Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am in the middle of my contribution to this disallowance motion moved by Senator Wong. Before I continue on from where I left off yesterday before the debate was interrupted, I could probably draw a comparison between this disallowance motion and the vote that we just took on the disallowance motion moved by Senator Joyce.

Senator Joyce argued that there was a fundamental injustice in expecting small business to be able to negotiate appropriately and effectively with big business. He recognised that there was an imbalance of power in those relationships and that the small operators, the people with lesser bargaining power, needed some protection from the government. Labor supports Senator Joyce on that because Labor believes that there is imbalance in the power relationships in contractual arrangements. But the same principle applies in the Work Choices regulations and the Work Choices bill. If he is concerned about the power imbalance of a small business compared to a big business, he should also be concerned about the power imbalance of a worker trying to negotiate with big business or a small business. The principle is exactly the same.

An individual worker, like a small business, does not have equal bargaining power when negotiating with big business or a worker does not have equal negotiating power when they have to negotiate as an individual with an employer. So I invite Senator Joyce on the same principle that Labor joined him on, which Labor supports, to join with Labor, the Democrats and the Greens when we move to the other side of the house for the vote to support Labor’s disallowance motion on the Work Choices regulations.

The people who are going to be hurt most in the initial stages of Work Choices are low-income earners and families in particular. I noticed Senator Fielding also joined with Labor, Senator Joyce and the minor parties on the previous disallowance motion—again, I expect for the same principle: that there is an imbalance and the mums and dads’ businesses, which Senator Joyce passionately talked about—and quite rightly so—will also be affected. That is the same proposition that Labor puts before the Senate on the disallowance of these bills: families and family members will be hurt and they will be hurt significantly by the Work Choices legislation and the regulations that underpin that legislation. So I extend the same invitation to Senator Fielding to join with Labor and the other parties in supporting this disallowance for the same principal reasons that we all supported the previous disallowance.

Yesterday when I was interrupted I was in the middle of a quote from Justice Giudice, who is the president of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. That was following on from a number of examples I was giving about the damage that Work Choices would do to Australian workers. I will continue on from where I left off. Justice Giudice says:

This will be accompanied by a slowdown in the rate of growth of minimum wages—that is what the Fair Pay Commission is for. If those things are going to occur, they will probably have to be accompanied by a reduction in social welfare otherwise the incentive to work will reduce.

I do not want to leave you in any doubt that these are very significant changes.

He also said:

The absence of protection for collective bargaining rights was a political area of real conflict and real difficulty.

Of course, he, like the 151 academics I talked about and everybody else, apart from the vested interests of employers, said the same things about the impact of the Work Choices bill and the underpinning regulations, which Labor is seeking to disallow today.

This legislation is unfair and it achieves this unfairness through three areas—and I am not sure whether I am going to have the time to go into the detail of all of them. It restricts the ability of workers to collectively organise to try and bring back the balance of negotiating power with employers to create a more even balance. It introduces Australian workplace agreements, which have priority now in terms of agreement making in this country in industrial relations. It pits an individual worker against an employer. We say that that is an unfair balance. It does not give workers the proper ability to negotiate on equal terms with employers with respect to their employment conditions. The third way it achieves this unfairness is by the removal of unfair dismissal protection. Regardless of any opportunity that you may have to try and negotiate improved wages and conditions without protection from dismissal for unfair reasons, you become incredibly vulnerable in the workplace. AWAs are nothing more than a means to cut wages and conditions and undermine decency and fairness in our workplaces.

The choice that the government likes to champion is no choice at all. The choice workers in this country now have under Work Choices is the choice to take it or to leave it. The Prime Minister’s response to that choice is: if workers do not like it, they can simply go and find another job. That is not a real opportunity for most working Australians. That is not a real choice. People need to work. People need to hang on to their jobs. When they are confronted with a choice of take it or leave it in respect of AWAs that strip away their so-called protected award conditions, AWAs that may give them no wage increase during the life of the agreement and AWAs that in fact may even cut their existing wages, they have the choice of: do you want a job or not? People in regional areas, people with families who have to make mortgage payments, people with kids who have to be put through school and people with bills to pay on a week-to-week basis, sometimes a day-to-day basis, do not have the luxury of saying, ‘Well, I won’t take that job. I will simply leave it and hunt around for another job.’ That is no choice for Australian workers, but that is how these regulations underpin this evil and pernicious legislation, which will drive down the wages of millions of working Australians and damage family structures in this country.

