Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it good to be back. It is Monday morning and the Senate is back in session so there must be an attack on workers underway by the Liberal government. When I first came to work in this place in 2005, it was for Senator Rachel Siewert when she was our industrial relations spokesperson. I can very well remember the night in November 2005 when Work Choices passed this chamber. At the time, the trade union movement, the Labor Party and the Greens said, 'We will repeal this, no matter how long it takes.' Whether it is Prime Minister Howard, Prime Minister Abbott or Prime Minister Turnbull, the man in the suit may change but the message is the same. I do not know what it is in the coalition's DNA that has them come back time after time seeking to further erode the power imbalance between workers and employers, but here we are again.

The Senate has twice rejected the two pieces of legislation that formed a major part of the coalition government's attack on people's rights at work. The smoothness of the segue, the transition, from Prime Minister Abbott, whose loathing for the trade union movement and for working people generally was worn heart on sleeve for every minute that he was Prime Minister, may be that the sales pitch has improved but the legislation is still here. First order of business for the new sitting week under the new government, that new prime ministership, the new frontbench—the same legislation. What does that tell us?

I hope that the Senate rejects this Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 as it has done to those that have come before it. But, right now, obviously we are very concerned that behind the scenes arms are being twisted and the crossbenchers are negotiating some kind of deal with the coalition to get this bill through. Like most on this side of the chamber, the Australian Greens have amendments circulated and our position on this bill is very clear: we oppose it. What the crossbenchers may or may not be able to hack together with the government over the course of the next few hours is yet to be seen because amendments are yet to be circulated. So it may not pass in its full current form, but it is possible, as we are standing here this morning, that some of the worst parts of this legislation could remain if the government talks the crossbenchers into opposing this bill.

One of our main concerns with the bill, as colleagues Senator Rice and Mr Bandt, the member for Melbourne in the other place, have made very clear is what it seeks to do on greenfields agreements—new sites, areas where new agreements are being formed. I wonder whether crossbench senators or those listening to this debate from outside the building are aware of what this legislation proposes to do. If it passes, there are changes here that will deny workers on big projects, new projects, greenfield sites, a voice on their own wages and conditions. These are the workers on new projects, whether they be mines, ports or LNG processing plants—greenfield sites around the country. In essence, it will mean that employers will be able to bargain with themselves and unilaterally determine the wages and conditions that workers on these projects receive without having to negotiate with trade unions or with the workers themselves. Think about that for a second; that is the very definition of a one-sided agreement—one which an employer negotiates with themselves.

It actually goes beyond this; it allows employers to choose which union they want to be their negotiating partner. Usually, it is the workers who get to choose who represents them—which union is involved in the negotiation—but this legislation goes against this and allows the employers to choose. Why would that be? Not only do employers get to pick the wages and conditions for workers; they also get to pick their own negotiating partners—who they will face-off with at the negotiating table.

This goes vastly beyond the recommendations in the Productivity Commission's draft report into workplace relations. The PC's draft report recommended, in fact, that the Fair Work Act be amended so that if an employer and a union have not reached a negotiated outcome for a greenfields agreement after three months, the employer may—and there are a couple of choices, 'continue negotiating with the union, request that the Fair Work Commission undertake last offer arbitration of an outcome by choosing between the last offers made by the employer and the union', so as far as the two negotiating parties were able to get it to, or 'submit the employers proposed greenfields arrangement for approval with a 12-month nominal expiry date.' That is bad enough, but this piece of legislation would not even allow this degree of compromise. Instead of employees and unions negotiating a decent, settled agreement on wages and conditions that work for both parties, as has been happening in this country for 115 years, this legislation would see employers be able to just wait it out for three months, or potentially six months if rumoured crossbench amendments pass, and they can then ask the Fair Work Commission to accept whatever they put on the table in an agreement negotiated with themselves—giving employees and unions no say at all. It is workplace unilateralism. The Greens think that workers are entitled to share in the wealth of this country, but this legislation appears to be about letting employers and companies earn even more profit from their projects and sidelining the people who actually do the work.

We have not heard many reports of projects not getting off the ground because of difficulties negotiating under the current legislation—I have not heard of any. What is the problem that this legislation is designed to solve? It is not an attempt to get more projects up. We have just gone through the greatest commodities boom in the history of this country—we had labour shortages; we had the dollar pushed up; we had skills shortages, and the desperation of employers to import workers from overseas rather than training them here. The economy has expanded at a ferocious rate. What is the problem that this bill is designed to solve? You would have to say that it is simply an attempt to give employers a greater share of the profits coming from agreements by shutting out their own workforce and those their workforce might choose to represent them for negotiating wages and conditions. That is what is going on here this morning.

