Shorten’s shortfall: the Fair Work Act ‘Review’ | En Passant #AusPol

via enpassant.com.au

via: http://enpassant.com.au/?p=11839

The Fair Work Act maintains the hated Workchoices regime with a few changes as sops to the trade union bureaucrats and to give the impression to workers that they have done something major when they haven’t.

There are still massive restrictions on the right to strike and fines and threats of imprisonment for taking ‘unprotected’ action. The building union cop, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, with its draconian and undemocratic powers, still terrorises building workers.

The crisis of Australian capitalism – the two speed economy masks the low profitability of large swathes of capital – has seen the bosses scream for industrial relations changes. More flexibility and higher productivity are two key demands. Both are code for attacking wages and conditions and restoring profitability at the expense of workers’ living standards.

In fact the bosses have been using lockouts as a way of getting what is effectively arbitration of claims. Who really imagines that the locked out QANTAS workers will get a fair deal from Fair Work, assuming the other union leaders don’t sell out like the engineers’ leadership did?

And the bosses want further restrictions on industrial action. It is true industrial disputes in the June quarter were at their highest level for seven years. But that is from a very very low base. It is slight blip in an otherwise bleak industrial landscape.

The ’upsurge’ is due to two main factors. There were a large number of enterprise agreements that fell due in 2011.

52% of the industrial action was in New South Wales. NSW pubic servants fought against the O’Farrell attacks on their wages and conditions. For example they went on a one day strike.

This quarters’ numbers might also be up with the unprotected action Victorian nurses took for all too short a time.

There may be more ’shooting star’ action organised by the union officials next year. For example the Baillieu government in Victoria has decided to cut ten percent of public service jobs (about 3600) and limit wage increases to well below inflation.

This follows the lead from the Gillard Labor government which has announced an increase in the ‘efficiency’ dividend to 4%. This effectively means the loss of 3000 public service jobs, according to their union. Labor too is limiting pay increases to well below increases in the household price index, in effect real wage cuts.

Labor’s ‘review’ of the Fair Work Act is something it promised when it introduced the original legislation. It is being painted as refining the Act. However the appointment of Shorten as the Workplace Relations Minister, the pressure the bosses are putting on the government and the neoliberalism that is now Labor DNA all point to more significant changes to the Act that will go a long way to addressing the concerns of capital.

As a former senior union official Shorten is in a great position to oversee changes to the Fair Work Act to placate the bosses and sell it to his former union leader mates who can then sell it to their members.

Clealry Shorten’s class collaborationist past will be influential in him pushing through pro-boss changes to the industrial relations laws. Here’s what he said when he was appointed Minsiter.

My view is very clear about Australian business: you can’t have employees without employers. I do not have a catastrophic view of industrial relations. I don’t have a view that being Industrial Relations Minister is all about fire fighting. I know from personal experience of doing thousands of enterprise agreements, having been an employer myself of people, having sat on investment boards of pension boards and superannuation funds, having been a Parliamentary Secretary and Minister in this Government, most Australians go to work and are happy at work and most employers are happy with their employees .

You cannot have a workforce without employers and we need employers to be doing well, and of course there are many different forms of employment: there is direct employment, there is the very important world of independent contracting, some businesses are large and some are small. I have a lot of respect for people who risk their capital and give up their weekends to running businesses, managing businesses, and I have great respect for employees. I do not believe it is too difficult to be pro employer and pro employee at the same time.

Of course the opposite is true. Capital only exists and survives because of the exploitation of workers. They need us. We don’t need them.

But the outcome of the Review will be a shortfall for workers looking for better wages and conditions and the right to strike if the pro-boss sentiments of Shorten are any guide.

The Fair Work Act Review is being conducted by a member of the Reserve Bank and economist, a former industrial relations judge and an academic. Gee, I wonder what the first two will be interested in? Listening to the bosses perhaps?

Is there an alternative? Yes.

Baiada workers showed it. They set up a picket for two weeks and won their demands. Nurses showed a glimpse of it when they started closing down beds and defied for a short time the orders of Fair Work Australia and the Court. QANTAS workers were starting to do it but accepted the lockout and the cessation orders.

Industrial action, especially strike action, has the potential to win real gains for workers, to defend jobs and to help rebuild unions. The way to reform industrial relations in Australia is to make the draconian anti-strike and other rotten provisions of Labor’s Fair Work Act a dead letter by concerted strike action challenging the rule of the bosses.

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Baiada is playing chicken with livelihoods and lives #Ausunions

via thepunch.com.au

Via: http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Baiada-is-playing-chicken-with-livelihood...

Until the dramatic events of Friday night, the Baiada Poultry dispute in suburban Melbourne had not had the publicity of Qantas. That’s a shame because the gutsy fight by low-paid Baiada workers is just as important in the fight for fair treatment at work.