How are workers expected to negotiate their own terms and conditions of employment? We have workers at all sorts of different levels. Workers, as individuals, do not have, as we know, equal bargaining power with employers. There is a basic inequity in the bargaining relationship. The capacity of people to negotiate varies across the spectrum. We have people of varying ages. How do we expect people out of school negotiating their employment conditions at their first job, when they have had no experience in the workforce, to adequately negotiate with a multinational company that might have an army of professional human resource managers who negotiate industrial agreements? People with varying education standards—with low levels of education or with very little English—will have to try to negotiate employment conditions by themselves. Employers have the resources of human resource management and the resources and the ability to actually say, ‘Take it or leave it’ and produce an agreement to put in front of people. We have people who will not have the knowledge or the understanding of these laws, these complicated laws, which now run to 1,800 pages of legal jargon and technical detail. We are expecting workers across the spectrum to have a full grasp of that sort of legislation. It is a ridiculous scenario, but this government would have us believe it is a fair and equitable system. Well, it is not and we know it is not and no-one, apart from the vested interests of employers and this government, says it is a good system. No-one else says it at all.

Work Choices and these underpinning regulations that come into effect on 27 March have already led to a massive diminution of working conditions. We found that out in the estimates hearings just recently. For the first month after the introduction of Work Choices, what did we find? We were told that 6,340 workplace agreements were lodged with the Office of the Employment Advocate during that month, covering 10,257 employees. In the snapshot of the first month—before employers had really had an opportunity to get into these laws—the initial results were all bad; they were all down. What did we see? Sixteen per cent of all AWAs removed every single so-called protected award condition. Every AWA removed at least one so-called protected award condition. In regard to the three most commonly excluded protected award conditions, we saw that 64 per cent of AWAs removed annual leave loading from agreements; 63 per cent of all AWAs removed penalty rates; and, in terms of people who are required to work shiftwork, 52 per cent of agreements that had shiftwork provisions in them removed shift loading penalties. So people are working whatever hours across the board and they are getting no shift penalty loadings—no reward.

Some people in the government would have us believe that you have to agree to sign away those protected award conditions. This is where the government fails to understand the basic reality in the workplace. Do you really expect anyone to believe that people have been happy to sign away all these protected award conditions? Of course that is not what is happening. What is happening is that agreements are being put in front of people on a take it or leave it basis with those provisions already removed. It is not about agreement. Sure, the government will say, ‘The worker has to sign on to it.’ Again, that demonstrates its absolute ignorance about what really happens in the workplace, because people are not willingly negotiating away these conditions; they are being told, ‘Take the job on these conditions: sign here or go elsewhere.’ That is the choice that is being put in front of Australian workers and that is what the statistics show is happening.

The government will say, ‘Yes, but some of those conditions might have been negotiated away for more money.’ What have we seen? We have seen in the case of Spotlight, for instance, that penalty rates were negotiated away for 2c more an hour. It may be true. We are not able to break down some of those statistics. Some of the agreements may give even a slightly higher wage increase for trading away your penalty rates. I do not know. That information will come out over time. But what I can also tell you—and this was confirmed by the Office of the Employment Advocate—is that 22 per cent of all AWAs provided for no wage increase at all. Do you really think people are willingly entering into agreements that remove their penalty rates, remove their shift loadings and do not even provide for all public holidays? In fact, only 59 per cent of AWAs provided for gazetted public holidays. I remember Senator Joyce feeling very strongly about this issue. Only 59 per cent of AWAs signed after Work Choices in the month of April actually provided for gazetted public holidays. This is a disgraceful outcome. It is only the tip of the iceberg.

This is the opportunity that employers have been waiting for to rip off wages and conditions. They and the government have been running this mantra that this sort of flexibility will improve productivity. What a nonsense! The government do not seem to understand the difference between profitability and productivity. How does removing penalty rates for a hospitality worker increase productivity? If they serve the same amount of meals, if they have to carry the same amount of plates and if they have to do the same amount of work, how does cutting out their shift loadings, annual leave loading and penalty rates increase productivity? It does not; it increases profitability. We are happy for companies to be profitable. We want companies to be profitable, but we do not want those increases in profits to be at the expense of the pockets, the wages and conditions, of ordinary working Australians who are mostly in the low-paid, low-skilled areas. That is the picture that is being painted here by the Office of the Employment Advocate’s own figures that we identified in Senate estimates.

None of these outcomes surprise me. It is what everyone who has any basic understanding about workplace relations predicted would happen. It is what happens when workers are subject to duress. It is duress that is being applied in the workplace. This applies not only to new employees who are applying for a job and get presented with an agreement which they have no input into negotiating and who are told: ‘Sign here; take it or leave it,’ but also to existing employees, who are also being put under duress. How do we know that? Because we see it. The reports come out. They are publicised in the papers. People ring us. People ring their unions. It is well known. We have seen people being sacked for smirking. If you are in a workplace and your employer wants to take away your penalty rates, annual leave loading and shift loading, they present you with a new AWA. It does not matter whether there is an existing agreement in place or not. You get presented with an AWA and you say, ‘I don’t really want to take a wage cut, thanks very much.’ The next thing you know, you can be sacked for any reason as long as it is not an unlawful discriminatory reason, which is a small, narrow group of events based around discrimination. You get told: ‘If you want to continue to work here and if you want a wage increase, you will sign this AWA and, if you resist, I will find some reason to get rid of you whenever I like, whether it be for smirking, chewing gum or because I don’t like the look of you. I can simply sack you and you have no legal recourse.’