Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australian workers have suffered through a decade of declining wages and working conditions, and it is unprecedented. But this plague is not an act of God. It hasn't fallen from the sky; it is a deliberate outcome of antiwages, antiworker and antiunion policies by companies like Qantas and Amazon. If your wages have gone backwards, you can thank Alan Joyce and Jeff Bezos, corporate thugs who have pioneered new ways to game our industrial relations system. If we continue to let Amazon and Qantas drive a race to the bottom then every other employer in Australia will be forced to do the same to survive. Around the world governments and workers are standing up to these corporate guerrillas. Governments from New Zealand to the European Union are moving to back multi-employer bargaining, to give workers a voice and a say over their wages and conditions, to give workers a voice to make sure they can have that say.

This week, in the lead-up to Black Friday, workers and unions around the world, including the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association and the Transport Workers Union here in Australia, are telling Jeff Bezos that enough is enough: no more starvation wages, no more union-busting, no more worker surveillance, no more tax avoidance and no more workers being forced to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines. We say no more to American Amazon's Flex, with workers being paid below the minimum age. We say no more to the Americanisation of wages and working conditions in Australia. Amazon's 19th-century work practices are not welcome here. It's time to make Amazon pay.