Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Labor opposes the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. This bill is yet another example of the Abbott government's failure to keep an election commitment. The election commitment of the Abbott government in this area was to go no further than what had been set out in their pre-election policy material—yet another commitment now on the election promise scrapheap! This bill is another example of the Abbott government's ideological opposition to collective bargaining. We know all about the opposition to collective bargaining and workers' rights that permeates the coalition. This bill is another example of the Abbott government's determination to weaken and eventually destroy effective trade unionism in Australia.

We should not pretend that this bill is about some minor amendments to the Fair Work Act. This is part of an overall strategy by the coalition to destroy collective bargaining and destroy the rights of working people in this country. It is part of the government's suite of bills to reshape industrial relations by empowering employers and the big end of town at the expense of employees.

This is a government who made the promise prior to the election that it would go no further than its pre-election promises, yet what do we see here? Another broken promise. This is a government that cannot be trusted. I think that the Australian public are over this government. They do not trust this government, because they have seen what this government is doing on education, on health, on pensions, on welfare, and to the ABC and SBS. These are all areas that this government said it could be trusted on. Well, the public has absolutely no trust in this government. It really is a government of incompetence, chaos and division. We see that incompetence played out on the front pages of newspapers every day. We see that incompetence in the House of Representatives. We see that incompetence here. We see policies being ditched and we see barnacles being scraped off; the scraper is going so hard that the hull is now paper thin and about to puncture. This is a government that is chaotic and incompetent.

The division in the coalition does not lead anyone to have any confidence that this government will ever adopt policies based on fairness and integrity. On economic issues, on budget issues and on industrial policies, this government cannot be trusted. Through this legislation, the government wants to provide more power to the already rich and powerful in this country. It wants to create more insecurity for the poorest in this economy. It wants to create more uncertainty and fewer rights for the working poor and for the workers who can actually collectively bargain and stand up for their rights. This government wants to diminish all of those issues. This really is about promoting more income insecurity for ordinary workers in this country. I will come to some of the reasons for that, further down the line.

The purpose of this bill is, supposedly, to implement the recommendations of the Fair Work Act review and to implement election commitments. Well, the government is not implementing the recommendations of the Fair Work Act review. This legislation goes further than the government's pre-election commitments, and it ignores some of the checks and balances in the Fair Work Act review. Again, this is a demonstration that this government cannot be trusted even to implement its election promises.

There are substantive amendments to the Fair Work Act in this bill. There are substantive amendments to greenfield agreements, to union rights of entry and to individual flexibility agreements. There are some detailed issues in the structure of the bill and there are two schedules to the bill. Schedule 1 contains the substantive amendments to the Fair Work Act and schedule 2 deals with application and transitional matters relating to those amendments. Schedule 1 consists of 10 parts. Parts 1 to 3 make amendments to the National Employment Standards in part 2-2 of the Fair Work Act in order to deal with unpaid parental leave, annual leave and preventing employees from accruing and taking annual leave or any other type of leave while absent from work and in receipt of workers compensation.

Part 4 amends part 2-3 and part 2-4 in relation to the requirements for flexibility terms in modern awards, and the enterprise agreements and individual flexibility agreements made under those terms. Amongst other things, it will allow employers and employees to make IFAs about when work is performed, overtime rates, penalty rates, allowances and leave loading, if these matters are dealt with in the particular enterprise agreement. We know that the employers are doing the bidding of the Abbott government by raising their voices about penalty rates and, vice versa, that the Abbott government is doing the bidding of employers on the issue of penalty rates. If you reduce penalty rates then you reduce the costs of companies, and in my experience that simply means more money to the chief executive and the big end of town. So we are not prepared to accept this proposal.

Part 5 amends part 2-4, 'Enterprise agreements', and introduces changes to greenfield agreements. It says:

… where agreement cannot be reached with a union within three months, a business will be able to apply to the Fair Work Commission for approval of the agreement.

What this means is that the employer simply gives three months notice that it wants to reach an agreement and there are no checks and balances in terms of the bargaining process: it can simply give that notice, walk away or get some high-paid lawyer to argue that it has been bargaining in good faith, and then go to the Fair Work Commission to have the agreement approved. It really is the employer bargaining with itself.

Part 6 of schedule 1 to the bill amends transfer-of-business provisions in part 2-8 of the act and provides that there will not be a transfer of business under that part when an employee voluntarily moves between associated employers. That is a real problem, because it means that you could have no option but to move to that associated employer and lose all of the entitlements that you would have under the redundancy agreement with the existing employer

It is simply about allowing employers to get away from paying out the rightful accrued entitlements of an employee.

Part 7 amends the provisions dealing with protected action in ballots, in part 3-3, and it provides that an application for protected action cannot be made unless bargaining has commenced. This is one rule for the unions and another rule for greenfield sites for the employers. The hypocrisy is huge.

Part 8 tightens the right-of-entry framework, in part 3-4, by narrowing the eligibility rules for entry for discussion purposes. It repeals amendments made by the Fair Work Act 2013, it reinstates pre-existing rules regarding the location of interviews and discussions and it changes the Fair Work Commission's capacity to deal with disputes about the frequency of union visits to premises for discussion purposes. This is about the ideological view that there is no room for the union movement to represent its members at the enterprise in this country. It is about trying to stop workers having representation from their union and it is about putting up as many barriers as possible to the union movement gaining access to represent its membership.