Baiada workers, like this chook, have their hands tied by greater powers. Pic: John Fotiadis.

Media coverage has focused on the clashes between police and workers, but has ignored the basic issues at stake. A couple of hundred low-paid workers have been forced to take legal industrial action because their employer has refused to bargain with them.

They are taking collective action in an attempt to stop the spread of insecure work – and ensure that Baiada workers on low wages have some certainty around their jobs and basic rights to sick leave and holiday pay.

Have you ever been inside a poultry processing plant? It’s not pleasant. The work is dirty, difficult and dangerous. The company has already been fined for a death which occurred on one of its farms, and the courts are currently investigating a death at the Laverton plant.

We need to wait for the courts to rule on the cause of this death, but I will make a general point that workers who have not got secure employment are less likely to raise safety issues with their bosses.

Baiada workers are on around $17-19 per hour for permanent employees, with those on casual or other contracts often doing the same work for less. Staff are asking for a 5 per cent pay increase, the company has offered 3 per cent.

But what the debate is really about is security of work and equal treatment for all employees. The increasing numbers of workers employed as cash in hand, contract or labour hire workers at the plant has undermined pay, conditions and safety for the permanent workforce.

Employees want an assurance that they will not be shifted on to contract or casual employment, and a way to move into permanent employment once they have spent a certain amount of time at the company.

They have sought to raise these issues with the company as part of regular enterprise bargaining negotiations, but management has repeatedly rejected their modest claims and refuses to recognise their rights to collective bargaining.

As is sometimes the case when a company refuses to bargain, the workers have exercised their legal right to take industrial action. Contrary to popular belief, workers on contract or casual work do not automatically earn more than their colleagues in full-time work.

The indirect model in place at Baiada is all for the benefit of the employers, not the staff who are trying to pay off mortgages or monthly bills with no certainty about how much they will get paid. Unlike the directors of Baiada, whose company controls 35 per cent of Australia’s poultry market and turned over $1.2 billion in 2009-10.

The Baiada family’s wealth was estimated at $495 million by BRW magazine in June 2011.

What’s happening at Baiada is an extreme version of what is happening across Australia. Workers on a variety of contracting arrangements are working alongside each other. The risks are being shifted from employers to workers. Complex contracting arrangements are used to push the limits of the law and strip entitlements away from workers.

It is common to hear the argument that industrial disputes should be limited to pay and conditions, and other arrangements left to the discretion of the management. But it is impossible to separate pay and conditions from the issue of insecure work.

What is the point of agreeing to pay and conditions if employers can simply shift to other forms of work with no chance for workers to change this?

I wrote on the Punch a month ago about the rise in insecure work in Australia - which is now about 40 per cent of the workforce - and the problems it was posing for people trying to pay off a mortgage or establish themselves in a career. I also wrote about the ACTU’s push to give people real choice about their working arrangements.

This case is a concrete example of what we are fighting for.

Since then the ACTU has announced the first formal national inquiry into insecure work. To be chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, it has begun taking submissions from the Australian community, and will travel around Australia to hold hearings next February and March.

Since the announcement of our “Secure Jobs. Better Future” campaign, I have heard many more stories about the frustrations of coping with uncertainty in the workplace and the difficulty of getting permanent work.

The shift from permanent to insecure work is a social experiment that we have undertaken without thinking through the consequences. No one has examined how things have changed over the last 20 years.

The Howe Inquiry wants to hear from all sides of the debate, those who think they benefit from insecure work, and those that don’t. But the debate should not be narrowly focused on the economic side.

We want to examine just what the effects of insecure work are on the family which can’t plan paying its bills, or the country town that can’t field a football team because so many players cannot commit to play on Saturdays as they never know whether they have to work or not.

What are the long term effects of having such a big proportion of our workforce on insecure wages? What happens when many families do not have the chance of building some financial security or paying off a home - assuming they can get a loan in the first place?

How does society change when people are increasingly shifting from city to city to look for work leaving family and friendship networks behind? We may have calculated the benefits to employers, but I do not think we have really looked at the social costs.

I understand that no one is guaranteed a permanent job for life, but there is no reason why six-month contracts have to become the norm. This is particular the case for jobs like teaching and nursing, which are not seasonal, but are increasingly becoming contract-based.

The book “Nickel and Dimed”, by American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, details the emergence of an underpaid class of US workers, stuck in short-term jobs and unable to save enough money to buy homes or go to college.

This was written during the economic boom at the start of the century, and many of those insecure workers are now facing long stretches of unemployment.

We are not at the same level as the USA - we have a higher minimum wage and guaranteed entitlements - but I do not want to see us going down a path that leads to big disparities of wealth and opportunity in society.

