Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be seconded.

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

I believe that the second reading of the Fair Work Amendment (Tackling Job Insecurity) Bill 2012 has been moved and seconded and is now for debate here. There is a significant problem in Australia when we have researchers working in scientific and health fields, teachers and staff who work in universities being unable to get a mortgage or plan their lives with sufficient certainty because they do not know from year to year, or in some cases from month to month, whether they are going to have a job. When we have a quarter of employees in this country who do not have any access to paid leave, it is clear that we have a problem. I have spoken to many teachers, who are responsible for educating our children, who have told me that they can find themselves nearing the end of the school year not knowing whether their contract is going to be renewed for the next year, despite the fact that the school needs teachers and always will.

Australia is a particularly bad offender when it comes to insecure work. We are second only to Spain in the OECD for the number of people in temporary forms of work. Of course, Spain has a very large rural workforce employed on short-term contracts. We can do something about it and we should do something about it, because the burden of risk that comes with globalisation and the changes in the workforce that we have seen over the last three decades primarily is falling on working Australians and their families. This is having huge consequences not only in terms of people being able to plan their lives but also in terms of their health.

This bill proposes a solution to fix one part of the problem. It is a multifaceted problem which will not be solved simply by one piece of legislation, but it does need legislation in order to be fixed. This bill is based on the path-breaking work of the inquiry into the nature and the extent of the problem of insecure work in Australia and some solutions conducted by a former Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe. One of the central elements of this bill is to give the Fair Work Commission the power to lay out pathways for people to transition from insecure work to ongoing employment arrangements. This bill also exempts small businesses from its operation. There are a number of reasons for that to do with the particular needs of small businesses, but one thing that is important to know is that it is in our high-employment sectors in government—in education in particular—that this problem finds itself most graphically expressed.

It happens with teachers, as I have referred to, but also amongst university staff. On one recent report, up to one-third of university staff, including lecturers and all the other staff there, find themselves in non-standard employment arrangements. Of course, there will always be universities; they will continue to be funded. There is absolutely no reason there should be such a high level of short-term work.

What this bill does is say, 'Well, in certain circumstances we will leave it up to the Fair Work Commission to decide whether it is appropriate that people should be on insecure work arrangements or not; if not, there will be a process for transition. We will also allow the Fair Work Commission to look at some of those other areas of non-standard work—for example, labour hire—and to say what is an appropriate use in this particular sector or in this particular industry.

This bill has been to an inquiry; we have received a number of submissions. I am very pleased that the ACTU supports it. I am very pleased that the union that represents staff who work in universities supports it. I guess the real question will be whether Labor supports it as well. We have an opportunity, before this parliament rises, to take some real action to fix the growing problem of insecure work. Brian Howe has laid out the road map and we should follow it.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

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

Deputy Speaker, the seconder is not here because the previous practice has been that, for bills referred to the Federation Chamber, the mover and seconder do not need to be in here when it happens; only in the House.

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

I am not going to second it, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will speak on it.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We will move on. Thank you.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.