Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will be supporting this motion to disallow the Workplace Relations Regulations 2006. In our contributions to the debate when the Work Choices bill passed through the Senate last year, we made clear our principal concerns.

We asked the government to provide evidence that these reforms would increase productivity, which it could not do satisfactorily. We looked to the statistics on industrial disputes, but these showed that such actions had been falling steadily for decades. We produced research that suggested that young people in particular would find themselves engaged in a highly unequal bargaining position with their employers.

We were particularly concerned by research undertaken on the impacts of the so-called reforms undertaken in Western Australia by the Court government—reforms that depressed the minimum wage and made it less than in the rest of the country, disadvantaged women and low-skilled workers, and accelerated the race to the bottom. These dubious reforms were repealed by Labor after they attained government in 2001. By most conventional measures, the state economy is now one of the leaders of the nation.

We suspected that the federal government’s real agenda was to drive down the minimum wage and make it easier for companies to treat their workforces more like disposable components. It looked as though the less industrial bargaining power you had in this brave new world of Work Choices the harder life was about to get for you. The government insisted that we had nothing to worry about and pushed the bill through this place with a minimum of scrutiny and very little tolerance for any reasoned debate or amendment by the minor parties. Of course, that was with the exception of Senator Joyce’s amendment to save Christmas—and that turned out to be a farce, didn’t it?

Seven months later, we are unfortunately seeing many of our predictions being borne out. The new laws are being used punitively against workers by some businesses. Other businesses are being forced, through competitive forces, to take what they probably consider to be unsavoury measures to cut wages and dismiss workers. In other words, we are starting the race to the bottom, just as we saw in Western Australia. During the debate last time, some depressing cases from Western Australia were articulated, particularly cases involving the cleaning industry and security guards.

I emphasise that we do not believe that all businesses wish to treat their workforces in this way, but already a number of businesses are treating their workforces with contempt. The media is full of stories of workers who have been subjected to what I believe are very discriminatory and unfair practices. We warned of a race to the bottom, and by golly it has started.

We can now move beyond predictions and theories and look at what is happening on the ground. As other senators have pointed out during this debate, the results of the first month’s survey of contracts examined by the Office of the Employment Advocate are very clear and depressing. Every contract surveyed has abolished at least one award condition. One in six have abolished all award conditions apart from the mandatory five. Sixty per cent have wiped out leave loading, and 63 per cent have abolished penalty rates. Right up until the release of this survey, Kevin Andrews was insisting that the vast majority of new contracts would not affect penalty rates and overtime.

Statistics have been described as ‘human beings with the tears wiped off’. We now have a number of very clear case studies showing how Work Choices is being applied on the ground. The first to feel the impacts were the workers at the Cowra abattoir. On 30 and 31 March this year, 29 workers were sacked. They were invited to reapply for 20 of the jobs they had just lost, at a wage cut of $180 a week. The Office of Workplace Services, OWS, began an investigation which Kevin Andrews suggested was proof that there were still protections for workers.

As the first cab off the rank, the blowtorch of media and—very gladly—union scrutiny was applied, and the company backed down, despite later confirmation that they had been fully within their rights. At the end of May, a copy of the OWS report was leaked to the media, and it established once and for all that, under Work Choices, it is entirely lawful to sack workers and rehire them on lower pay and lesser conditions. A handful of ministers were the only people who were surprised that this could occur.

Workers in other cases can hardly expect this kind of profile. Most cases will slip under the radar, which is presumably exactly what the government is hoping for. The key message is that what happened at Cowra was not an abuse of the Work Choices law, or a mischievous application, or an accident. The laws are being used precisely as the government intended.

Around 400,000 people leave study and enter the Australian workforce every year. Next year’s young entrants to the workforce are going to find that they are playing on a field that is very much tilted against them. The no disadvantage test is gone, and they will be pressured into accepting lesser conditions and lower pay just to get a toehold in the workforce. This can be as simple as demanding that young workers pay for their own uniforms. In Western Australia there are cases where young people have been forced to work basically for free for five or six weeks while they pay for their work uniform. This is in part-time positions.

