Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In many ways, this bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020, sums up this government. It's a government governing for last century, governing for the wrong time. It's a government that believes that you can cut people's wages and grow the economy. Those opposite have always believed that. They do it every time they get into government, and they're doing it again through this bill. It's a strategy which simply won't work. You do not grow an economy and create jobs by cutting the wages of a business's customers. I have never, ever heard a business argue for cutting the wages of their customers, yet that's what this bill does. It allows any employee on an award to have their wages and conditions cut by their employer, without, really, any opportunity for that employee to go to arbitration unless they go to court and pay for it.

Let's have a look at what this bill does, before I talk about some of the issues in the context in which this bill will do exactly the opposite of what the government wants. Labor's test for the bill, as it is with industrial relations, is that if unions and employers—through the government's consultation program, which they claimed would be extensive; it turned out not to be—reached an agreement, we would support it. That was our test. It was also our test that workers not be worse off, but we were pretty confident that, in a proper negotiation process, that would not occur. But that's not what we've got here. This bill will not create secure jobs and decent pay. In fact, it will do exactly the opposite.

The most extreme part of the bill—the suspension for two years of what's known as the BOOT test, the better off overall test—has now been withdrawn. The government knew full well that they were on a hiding to nothing with that, so they have withdrawn it. But this bill still allows workers' wages to be cut, and most of the workers who will have their wages cut are the heroes of the pandemic. They're the people who turned up to retail outlets every day. They're the cleaners. They're the people who actually took the risks for the rest of us and held this country together. But this bill is bad for them. It makes it easier for employers to casualise jobs that would otherwise have been permanent, it makes bargaining for better pay and conditions more difficult than it already is, it allows wage cuts, it takes rights off blue-collar workers on big projects and it weakens wage theft punishments in jurisdictions where it already is deemed a criminal act. Some states already have strong wage theft laws. This law, weaker than some of those, overrides those. So while in some states there will be an improvement in wage theft legislation, in others it will be worse. It makes work less secure and it cuts pay.

It also does something which is really quite interesting. The permanent addition of flexible work directions in this bill is absolute proof that changes to the Fair Work Act introduced as temporary by the Liberal-National government are never that. This measure was originally introduced as part of the JobKeeper program and limited to employers receiving the wage subsidy; however, since then it has continued and expanded its application well beyond its original intent. This part deems the modern awards, of which there are 12, to include terms that allow an employer to give a direction to an employee about their duties and location of work. Again, it was a two-year provision based on the original JobKeeper stand-down directions. In other words, during the pandemic, rules were changed a little so it allowed workers to keep their relationship with their employer through JobKeeper. Since then, the provision has been extended to legacy employers—that means for workplaces covered by the identified awards, the special flexibility will be available to every employer; even those that never qualified for JobKeeper. It also allows part-time work to be reduced to 16 hours, with workers being asked to work hours after that effectively on the same rate, without the casual loading. Again, it makes it incredibly flexible for the employer to change the hours of work for an employee, but it doesn't give the employee the kind of certainty that they need in the contemporary world.

I just want to talk about the context in which the government is introducing this bill because they claim that this bill will grow jobs. Again, I have never heard a business argue to cut the wages of its customers. I can't see how cutting the wages of its customers does grow jobs; in fact, it decreases spending. Most of the workers on these rather low incomes relative to the national average would spend every dollar that they get, so it's hard to understand. But I do understand why small business in particular would ask for this greater flexibility in bargaining with their staff. What they tell me is that because of the imbalance in bargaining with the large businesses with which they do business, this is kind of the last remaining place where they feel they can actually negotiate and cut costs at all. We have the highest retail rents in the world—perhaps the government could look at doing something about that. We have incredibly high retail rents. We know that. Talk to any business and they will tell you that. We have seen through COVID just how unreasonable some of those relationships are. There is unequal bargaining with the really large businesses with which they do business every day. They have very little control over their electricity and gas bills.

