Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This Fair Work Amendment (Repeal of 4 Yearly Reviews and Other Measures) Bill 2017 says it is about amending some aspects of the Fair Work Act to deal with minimum standards of appointment and to deal with so-called technicalities and problems that arise during the bargaining process. You would think, with a bill of that ambition, that we would pick up on some of the big issues facing this country and facing low-paid workers in this country, in particular.

In just a few days time penalty rates will be cut. That will hit a number of people pretty hard. It will hit young people pretty hard. The burden is going to fall disproportionately on women. And it will hit those people who work at night or on weekends or public holidays—sometimes to make ends meet, to get themselves through university or TAFE, other times to make sure they have enough money to meet skyrocketing house prices and large mortgages.

At a time when household debt is growing to record levels in this country, you would think that a bill that is, supposedly, about dealing with a fair set of minimum standards and conditions would address that. You would think that it might also address the situation of people working at Coles or Woolworths—or Hungry Jack's or McDonald's or KFC—who, in fact, have never seen a penalty rate in their working lives. That is because they work on weekends or at night and they are working under enterprise agreements that have been struck so that those workers get paid less than the hourly rate of pay set out in the award. You have people who might not work Monday to Friday but just come in on Saturday and Sunday. They might not get any alleged trade-off that happens during the Monday to Friday hours, but they are coming in and working on Saturday and Sunday—an 18-year-old working in McDonald's is getting paid less than what is set out in the award. You would think that a bill that says it is about making sure there is a fair minimum safety net of conditions would address that. This is a growing problem and it is a scandalous problem.

It has taken some pretty dogged investigative journalists at Fairfax, and some people like Josh Cullinan and the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, to go and do the work and realise that right across the country people who are doing part-time work—that many parents would hope their kids would do—going off and working over the weekend or at night are getting paid less than the minimum award. You would think that if the government were concerned about what is happening to the minimum safety net they would come up with a proposal to address that.

You would think the government, if they were concerned about a minimum safety net, might have listened to what the Reserve Bank governor had to say recently. Wages in some places in this country are, effectively, going backwards, with wage growth at record lows. People have seen the cost of living go up and power bills go up, with wholesale power prices having doubled under this government since they abolished the carbon price and sent a shudder of uncertainty throughout the industry and caused half the industry to go on an investment strike. You would think the government might say, 'Maybe we do need to have a look at whether the minimum wage is high enough in this country or whether our laws are making workers too scared to ask for the pay rises they are entitled to,' because that seems to be one of the things happening in this country.

We could change our laws to help by lifting the minimum wage, by ensuring that penalty rate cuts do not go through and by ensuring that people working at Hungry Jack's or at Coles or Woolies get paid their proper legal minimums. We could fix all of those things, but the government is not doing that.

This bill is supposedly about addressing minimum safety nets, but I looked through it to see what the government was going to do about the growing problem of insecure work. The fact is that there are so many people who will graduate, go out and look for a job, but find that the jobs that are available are increasingly part-time or casual or on a contract. The government might have looked at some of the Senate inquires before that have shown that there are people at our universities who are working there, who fronted up and told the inquiry they worked for 10 years at one university, in the same department, doing the same job, but they were never entitled to a day of sick pay throughout that whole 10 years; they were treated as casual for all of that time, on repeated, rolling contracts. What does that do to a person who is trying to start a family or buy a house? They know the job is going to be there, but they front up to the bank manager and say, 'Could you give us a loan?' and they say: 'No, sorry. You're classified as casual. You're on short-term contracts.' What about when you are trying to start a family and you want to know whether you can rely on your job, and you look at it and realise that you actually have next to no rights at all?

This is even happening in our schools, with many teachers starting out and getting a one-year contract. For many teachers it happens throughout their lives. And it is not because the school might go out of business tomorrow. We are always going to have schools and are always going to educate our kids, so why on earth are teachers on short-term contracts, like university staff? Casualisation is growing throughout the country and people are feeling the pressure. Casualisation is up; debt is up; house prices are up; energy prices are up; but wages are going down, and we have to fix it. We have to do something about it, but this bill does nothing about that. It professes to be about addressing a safety net, but it does nothing about that. The government says it is just dealing with some technical issues that have arisen for some people when they have been bargaining, as is allowed for under the act. They say, 'Some technical issues have arisen, and we have to fix that.'

I will tell you what else is happening when people are trying to bargain under the Fair Work Act at the moment. Employers are fronting up and saying, 'Well, you're trying to bargain for higher wages.' Some employers, including this government for the public servants, just say, 'We're not go to bargain with you at all unless you accept a very bad deal.' And there is nowhere you can go to get redress for that, so you find yourself three or four years into it with no pay rise at all, and the government has an effective pay cut, just through stalling the bargaining process. They are not interested in fixing that.

Even people who have managed to get a good enterprise agreement in this country are not safe either. When their enterprise agreement expires, the quid pro quo, when these laws were first introduced, was, 'We're going to make you bargain and do the highwire act of having pretty much nothing in your award, and everything is going to be in your enterprise agreement.' The quid pro quo is that when your enterprise credit expires it remains in force until it is replaced by a new one, so you do not fall all the way down to the award. But now, under the act, employers are fronting up and saying, 'You're enterprise agreement has expired. Rather than let that minimum floor stay there until we negotiate a new one, we're going to go off to the commission and terminate your enterprise agreement to give us a leg up in the negotiations.' They know that if they terminate the agreement, workers fall all the way back to the award.

As a result, you have people around the country who are facing potential pay cuts of 30 or 40 per cent, because the employers have said, 'We're just going to terminate your agreement, and then you will rely on our good graces for the wages and conditions you get after that.' It effectively puts a gun to people's heads, because then they are told they have not got their old agreement or the current agreement to rely on. They are falling back onto the very low level of the award, and they are told to accept the measly deal they are offered instead. That is something that could be fixed up.

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