Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are again: a coalition government attacking workers' pay and conditions, exhuming one of the worst elements of the dead, buried and cremated Work Choices. It is interesting that government members cannot remember their own words they uttered, not in the dim, dark past but in the recent past. Work Choices were dead, buried and cremated—but apparently not. This bill is the beginning of Work Choices mark II. It will enable employers to cut basic award entitlements. If my memory serves me correctly, and I am sure it does, the last time the coalition tried this, former Prime Minister John Howard belatedly admitted his error and at least sought to implement the no-disadvantage test. I distinctly remember it; I was in the parliament at the time. It is hard to see this government, even in the face of the strongest possible evidence, ever having the humility to admit its own mistakes or errors. We only need to see what they are doing with their current budget to realise that.

Night and weekend pay is a core part of the budgets of millions of Australian families. The Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 is designed to cut the pay of Australians. I am fully aware of how important overtime payments are for night and weekend work, having been married to a MICA paramedic for many, many years. The base wage for a MICA paramedic—a job that is quite exhausting, onerous, difficult and vitally important to the community—is actually very low. The only way to make a decent wage out of being on the road, serving the community and saving lives is through overtime payments. This legislation could see the end to all that. This bill and the ideology behind it seeks to deny the fact that penalty rates for working unsociable hours are a fair and reasonable form of compensation for the negative impact these hours have on a worker's family and social life.

For the first four years of my married life, my husband and I had never spent Christmas together and we did not have Easter together. It took until about my fifth wedding anniversary for us to spend the day with each other. This is the reality of the lives of shift workers. I do not begrudge that; that was the understanding. When we were first married, my husband was working a rotating eight-day structure. We did not actually know from week to week if it was morning, noon or afternoon. It was terrible trying to coordinate any social engagements with the pattern of the roster. Then the ambulance in Victoria moved to a 10-14 roster—two 10-hour days and two 14-hour nights. That sounds horrendous and it is, but it concentrates it into four days. You knew the pattern and you could get your lives together. You could actually work out things. 'Yes, our friends are getting married this weekend. We'll actually be able to go to that together.' It had this enormous impact on your life.

Of course, once I entered parliament my husband actually had to change his career because you cannot coordinate being a parliamentarian with being married to a rotating shift worker and have children. So he went casual and went on this terrible thing called the reserve roster for many years, where you would, literally, be woken up in the morning to be told where you were off to and what shift you would be covering. Without the penalty rates, none of this would have been viable or reasonable for people doing this day to day. Indeed, on two of our applications for home loans, it was only when my husband's overtime and penalty rates were included that we could actually borrow the money to buy a home because his base wage was so insubstantial that it was not recognised. He said: 'It's a rolled-in rate. I generally get this and I generally get some overtime.' So that was what the bank actually took as his payment. His actual base rate without any of that was so insignificant we would not have been able to buy a home.

People working these unsociable hours deserve this compensation. Eighty per cent of Australians agree with this proposition. It is only the minority on the government benches opposite me that think that it is reasonable not to compensate someone working unsociable hours. If this bill is passed, 4.5 million Australians will have their wages cut. These include paramedics, security guards, bakers, cleaners, factory workers and hospitality and retail workers—people who are the backbone of our society. It is a diverse list of industries and there will also be many more industries where workers could no longer rely on penalty rates, thanks to this legislation.

I was visiting a factory in my electorate only the other day where they work a 24-hour rotating roster. Again, as most of the guys in the plant said, 'It is actually a very good company to work for, but if it wasn't for the overtime and penalty rates for working the longer shifts, it wouldn't be viable to stay here.' These were workers who were promised by the Prime Minister before the election that he would not cut their wages—another broken promise. This Prime Minister is intent on actually never keeping a promise he made before the election. Labor understands how hard it is for families to keep on top of costs and just how important it is to keep the certainty of penalty rates in place while also offering flexibility in the workplace. Under Labor, individual flexibility arrangements were used to give employers genuine flexibility, not to cut wages.

I always love this terminology 'flexibility'. It is flexible one way, the one way where the worker is ripped off and the employer gets everything they are seeking. Labor's key safeguard was the 'BOOT' test. Individual flexibility arrangements had to ensure employers were 'better off overall'. That is the basis: better off overall. Yes, you could trade something off, but in the end the bill would ensure that key protections were in place. This bill will allow night and weekend rates to be traded off for an unlimited variety of non-monetary benefits.

One of the last actions before I came into parliament, in my former life at the Finance Sector Union, was negotiating the enterprise agreement at ANZ Bank. The biggest thing everybody wanted there was to maintain their RDO—their rostered day off. It was the sacrosanct thing that people in that place wanted. Most of them were mums. Most working in branches of banks were women who—and men also—needed the certainty of knowing you eventually were going to have a day in the week where you might be able to make medical or dental appointments, or you could perhaps organise to take your mother out for a coffee or something like that.

