyclists paid for their own tracks, & were never allowed on public roads paid for by the motorist a dozen times over. Their presence puts far too much responsibility on girls busy texting as they drive around.

Secondly he highlights the incompetence of the younger generation, who can't even cook their own meals. Perhaps they are too busy texting, or don't have the attention span to last the cooking time of a frozen meal.

I saw a case recently where tenants were ordered to pay restitution as they had sold the stove out of a flat they were renting. They never used it. I wonder how long it will be until we deliver meals to them, free of charge, to ensure their "quality of life".

Wow, did I just make a joke?

ALTRAV says:

"Although I think it is very low of you to use the death of innocent people in an insane attempt and exaggerating in desperation to ram home your vacuous points".

I'll second that. Apart from the fact that how much people are paid has naught to do with watching where they are going, it's totally insensitive to a dead person and his family. But when did a Green show any sensitivity!

Paul's ideal world is to have everyone working for the Government on equal pay, even if they are producing no nothing. Everyone would be public servants, or slaves to the State. That way no one has feel unequal or produce income because income is a dirty capitalist word. It means we all share equally in the benefits from products produced. No one "owns" the factory, or business or goods produced they belong to the State until its is distributed. Soon we finish up like Venezuela.

Josephus, you have gone to the top of the class, with your latest posting.
I don't know if you're aware of it or not but, what you have written is a forecast of what is actually in the planning stages, and has been for decades, even centuries.
I have been following certain very wealthy, and therefore powerful people.
These sick scum-bags have been planning the most egregious and massively outrageous assault on the world, to do exactly what Josephus has, I believe, accidentally or unknowingly stumbled upon.
These filthy pigs consider themselves above the rest of humanity and have been working on this idea/plan for as long as I've been alive and longer.
They have been the cause of, if not all, then most of the wars around the world.
Their history and actions are truly sickening, and given the power, I would have them all killed before they finish us off first.
They are the worst of absolutely deranged, psychopathic and sick people and minds.
One of their stupid unbelievable and just plain idiotic mantra's is, "You will own NOTHING, and you will be happy"!
Are these guys sick or what, and because of this they are a danger to society, and also they are too wealthy and powerful, they cannot be locked up.
No the answer is returning the favour they subjected innocent people to over the many years they and their sick, inbred families have been around.
They hide and skulk within the shadows of the WEF, and that's probably why Trump dis-owned the WEF.
But now since one of their own is back in the chair, they can keep purging and steeling from the piggy bank again, to continue with their sick agenda.

A little more on the topic of jobs and work from the IPA:

"The political class looks down on Australians who work in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. They see them as inconvenient roadblocks on the inevitable path to progress, and would prefer them to just spend the rest of their lives on the dole.”

“Labor, Greens, half the Liberal Party, big business and their lobby groups, and the trade unions hold Australian workers in contempt. They expect a 45-year-old unemployed manufacturing worker to simply upskill and find a new job which don’t exist".

The second paragraph refers to the nonsense of all the mythical, by such and such a date 'green' jobs in the future, which now account for
1% of jobs.

The 'rest of their lives on the dole' again raises the prospect of Neo-Feudalism.