Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back when the member for Melbourne was learning Marxism at university—I went to university as well—I was a trolley collector, many moons ago. It taught me everything I needed to know about the perils of insecure work and the perils of dealing with small businesses. It was that experience that led me to wind up, after a little while, working for the shop assistants' union.

We dealt with many employers who had vast numbers of casuals—in retail—and had very similar problems to the ones that the member for Melbourne talks about. I can remember Coles, for instance, had about 80 per cent casual employment; and it would have been the same for Woolies. We spent a lot of time bringing this up with the companies over and over again. We brought up the fact that it was completely unfair on employees, and those employees had all the same problems that the member for Melbourne talked about: they could not get loans; they faced varying hours from week to week; they were insecure even after years of employment. These were very serious matters. But, in the end, the companies worked out that this was an economic cost on themselves, because of course when you have high levels of casual or impermanent work, you get the associated cost of a very high turnover.

That is a very big cost to companies, because you lose skills and you spend vast amounts of money on training, on providing uniforms and doing all sorts of things. You have this churn within your organisation. None of that is very good in the modern workplace; for skill formation, for productivity and for a settled workforce. So any company that looks carefully at excessive casualisation of their workforce will find that turnover is a cost and they should take that into account. I would be a bit surprised if universities did not have a bit of a think about this and work out that it is a very big cost with a teaching workforce as well. The point is we resolved that issue through workplace negotiations and that is where I think this matter should properly be left. We have in place the Fair Work Act and that act promotes bargaining at the workplace level and it puts in place a number of job protections which help people to bargain, and it has a number of provisions which help people to collectively bargain in areas such as cleaning and other areas where contracts come and go.

We know that people can bargain and that issues around employment security have been brought up at least in a number of awards and agreements. A number of those agreements contain the matter of conversion from casual to permanent employment. This is a process that operates under the Fair Work Act, so to come over the top with legislation which, on the member for Melbourne's own admission, only applies to big organisations, which tend to have these clauses in them anyway and completely exempts small business, where we would all acknowledge most of the job creation goes on in any event, seems to be somewhat problematic. He seems to be promoting a solution that would not work and would, I think, potentially complicate industrial relations a great deal in this country, because it is not clear when the orders were made and how that would affect individual employees and whether they would be put on some new set of conditions after this bill is enacted—

Honourable member interjecting—

No. Listen. At the moment there are conversion clauses in the award. What you are talking about is putting legislation over the top of that, so we might make a whole new set of conditions which is not necessarily the thing to do.

The experience with Coles is that they got so carried away, they had some stores with 100 per cent permanency options, and of course we found that that did not suit everybody. So some people do opt to remain casuals even after years of employment because they prefer the flexibility, sometimes to the frustration of the employer. While this bill is well meaning, I think it tends to go over the top of the Fair Work Act and over the top of workplace bargaining, which I do not think is welcome.

Due to a lack of a seconder, the motion lapsed.

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