A lot of people are not just interested in monetary reward; it is the certainty of conditions that they want. So if you had something where you could trade of a non-monetary agreement, it was something that people were looking for, but you had to be no worse off. It could not just be a cash grab to strip away wages. For non-monetary benefits to be taken into account under Labor's BOOT safeguards, they had to be relatively insignificant and genuinely agreed to; not a sign-it-or-lose-the-job type agreement. Under this bill the safeguards have been removed. Labor's safeguard to limit the use of non-monetary trade-offs are replaced by a short note providing for, apparently, any 'benefits other than an entitlement to the payment of money' to be used. No security, no safeguards—not even going back to Howard's agreement of a no-disadvantage test. Nothing.

The requirement that it be relatively insignificant and genuinely proportionate is gone. This opens the door to weekend and night pay being traded away for all sorts of non-monetary items, which comes nowhere near compensating workers at a rate equitable to their penalty rates. I was recently at an organisation where the manager said, 'I give them a Coles voucher every once in awhile and that keeps them happy.' No, it doesn't. It doesn't pay the bills; it doesn't make up for unsociable hours. Without these safeguards, overnight and weekend penalty rates can be traded away, just as they could under John Howard's much hated individual contracts—the parts of the Work Choices legislation that were meant to be 'dead, buried and cremated'.

This bill also continues on in the well-established Liberal-National Party tradition of attacking workers' rights to collectively organise. The bill says that 1.5 million Australians on the award safety net will need to show their employer they invited a union to their workplace if they need information and support. If passed, workers will lose easy access to the information and support which is available to help them understand their rights when negotiating with her employers. It opens the door to exploitation of vulnerable people, such as recent migrants, who in the real workplace of Australia will now be expected to know immediately that they need to ask their employer if they can invite the union into their workplace. How ridiculous! You are having a dispute or a misunderstanding with your employer. You are scared and vulnerable enough, and you have got to go to your employer and say, 'Can I invite the union in?' It just belittles. It has no understanding of how unions work, how collectivism works and what is needed to protect people in their workplaces.

Most of the businesses I dealt with in my previous life were happy to have you come on site. You did not just rock up. You didn't just bash down the door. You generally arranged it, organised a time and you went into the tea room. Especially when you were dealing with rotating shift work, you were dealing with a call centre, you couldn't just do it. There is a complete misunderstanding about how this works. People are allowed to belong to groups so long as you are not belonging to a group that is called 'a union'. That is what does my head in. It seems to be the name. Somehow they are this vile creation—as opposed to a group of individuals coming together for the protection of each other. I would have thought that that was a basic human right. Indeed, the Catholic Church has intoned that that is a basic human right.

These migrant workers, many in my electorate, who have come to Australia may be employed in their first job in Australia. They are doing their best to please their employer. In reality it may be very unlikely that they need to speak to a union—but they might. And they are presented with a document and told that they can sign away their rights. Do they say no? Of course they don't.

In the real world, lack of knowledge, the insecurity of the workplace and fear of unemployment mean that people do sign away their rights. They will be exploited and they and their families will lose out. How can someone who does not know that help is available be expected to ask for it? In the real world, it is 'take it or leave it' and that is all that they will be told when it is time to sign on the dotted line. Given the precarious nature of the employment situation at the moment and the high rates of unemployment, particularly among youth—again, you are going to sign it. You are going to take the job, you are going to be exploited later, and you are going to have no recourse. You might not, but you might. That is why we all have insurance. Isn't this just a basic form of insurance that people should be entitled to have?

A government which is apparently so devoted to freedom in our lives is attempting to deny some of this country's lowest-paid workers the right to unionise so that big business—and, indeed, small business—will have the freedom to pay these people even less than they are currently. Meanwhile, higher-paid Australians who are already on collective agreements will have ongoing access to union information and support. All Australian workers deserve the same right of access to unions regardless of where they work, how much they are paid and if they are on an enterprise agreement or not.

The Prime Minister promised he would only implement changes from the Fair Work review. But that was just another hollow promise he never intended to keep. The notion that an employer must offer an invite before unions can provide support in the workplace was rejected by the Fair Work review panel. The panel agreed that people on the award safety net should not have their access to union information and support reduced. But here we are, debating a bill that seeks to severely reduce the ability of the lowest-paid people in Australia to access union information and support if they need it. Australians on the awards safety net will be the most vulnerable. They need help from unions to know their award rights. They need help to know when not to sign those rights away. And they need help to improve their rights by joining with others and winning the better living standards that come with collective bargaining. Without these rights, workers will lose pay and conditions. They will lose time with their families and friends with little or no compensation, and they will be left struggling to stay above the poverty line.

These amendments are an attack on Australians' rights at work and should not be proceeded with. I will finish by quoting an ambo, Paul, who was interviewed by his union and said:

Weekend and night pay takes an experienced ambulance paramedic's pay to $71,000. That is a 26 per cent increase on the base rate, as compensation for shifts of 14 hours and 10 hours and working any time of the week, day and night, all with unpredictable overtime.

Without that 26 per cent you would find people have to get another job. I have done 10 years and I want to stick it out. It's incredibly rewarding in many ways but it's tough on families. We are always juggling child care, relying on friends and family …

Without that extra pay … would lose their experienced people …

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