Part 9 provides that, subject to certain conditions, the Fair Work Commission is not required to hold a hearing or conduct a conference when determining whether to dismiss an unfair dismissal application under section 399A or section 587. So this again is about ensuring that the employer's position is bolstered under the Fair Work Act. And the Fair Work Act, if this gets up, cannot be called the Fair Work Act any longer, because it is not the Fair Work Act; it is an act in support of employers.

The 10th part provides that the Fair Work Ombudsman pay interest on moneys recovered by the Commonwealth for workers who were initially unidentified and then are later found and reimbursed. Parts 1 to 9 clearly are impediments to collective bargaining. They are impediments to workers being able to join and effectively engage in trade unionism in this country. It is about giving more power to the employers in this country, at the expense of working people in Australia.

I came across an interesting article from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, by Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron. One is a senior economist and one is an economist at the IMF's research department. Their paper is called Power from the people. It is an analysis of how the decline in trade union rights and trade union density means that more money goes to those at the top of the tree in the countries where unionisation declines. When you see the IMF look at these issues, you then understand the problem that we are facing in this country—that the ideological position of the coalition is to diminish the power and capacity of the trade union movement, to give more rights to the employers so that the employers are more well off, mainly at the chief executive and director levels, at the expense of ordinary workers in this country. When the IMF start to see this, you know that there is a problem. They say:

… the most striking development is the large and continuous increase in the share of total income garnered by the 10 percent of the population that earns the most …

So you decline union capacities; you decline union influence in the economy; the top 10 per cent get better off; and the bottom can please themselves. This is what the IMF is seeing, and this legislation that is before us is exactly the type of legislation designed to disempower workers and make sure that the top 10 per cent are better off and the bottom rung of the economy, the bottom rung of working people, are worse off. They go on to say:

Moreover, a rising concentration of income at the top of the distribution can reduce a population's welfare if it allows top earners to manipulate the economic and political system in their favor.

That is Joseph Stiglitz quoted in the IMF paper. We see here how the top earners are manipulating the economic and political system in their favour. They are out there arguing to cut back penalty rates. They are out there arguing to lower minimum rates. They are out there arguing to keep unions out of the workplaces because, if they are successful in that, then what happens? The top 10 per cent become more wealthy, at the expense of ordinary Australians. The IMF document says that economic research has recently focused on:

… the effects of institutional changes, with financial deregulation and the decline in top marginal personal income tax rates often cited as important contributors to the rise of inequality. By contrast, the role played by labor market institutions—such as the decline in the share of workers affiliated with trade unions and the fall in the minimum wage relative to the median income—has featured less prominently in recent debates.

The authors say:

We examine the causes of the rise in inequality and focus on the relationship between labor market institutions and the distribution of incomes, by analyzing the experience of advanced economies since the early 1980s.

This is not an analysis of some small, isolated economy. These are the top economies in the world being identified by the IMF as a problem. When you take away the rights of ordinary working people, it then goes to the top 10 per cent. They say that:

… the main channels through which the labor market institutions affect income equality are the following:

Wage dispersion: Unionization and minimum wages are usually thought to reduce inequality by helping equalize the distribution of wages.

They say: 'economic research confirms this.' So what do this mob across here want to do? They want to stop that happening. The authors go on to say:

Unemployment: Some economists—

and we have heard them argue over here, not that there are any decent economists over on the other side of this chamber—

argue that while stronger unions and a higher minimum wage reduce wage inequality, they may also increase unemployment by maintaining wages above "market-clearing" levels, leading to higher gross income inequality. But the empirical support for this hypothesis is not very strong …

So, on the argument of keeping wages low, the IMF are actually saying there is no empirical evidence for that; or, if there is any evidence, it is not strong. This legislation—this package of legislation that has come before the Senate—is designed to make sure they look after the big end of town at the expense of ordinary workers. The authors talk about redistribution. They say:

Strong unions can induce policymakers to engage in more redistribution by mobilizing workers to vote for parties that promise to redistribute income or by leading all political parties to do so.

A clear example of that is the budget. This combination of the budget—the unfair budget; the budget based on lies—along with these attacks on workers' rights and conditions, as epitomised in this piece of legislation, is all about an ideology. It is not based on empirical evidence such as the IMF is looking at. It is not based on the welfare of ordinary Australians. It is based on this ideology—this economic argument that, if you reduce wages and you reduce conditions, you will create more jobs and open up the economy for more people. The IMF is saying that is flawed. But the mob over there on the other side of this chamber are too engrossed in their own problems to even worry about what the IMF is saying. They are too insular in their attacks on the trade union movement to worry about what the rest of the world is saying and the analysis that is out there.

This is another piece of unfair legislation from a government that has unfairness at its core. It is about workers being denied their rights to collectively bargain; about workers being denied their rights to effectively organise; and about ensuring the top 10 per cent—their mates that look after them and put money into their election accounts—are looked after at the expense of ordinary workers in this country.