We have, on behalf of Senator Janet Rice, our own amendments to the bill that would give workers better control of their work-life balance and more negotiating leverage as they negotiate their pay and conditions. I encourage the crossbench in the strongest possible terms to support these amendments to give people control of their work-life balance, rather than simply following along with the government's rush to remove the ability of workers on these big projects to take control of their pay and conditions and, indeed, their working lives.

The bill was first put forward by a government and a Prime Minister on a crusade to slowly but surely strip away the rights of Australian workers, and it seems that under this new leadership nothing has changed—maybe some of the language has changed; maybe the attitude has changed; maybe people are wearing better tailored suits, but the underlying dynamic is identical. It is done now with an undertone of fear and resentment because of the backlash and the sustained campaign that followed the decision to ram the Work Choices legislation through the Senate, as I can recall and my colleagues can recall. It has become a political truism that the Howard government was undone not just by that legislation but by that sitting fortnight in which the laws of terror, the welfare to work legislation, the Work Choices legislation, a bill to abolish compulsory student unionism and a bill to dump radioactive waste in regional Australia went through in one single sitting fortnight. Political historians consider that fortnight to have undone the Howard government—that overreach. The Greens and I were part of the campaign to roll that legislation back against the newly departed Kevin Andrews, whose political career appears to have been one catastrophic disaster after another. Now the coalition is a little gun-shy, and they are not front and centre pushing the same kinds of policies as they did under Work Choices—it is subliminal; it is a drip-feed; it is a bit at a time; an attack here and an attack there, and that is what we are seeing this morning.

This is a bill from a government that is continuing to put the profits of big business ahead of the rights of vulnerable Australian workers, because it is those very large corporations—some of them local and some of them offshore—that pay for their preselections, election campaigns and TV advertising. It is that end of town that bankrolls the Liberal-National Party, as it has been for time immemorial, and so it is a fairly easy dynamic to understand. What it results in, what it ends with—the final result, the final outcome—is a bill like the one that we see today. The bill that is about changing those minimum standards. It is not about giving people more flexibility unless it is the flexibility of being unemployed, the flexibility to be paid less, the flexibility of having your conditions traded off, and the flexibility of not being able to choose who represents you in negotiations that affect the rest of your life and your paying conditions in your workplace. That is not flexibility at all; that is something else.

When one looks through the provisions of this bill, you can see the government has gone back to the previous Fair Work review and cherry picked the nasty bits of it—the things that work to implement one side of the ledger, to shift the balance further in the direction of employers and away from fairness and away from workers; there is nothing here to balance that out on the other side. It is a hideously lopsided piece of legislation. We see the obsession of the government about employees having access to their union representatives at reasonable times. What on earth is wrong with that? How is that possibly controversial?

In many workplaces, often the only way that workers find out about what their entitlements are are from their union representatives. These are the people who study legislation, such as this, and who make it their life's work to stick up for people in the workplace. These are the people who can come into a workplace and say: 'No, there are laws to protect you. You are entitled to be paid properly as a member of the Australian community.' Yet what we see here, in this legislation, is the 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 certainly have done on many occasions 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. I'll sit there, with a clipboard, making a note of who comes in to get advice about what their minimum conditions are.' Not all employers, maybe not even most, but there are enough of them out there that we have to retain the role of the trade union movement in advising people of their workplace rights and entitlements, so they do not find themselves stigmatised or victimised or singled out for that. That is a workplace right that is as old as the Commonwealth of Australia. It is one of the things that has made this country, although we are suffering from growing inequality, and its egalitarian tradition such an important part of the prosperity of this country. We owe it to those organisers, workers, researchers and activists in the trade union movement that this government has worked so hard to demonise, whether it be through a ridiculous royal commission, or at the thousand little comments and sleights that even have taken their place in the course of this debate.

The law currently says that you cannot victimise workers for seeking the advice of a trade unionist, 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 what the law says at present. And that is abolished under this bill. When you think about this from the perspective of a vulnerable worker, who may not even have English as their first language, who may not have another job to go to, who may not understand the complexities of our industrial relations system—how are they going to find out what their workplace rights are? Whose advice will they seek? The risk is that they will not seek advice; that will be the practicality of it. And that is not an accidental or an inadvertent or an unfortunate side consequence of this bill—that is what this bill was drafted to achieve: to prevent people from seeking that advice.