Unions South Australia has reported that a third of young people are pressured to work unpaid overtime, and up to 43 per cent are pressured to work while sick. These are people without training in industrial law or negotiating skills. They have been abandoned by this government. Senators may be aware of the case of the 16-year-old worker in a juice bar who was made redundant one day, when her employer went into administration, and was offered her old job back, by the new owner, the next day. The new AWA amounted to a $5 an hour pay cut. Instead of rolling over, she contacted her union, and the government’s own Office of Workplace Services stepped in. Ultimately the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission ruled that the company had acted unlawfully. This is just the tip of the iceberg. How many kids out there would just knuckle under if they were told that they had to cop a pay cut or go and look for another job? I suspect that most young people do not know their rights and are not experienced in the big wide world, and they would not have sought that sort of redress.

We also have strong concerns about how women are being disadvantaged by these laws. In the government’s single-minded drive to sign everyone up to AWAs, it seems to have missed the fact that, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data from May 2004, non-managerial workers on AWAs were earning two per cent less than their coworkers on registered collective agreements. For women on AWAs, hourly earnings were some 11 per cent less than for women on collective agreements.

The Coffs Harbour Spotlight workers were in the media this month, when they were offered a 2c an hour pay rise in exchange for shift penalties and other benefits worth $90 a week. Those are the kinds of choices we are talking about in Work Choices. There is a lot to be said about how the government has handled the Spotlight scandal—because it is a scandal. It has positively celebrated the result as a win for the economy. The fact is that most of the Spotlight workers are women. Most of the people in retail, clerical and community services are women. Women are more likely to be employed in these lower paid segments of the workforce—precisely the sectors that will be hardest hit by the regulations we are confronted with today.

ABS figures from April of this year show that, across all industries, women still earn 20 per cent less than men in Australia. Over the last 20 years, improvements to the award system have slowly been closing this gap. In gutting the award system and instituting the law of the jungle, the government is putting even these meagre improvements at risk.

One area which has attracted very little attention is the fact that, by making the details of employment contracts private matters, we will soon have no way of tracking sex discrimination in pay and conditions. I strongly suspect that Work Choices will act to widen the gender pay gap, but I do not see how the ABS is going to be able to follow the trends if the terms and conditions within AWAs remain a strictly private matter.

On 1 April this year it was reported that a single mother was given 10 minutes to leave her child-care job of nearly five years. No reasons were given and, under these laws, no reasons were necessary. The child-care centre in question had fewer than 100 employees, so job security has gone out the window in that workplace.

The media is littered with these sorts of terribly sad human stories. There is the case of the office worker in a doctor’s surgery who was sacked on the spot for not immediately signing up to an agreement presented to her. It would have forced her to work in a different office than the one she had been working in for 20 years. Before she had even been given the opportunity to query the new arrangements, she had been fired. A week earlier, it would have been unlawful. But, with Work Choices coming into effect, she had no choice in the new Work Choices environment.

When is it going to sink in, even for a government obsessed with economic rationalism, that these personal stories have huge implications for the economy? People with no job security are less likely to apply for or receive a home loan. People without job security delay major purchases and delay starting families. In its zest to work through the big business shopping list that it is obviously working through and ticking off—‘Done that!’—and trading it off for a hugely insecure and politically powerless workforce, the government is undermining everything it claims to be working towards: a stronger economy. These sorts of effects will ultimately destabilise the economy.

The government appears to have not learned a thing in the seven months since it rammed Work Choices through the parliament. The strategy is clearly to simply crash through and hope for the best, and try and persuade people that their personal hardship and insecurity is necessary for the good of the economy. The Greens’ stand on industrial relations is based on the simple fact that the economy is there to serve people—and not the other way around. These regulations are putting the finishing touches on a process that should never have been set in motion. For this reason we do not support these regulations.