Two-out-five Australian workers are in some kind of insecure work. Two million workers have no paid sick leave, no annual or long service leave and no right to ongoing work. The risks of the workplace are no longer falling on the shoulders of employers, but on their most vulnerable staff.

Other countries are beginning to recognise this and make changes to better protect insecure workers. In the UK, temporary agency workers get the same holiday pay and other entitlements as permanent staff after 12 weeks with the same company.

Unions will continue to push for better conditions for insecure workers through the bargaining process, but I think as a society we need to start having a debate about what level of insecure work is acceptable.

Is a bigger profit for Baiada, or a couple of cents off a roast chook at the supermarket worth putting workers’ lives at risk and cutting away at the security and entitlements of our lowest-paid workers and their families?

Posted via email from The Left Hack

Secret plan to cut Vic nurse numbers #Ausunions

Cabinet's strategy.

THE Baillieu government has developed a secret plan to goad the state's nurses into industrial action so it can force them into arbitration, cut nurse numbers and replace them at hospital bedsides with low-skilled ''health assistants''.

The secret government document outlines an aggressive approach to achieving its policy - by deliberately frustrating pay negotiations - prompting claims from the nurses' union secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick of ''duplicity''.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT

A cabinet-in-confidence submission, signed by Health Minister David Davis in May and leaked to The Sunday Age, confirms that the government had detailed plans to cut the annual nursing budget by $104 million.

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Mr Davis did not return repeated calls from The Sunday Age, so it is not known whether cabinet endorsed the strategy.

In order to make the savings, the government planned to make nurse-patient ratios - currently one nurse is rostered on for every four patients - more flexible; replace some nurses with low-paid, low-skilled ''health assistants''; reduce the ratio of university-qualified nurses on wards; and introduce shorter shifts and split shifts.

Mr Davis's submission reveals that in return for these cuts, which amount to 4 per cent of the nurses' wage budget, nurses would get a pay rise of just 3.5 per cent per year. Police recently received a 4.7 per cent pay rise.

The government appears determined to pursue its policy despite its submission acknowledging that interstate nurses ''receive significantly higher pay rates'' than Victorian nurses.

Negotiations for the new agreement began in September, and on Friday nurses voted to give themselves the ability to take legally protected industrial action from Thursday.

The government's aim, revealed in the submission, is to have the crisis continue to a point whereby the industrial tribunal, Fair Work Australia, is either called in or steps in because negotiations have broken down and the nurses' action is deemed harmful to public welfare.

This would force both parties into arbitration, where the government's push to reduce nurses' conditions is likely to be successful because the tribunal is not permitted under the constitution to tell states the ''number, identity or appointment'' of the workforce they employ.

''[We] believe that a demonstrated preparedness to take such claims to full-blown arbitration (despite the risks involved) is the best means of inducing the ANF to reach an acceptable agreement,'' the submission argues. ''These proposals will be difficult to have agreed in negotiation, but may be successful should the parties end up in arbitration.''

The Australian Nursing Federation's Lisa Fitzpatrick told The Sunday Age the government had adopted a ''sham approach'' to the negotiations.

''They're prepared to force nurses to take industrial action such as bed closures which they then argue is harming the community, and say how terrible the nurses are,'' she said yesterday.

''But this is what they've set out to do all along. It's duplicity of the greatest proportion - more than we've ever seen before.''

Mr Davis's submission details savings of $42 million per year from ''roster/shift flexibility'', $39.3 million by changing nurse ratios and using ''health assistants'', and $19.9 million from ''nurse-patient ratio flexibility''.

It says the government wants ''significant replacement [of nurses] at the lower end [of the skill range] by a new generation of assistants'', even though the rate of technological change in nursing ''easily surpasses that experienced by other professionals''.

It says more flexibility is required to make sure that ''management prerogative … in relation to workforce planning is enhanced as far as practicable''.

At present, state health facilities employ registered nurses who have done a three-year university degree and enrolled nurses who have completed an 18-month TAFE diploma. The government wants to save money on nursing wages by employing unregistered health assistants who have little if any training, similar to personal care assistants who work in the private aged-care sector.

The Austin Hospital is trialling a program whereby health assistants are tending patients on wards, but they are in addition to the existing nurse-patient ratio.

Kate Robinson and Kylie Thompson, nurses at the Royal Women's Hospital, said if the government tried to save $104 million from nurses' wages, they would look for different jobs.

And Hannah Harris, an enrolled nurse at the Peter James Centre, said the move would create so much stress that ''we're going to lose nurses, surely''.

The government has appointed two law firms to manage negotiations. The Fair Work Act requires parties to negotiate in good faith. Ms Fitzpatrick said the union ''needs to get legal advice about whether this constitutes good faith bargaining''.

Ms Fitzpatrick said the union had clear evidence that the government was dragging out negotiations. But when she alleged this in a letter to the Department of Health's director of industrial relations, Tom Olthof, in September, he denied it.

