Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. The Prime Minister used to say that Work Choices was 'dead, buried and cremated', but in reality this bill represents a return to Work Choices. It is not about giving people more flexibility. It is about giving bad employers even more power over vulnerable people, who are already in a worse position because of the unfair federal budget.

Most of us would think that an agreement applying in the workforce involves at least two people—at least two parties. But under this legislation an employer is now going to be able to agree with themselves about what legislation and minimum conditions would apply in their workplace. The provision about so-called 'greenfields agreements' says that if a business is about to start a new project—that might be to, say, dig up the minerals that all Australians own, because we only get to dig them up and sell them off once—and if they want to negotiate an agreement for wages and conditions over the course of that project when it gets up and running, all the employer needs to do is put a substandard agreement on the table and say, 'Here's what I want.' If, three months later, there has been no agreement they are able to go to the Fair Work Commission and get the agreement ratified. They do not even need another party to the agreement. They just have to decide it themselves. I am not at all confident that a wealthy miner is going to look after its workers when it does not have to. It is going to pay the least it possibly can, and that is what this legislation allows it to do.

We have also seen this obsession of the government, which is reflected in this bill, about employees having access to their union representatives at reasonable times. In many workplaces, often the only way workers will find out about what their entitlements are is from a union representative who comes in and tells them, 'No, actually; there are laws to protect you and you are entitled to be paid properly as a member of the Australian community.' Yet what we see here in this legislation is a winding-back of the provisions that would allow someone to come in and give that explanation. We know that what some unscrupulous employers do at the moment, or have done in the past, is to say, 'Sure, you low-paid worker—you can find out what your minimum legal rights are. But I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll put the union representative, when they come during your lunch break, in the room next to my office and I'll just sit there with a clipboard making a note of every worker who comes in to get advice about what their minimum conditions are.' We all know what could then happen to those workers.

Currently, the law says you cannot do that. You must strike the right balance between not disrupting the workplace and allowing people to find out what their minimum entitlements are. That is abolished under this bill. When you think about this from the perspective of a vulnerable worker, who may not have English as their first language, how are they going to find out about their rights? They simply will not. That will be the practicality of it. That is exactly what this legislation is designed to do.

The bill tilts the playing field further in favour of powerful employers by allowing them to just sit there, fold their arms and say, 'We refuse to engage in discussions with you about an enterprise agreement.' Plus, it will take away the only thing that the employees have the right to do in that situation, which is their right to industrial action. At the moment, if your boss refuses to negotiate with you, you are allowed to say, 'We are going to start stop-work meetings,' or 'We are going to go on strike until you strike a deal with us.'

You would think that workers should be given the right to go to Fair Work and say, 'Look, we just cannot strike a deal and we have been trying; why don't you decide as the independent umpire?' But this bill does nothing of the sort. In fact, it does not allow them any help. It further ties their hands and allows the employer to sit there and say, 'I am just not going to negotiate with you.'

These are just some of the measures in this bill. There are others that say if you have happened to accrue annual leave loading and other reasonable measures during your time at work, and it turns out that you get sacked before you have had the chance to take them, do not expect to get your full entitlement paid out—you are only going to get part of it. These are measures that you have legitimately accrued during your time working for this employer.

When one looks at the other provisions, you can see that the government has gone back to the previous Fair Work review and just picked the eyes out of it, putting forward only those measures on the employers' side of the ledger, but there is nothing there to balance it up on the other side. That is why the Greens will not be supporting this bill. Instead, if we get to a third reading of this bill, I will be moving some amendments, to remove these clauses of this bill and, instead, substitute them with other clauses that would actually benefit working people in this country. The Greens want to improve conditions for working people, not just to have them desperately fighting to hang onto current conditions.