Because of the increasing casualisation in the workforce and the changing nature of work in the workforce, small businesses have less ballast in their market. By 'ballast' I mean customers that have regular income—it used to be public servants or people who worked full time in factories. People who had regular work and didn't respond with fear at the first indication that the economy might be getting a bit rocky or something might be happening overseas—they were like the ballast. They had customers that were there, but this is changing. It's another reason why this is the wrong time for this bill. It really is the wrong time for this bill. One of the reasons why we have less ballast is that workers are in a far more casualised world. In fact, we've had higher growth in casual employment in the last year than we have ever had before. We know from talking to people around us that there are literally millions of Australians now in casual work, many of whom would like more permanent and consistent work.

If you look at the nature of working people now, you're quite often talking about single parents. You're talking about parents with children—of course parents have children! You're talking about working couples with children. They need to be able to organise their working life around their work hours. So just imagine what this bill does to a working couple who are organising their child care around what was permanent part-time work, and now it's 16 hours fixed, with casual hours after that determined by your employer—take it or leave it. How does a working person do that when they have to organise around school drop-off and school pick-up? Again, it's the wrong bill for the wrong time. It doesn't recognise what has actually been happening in our community and the changing nature of work. It really doesn't work at all.

We also have wage stagnation. In fact, we're approaching the second decade of wage stagnation, so we already had workers thousands of dollars worse off over the last 10 years. Again, wages are going down. Workers are relatively worse off every year. It is increasingly difficult for parents to juggle working life and family life, and we have a government that's making it worse with this bill and is actually taking away the level of stability and certainty that workers need in order to juggle their family life and their working life.

That, by the way, is perhaps one of the biggest issues that couples with children face at the moment, and single parents, of course, face it even more. I tell this story quite regularly, but we'll see more of this. I was doorknocking in an area in the south of my electorate where there are more single parents than in any other area in Western Sydney, and I found a six-year-old child at home alone. This little kid answered the door—and opened the door too, which was kind of worse. So I phoned that parent to find out what was going on. That was a parent who found out at 6 am every morning whether she was working that day. If she was, she had to be there by 7 am. If those are the working conditions that this government thinks people should have in order to create jobs, it doesn't understand the nature of modern Australian society.

There's another aspect to this for me too. As a businessperson, I'm saying that cutting wages doesn't grow a business, because it cuts the wages of your customers, but I know that there are some circumstances in which cutting wages does actually grow a business: if the business employs low-wage workers and sells to high-wage customers, it's going to be better off. I'll put it this way: I doubt that the food delivery drivers are finishing their shift on a Saturday night and then becoming customers of other food delivery drivers, because they're just not paid enough. I doubt that fruit pickers, who are being paid appallingly in some areas, are then heading out and buying the high-cost fruit that they've picked. Henry Ford knew about this. Henry Ford knew that there's a relationship between the wages you pay your staff and their ability to buy your products. Are we really moving to a world where we have people on low wages, with very poor conditions and casualised work, working in a business and selling those services to a higher-wage customer? That is the only way that this bill will create jobs. That is the only way that it will do that.

Again, there are a lot of things that a government could be doing at the moment to grow the economy. They could be looking at the nature of work now. They should be looking at the number of people who don't have stable income or stable working hours and trying to find ways to regulate so that we have that ballast in the economy that holds our economy relatively steady when we're faced with headwinds, because I can tell you—we know this well, and any economist or anybody who studies sociology will tell you this—that people who are insecure in their work and have irregular income will be the first ones to stop spending if they fear a shock to the economy, and they'll be the last ones to start spending again.

This bill is at the wrong time and it attacks the wrong people. It really does. It should be strengthening workers. It should be encouraging workers to have the capacity to spend to support local businesses, and it does exactly the opposite. It will not achieve what the government wants to achieve. In fact, I suspect it will achieve exactly the opposite.

We will see customers of businesses with less money to spend. Anyone who has been in business knows that you do not compete by cutting your price and you do not compete by cutting your wages, because everybody else can do exactly the same thing. It is a race to the bottom. If everybody can do it, it doesn't give any business an advantage. It simply cuts the amount of money that people spend in the business next door. It makes no sense. This is the wrong bill for the wrong time and it will backfire badly on a bad government.

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