''I note with disappointment and incredulity your statement … that the Department … are not genuinely seeking negotiated outcomes,'' Mr Olthof replied.

via theage.com.au

This shows the contempt shown by governments against Australian workers, and highlights exactly the type of anti-worker strategy employed by government, that Unions warn of regularly.

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#Qantas shutdown: industrial relations and #Ausunions| Crikey

via crikey.com.au

Delegitimising unions in the great game of labour v capital

by Bernard Keane
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/11/02/delegitimising-unions-in-the-great-game-o...

It may not look it, but there are strong links between the Occupy protests here and overseas, and more formal political debate and public discourse, which naturally has been dominated by the Qantas dispute. And not just in the vague sense that both deal with the economy, or capitalism, or markets.

Let’s be clear about the long-term business agenda in Australia regarding industrial relations. It’s an agenda aimed not at improving productivity — as I and others have incessantly showed, the last round of IR reform led to a drop in labour productivity — but a more self-interested one aimed at reducing labour costs and neutering unions.

Business is quite tolerant of trade unions, as long as they do nothing that inconveniences business or increases labour costs. They can even be a useful form of alternative pressure on governments when industries set about rent-seeking. Neutered unions are quite acceptable. Real ones, that aggressively represent the interests of their members, aren’t. And ones that actually take industrial action, in particular, are regarded as outright enemies of business.

This is the ultimate thrust of IR reform — to pathologise industrial action, however legal, however justified. The point is to frame the right to withhold labour as an illegitimate form of economic vandalism, no matter what the circumstances.

Thus the incessant business complaint that the Fair Work Australia framework is too “pro-union” because it allows unions to take industrial action once a number of legal hurdles have been cleared. And the logic of Qantas’s actions on the weekend was to break free of the normal industrial dispute provisions under which it was operating, in which unions could continue to take wholly legal industrial action which (as Fair Work Australia found on Sunday night) did not pose a significant threat to Qantas.

This is business’s particular self-interested contribution to the liberal economic reform project. The IR component of that project, starting in 1993 with the Keating government’s provisions for enterprise bargaining and accelerating in 1996-97 with Peter Reith’s reforms to deliver individual contracts, was to remove the impediments of a centralised bargaining system from a modern, open economy, allowing enterprises to respond to competition more flexibly.

Coupled with globalisation, deregulation and corporate tax cuts, the reform project has delivered a huge increase in the corporate sector’s share of national income — at the expense of labour, as this graph from the Australian Council of Trade Unions shows:

The wage share of national income in Australia has only recently come off historic lows. But on this we’re no different from the United States or the United Kingdom, where wage share has also dropped over the last three decades to historic lows of around 50%.

Australian business clearly doesn’t believe the wage share has fallen low enough. That’s what drives its agenda to go further and undermine collective bargaining, a key part of which is the right to withhold labour, something businesses have been trying to do since the time of the Combination Acts in the early nineteenth century. Australia remains, for its corporate leaders, a “high wage” economy that struggles to compete internationally. For globally-mobile capital, there’s always a lower-wage country somewhere else to move to.

That same global market, however, has been the justification for a massive increase in executive remuneration, which as Prof David Peetz has shown, accelerated in the 1980s but then really took in the late 1990s.

Now, you can look at this from a union perspective and rail about income inequality and overpowerful corporations, or from a corporate perspective and point out that it’s the logic of a global market. And that market is currently delivering strong employment growth and growing income to Australians. But either way, it is driving the growing anti-corporate sentiment in the community, the opposition to further economic reform and the desire to reverse some reforms like privatisation. The Occupy protests are only the most vocal point of this deep and wide community sentiment that corporations get all the benefits of the economic system while the community gets all of the costs.

Where unions have failed is to tap into this sentiment. Capitalism operates most effectively by atomising the individual, by ensuring that an individual’s primary relationships are one-to-one relationships with producers as a consumer, and with employers, as a worker. Traditional systems that establish links cutting across these one-to-one relationships — unions, churches, political parties — have all been in decline in recent decades. Now the internet threatens to establish a different set of relationships and communities at odds with capitalism. But unions still retain some of the power that they once had to disrupt capitalist relationships, which is why business wants to neuter them.

The challenge for unions is to find a way to effectively channel those community concerns. Some of the more politically effective unions, like the Australian Workers Union, would argue that that is exactly what they’ve done through outcomes like the recent steel industry package. They also face an often hostile media environment that reinforces the illegitimacy of industrial action.

Alternatively, the challenge for business is to find a way to address those concerns themselves, to stop the community seeing them as a problem, the beneficiaries of a rigged capitalist game. Continuing to reflexively wage industrial relations wars wouldn’t seem to be the best start in doing that.

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