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

I am not even going to go there. The Greens have consistently held the position that small business employees should not have inferior unfair dismissal rights on the basis of who their employer is. As a matter of principle, the Greens believe there should be no distinction between workers in relation to their unfair dismissal rights.

Unfair dismissal rights are very important for job security and for being treated with respect and dignity. We did accept, in the debate on the Fair Work Bill, the government’s policy on unfair dismissal rights for employees of small businesses defined as 15 employees. It is a significant improvement on Work Choices, which exempted employees employed in businesses which employ up to 100 workers. The amendments moved today provide for the definition of a small business to be calculated as 15 full-time equivalent employees. It provides a complicated formula for determining whether a business is a small business, and it is likely to be difficult and time consuming for small business owners to apply the formula—not necessarily replacing what they think is one complication with another complication; it is also likely that the full-time equivalent formula will mean that businesses of significantly more than 15 employees will be considered small businesses—particularly businesses with high levels of part-time and casual work, which are, coincidentally, also workplaces with high levels of female employees. So once again we have an amendment which we believe will detrimentally affect more vulnerable workers. However, we note that the formula is in operation for only 18 months; at that time the definition reverts to the 15 determined by a simple headcount. As I said, we will not be opposing this amendment but it is obviously not our preferred position. We made that distinctly clear at the time of the previous debate. We also said that if there was to be a definition of ‘small business employees’—which we do not like anyway—then a simple headcount is preferred. As I said, we will not be opposing the amendment but we wanted to put on record our continuing concern around treating one set of workers differently from another.

The other issues that the Greens have some concerns about are items 5 and 6, around protected industrial action authorisations. This allows the FWA to authorise industrial action taken to be authorised by a protected action ballot after 1 July in an industrial action. The Australian Greens welcome this amendment from the government. The treatment of industrial action authorised by the bill was noticeably inconsistent and, as I said in my speech in the second reading debate, we did have concerns about that. We had concerns with the way that was being treated and we believed that it was inconsistent with other processes undertaken pursuant to the Workplace Relations Act. I addressed this in my speech and I urged the government to address the issue where employees would have to repeat the entire authorisation process, including secret ballots for taking industrial action again, even where current authorisation would be still valid and the parties are engaged in bargaining. We believe this amendment goes some way to addressing this issue, although there would still be a period after 1 July when employees will be unable to take protected industrial action. As I had raised in my speech on the second reading that we had concerns, this does go at least most of the way to addressing it, so I wanted to highlight that particular issue. As I said, we will be supporting the amendments but we have concerns around unfair dismissal.