Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This is a government that thinks the entitlements of our young workers are worth 2c. It is a government that wants you to trade away your holidays, rest breaks and penalty rates for 2c. This is a government that wants companies slashing hard won rights and conditions and tossing workers 2c in return. What an absolute disgrace. Our young workers deserve better than 2c and they deserve better than this government’s extreme industrial relations laws.

In question time today, the member for Perth, the member for Port Adelaide and I asked questions about an agreement, an AWA, that has been placed upon the website of a substantial firm in this country. Spotlight is not a small business around the corner. Spotlight is not an enterprise that is distant from metropolitan centres in a location where there is no scrutiny as to their activities. Spotlight is not a company that operates in circumstances where there is a lack of fluidity in the labour market because there are very few job opportunities available. Spotlight operates in the heart of this nation. It operates with 100 stores. It operates with 6,000 employees.

When people have concerns about the security of their workplace, and when they have concerns about the stability of their ability to access penalty rates, holiday pay and fair treatment when it comes to issues of dismissals from jobs, they think about threats to that ability as lying at the heart of fly-by-night operations—rogue employers. They do not think about threats to that in heartland employment.

AWAs like this will affect the heartland workplace of the Australian nation—the sorts of workplaces in which the heads of families work, the sorts of workplaces in which people anticipate an opportunity for a substantial career over time and promotion, the sorts of workplaces in which people anticipate a dignified relationship with each other, with their supervisors and with their employers. In other words, they will affect heartland middle Australia.

What we can clearly see going on in heartland middle Australia now is a direct threat to the livelihood, to the happiness and to the economic security of ordinary Australian families. What we can see in this AWA is a direct threat to young employees starting out in the workplace, for many of whom this may be their first experience of employment. Their first experience of employment will be of deepest possible unfairness—the elimination of all incentives and the elimination of a desirable outcome if they choose to put in that little bit extra. Of course, what the current workforce can anticipate from this is a very direct threat to those employees who now come under awards or have other collective agreements with their employers. They know whom they are now competing with and what is coming at them.

Let me go through the details of this AWA offered by Spotlight to a new employee in New South Wales. It offers 2c an hour above the current award rate, but with no penalty rates, no overtime payments, no rest breaks, no break between shifts, no cap on the number of days worked in a row, no rostered days off, no annual leave loading, no incentive based payments or bonuses and no public holidays. All penalties and loadings will be sold off for the princely sum of 2c an hour. Employees on contracts will be expected to work late at night and all day Saturday to earn $91 less than their fellow workers still on the award. Saturday work will be paid at the ordinary rate, not at time and a quarter, as under the award. Sunday work will be paid at the ordinary rate, not at time and a half, as under the award.

Under the terms of that contract, these conditions cannot be raised and dealt with for a period of five years. This is not just a five-year contract; this is a coercive, harsh five-year sentence—five years locked in harsh, punishing work conditions with no prospect of a wage rise unless the company offers one. The door is now wide open for these reduced conditions to be imposed on 6,000 workers across the country. It is written in black and white in the company brochure. The brochure says:

With the new Workchoices legislation well underway, Stage one for Spotlight is as well.

... all new staff will be employed on Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs).

We have it there in black and white what the company intends for its workers. This is stage 1. Stage 2 will be when they work through the opportunities provided to them—and they are many in this government’s industrial relations legislation—to manipulate the provisions in the legislation that are there for employers to manipulate so that they can start to move all their employees onto what is now being offered to all their new workers.

The thing about this is that it is completely legal. We have taken a very careful look at this, and there is no element of the government’s legislation which has been traduced by Spotlight, not a single jot. Absolutely every protection that the government has incorporated in its legislation has been recognised and adopted by Spotlight scrupulously. Every element of protection that exists with regard to an employee’s right to approach their employer has been scrupulously protected by Spotlight.

The trouble is that at the end of the day there is basically nothing that protects an ordinary worker from this sort of treatment—no legal outs, no fall-back to the award conditions when there is silence on award matters. Those who prepared this contract for new employees of Spotlight were very careful: they made absolutely certain to rule out any provisions in the AWA that offended against any proposition that, if there was silence in the AWA, the award would operate by default.

This is the future of this nation at the hands of this government. It is true that, in a buoyant labour market—and there certainly is a buoyant labour market in my home state of Western Australia and in Queensland; they are not as buoyant elsewhere, not in New South Wales—there will be a small number of employees who sack their bosses rather than the other way around. You might find them on the odd mine site in Western Australia, where they have to beg and plead to get people to work for them. But the vast bulk of people who inhabit our cities are not mobile. These are the people who are building their houses, creating their lives, wishing to come home of an evening to see their families and wanting to make certain that there is time available for decent contact with them and the rest of the community over the weekends, and people who may have two or three kids or mortgage commitments. They are not in a position to up stakes and disappear to the north of Western Australia when they are confronted with a situation like this. They have—and this goes for 90 per cent of the workforce—always relied on fairness in the workplace. They have always relied on decent treatment via awards as an underpinning backstop. They have relied on the fact that they can contact and communicate with people who will give them help and then, when they present themselves to an independent umpire, have their claims to receive a decent return protected. That has been absolutely destroyed by this government.

There is no doubt that in the not too distant future, Spotlight will be moving on all their employees. You will not have a situation in a workplace where somebody is paid $90 less for doing the same work. These things do not survive in workplaces. That is not how the country operates. How workplaces operate invariably is movement to the lowest common denominator. That is how workplaces in the real world operate. So, if a substantial section of the workforce and the incoming workforce are being paid on a different basis from others who are there, it is only a matter of time before they are all hit. This is reality. This is the real world which is inhabited by everybody but members of this government. This is the real experience of Australians. The worker who is confronting this proposition by Spotlight is confronting is a future in which, if her income contributes to a family mortgage, she is in trouble; if her income sustains the private school fees of students, she is in trouble; if her income sustains the private health insurance premiums that the family pays, she is in trouble; and if her income sustains the current level of petrol prices we are paying in our service stations now, she is in trouble. If she were to rely on the tax cut offered her by the government to make up for a $90 a week cut in what she could have anticipated against the award, she would regard it as merely derisory. There is $10 in that tax cut against a $90 cut in her pay.

When we mention that figure of $90, understand this: we are talking about what is normally expected of a worker in Spotlight. We are not talking about a worker who is volunteering for unusual hours or working on a holiday on which they do not normally work; we are talking about the ordinary week of the average Spotlight worker. So it is $90 against the ordinary week. It is not against some cobbled-up situation on penalty rates where somebody is desperately trying to work a bit of overtime. This is a very serious situation. I said this morning that, when I first started talking about these industrial relations issues, I talked about this law as an infestation of termites. Actually, the problems are hitting the Australian workforce much faster and much more comprehensively than I expected them to. We are going to have an accounting in 18 months from now, and that accounting will bring home to the table of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations every piece of injustice that is now being committed in the workforce around the country. He will be held accountable for it and he will be defeated. (Time expired)

See this speech in context