I note that there have been a number of amendments to the bill, and, most notably those proposed by members of the crossbench. It is important that the crossbenchers who have proposed these amendments in this chamber are aware of what these amendments do; particularly, if all we are trying to do is to polish this thing, which should not or could not be polished. I am saying that, obviously, in the context that these negotiations and this arm-twisting that is still going on in back rooms, even as this debate proceeds; I am certain of one thing: the final form of the amendments has not been circulated and made available to the chamber. This is not even really something that we should be debating; while senators on all sides—apart from those undertaking the negotiations and who are busy hammering out its final form—would not even know what the final form of this bill is going to be.

The amendments, which, as I understand it, are obviously subject to change as the debate proceeds are designed to remove part 2 of the bill, which says that if you happened to accrue annual leave loading and other reasonable measures during your time at work and it turns out you get sacked before you have the chance to take them, you will not get a full payout of your entitlements; you are only going to get part of it. That would be one possible marginal improvement—if part 2 is gone.

The proposal to take out part 3—and who drafts this stuff?—would remove the right of employees to take or accrue annual leave while they are receiving workers compensation. While the Greens welcome the removal of these provisions, if that is where this debate is going, we still cannot support the bill. The deal that the crossbench appears to be in the process of doing takes out some of the nasty provisions that the original bill contained but goes nowhere near far enough to protect the rights of vulnerable Australian workers. What the crossbench deal does not appear to remove from this bill are the provisions that would take away employees' rights to industrial action. This will tip the scales in favour of the employer during negotiations. The leverage is all on one side. The employer can say, 'There are plenty of others like you out on the street—if you do not like this, take your negotiations and find another employer.' The balance of power in these negotiations is frequently so asymmetrical—that is why it is important that we retain the right of workers to bargain and organise collectively and to have them in their workplaces with a full understanding of what their rights and entitlements are.

Industrial action is a part of that. It may be an unpopular thing to say in this day and age, but the right to organise collectively and the right to withhold labour are the reasons we have weekends, the reasons we have penalty rates and the reasons we have workplace safety laws that stop people from getting killed in their workplaces. These things were not all entirely negotiated patiently across a negotiating table. When push comes to shove, industrial action needs to be taken when employers threaten to walk away or to lock their workforce out. That is how these conditions of reasonable pay, reasonable conditions and workplace safety have been negotiated over the last few decades. Imagine going to your employer with a legitimate request for better pay or conditions and having the employer being unwilling even to have a conversation with you about it. You the employee have no legally protected course of action to make the employer come to the bargaining table.

Under this bill an employer gets to be the sole decision maker on what legislation and minimum standards apply in their workplace—it removes the negotiation element of bargaining and allows an employer to sit there, with their arms folded, and say 'Take it or leave it—we refuse to engage in discussions about an enterprise agreement'. It is deeply offensive that this bill will take away an employee's only power in this situation, which is to take industrial action. Under existing laws, if employers refuse to negotiate with their employees then the employees are able to commence stop-work meetings or even go on strike. When these options are taken away, so will be any semblance of constructive negotiation in the workplace. Why would employees even come to the table?

The Greens have amendments to this bill, which Senator Rice will speak to at the appropriate time, that will genuinely make work fairer. Our amendments propose to give workers more job security and allow working Australians to have the flexibility that works for them, so that they can have the time off to pick up the kids, to drop them off at school or to look after a sick grandparent. The average full-time working week in Australia is 44 hours, the longest in the Western world. Dr Richard Denness and his colleagues at the Australia Institute have documented over a period of years the additional vast hours of unpaid overtime that workers put in, unless they are working to rule—which so few people do. We perform $72 billion in unpaid overtime each year.

Just over half of all Australians want to change their hours of work. We have chronic unemployment and underemployment on the one hand and chronic overwork and a massive amounts of unpaid overtime on the other hand. We need to connect the dots. Surveys show that, on average, full time employees would like to work about 5.6 hours less per week, while part-time workers would like to work on average another four hours per week. We can see where this is going. Research shows that working hours are impacting on wellbeing, with poorer health and greater use of prescription medications. It affects people's personal and family lives. Sixty percent of women feel consistently time pressured and nearly half of men also feel this way. In this country we need to better match the hours people want to work with the hours they actually work—on both sides, with some people demanding less and some more. If people want to work different hours or work from home so that their life is better, then the law should allow that, provided it does not unduly impact on their employer. That is what negotiation is for—but they should not be one-sided negotiations. In fact, allowing workers more flexible hours will be a productivity boost for the economy—as many employees have shown.

Business will benefit from the reforms in these proposed amendments that the Greens have circulated. Good employers are already promoting work-life balance. This will not be news to those thousands of ethical employers around the country who already make this a part of their business practice. In this parliament we should be working to improve and protect the rights of Australian workers and not passing bills that see those rights eroded day after day in bill after bill