Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022. There is much to like in this bill. It helps to deal with some of our big work challenges. It makes a good start, and there is more to do. We've heard a lot about how the sky will fall if this bill is passed. This is the world spruiked by those opposite, as we just heard, and on the front page of the Australianthe world of backward-looking employer organisations and old-time IR club warriors fighting the workplace battles of last century. It is a world of opponents of reform, of hired advocates and consultants singing from very old song sheets, spruiking alarmism about the catastrophe of multi-enterprise bargaining and the imminent collapse of small business. This mob are re-running the IR debate of 30 years ago, and their lines are tired.

Out there in the real world of work, things are different. The issues are not strike action or enterprise bargaining. The issues are: 'Who will look after my kids tomorrow while I go to work? What hours have I got next week? If I knock back this shift, will I ever get another one? And how will I pay for child care or rent if I don't get a pay rise?' So many Australian businesses right now cannot find the workers they need because those workers cannot get the child care or the flexibility they need. If the roads that get us to work every day were failing like this, keeping people away from work, a national emergency would be declared. We'd have a critical road-to-work infrastructure program, worth billions, very fast.

The failures of our work system are a failure of critical infrastructure and a failure of outdated labour law. Yet, led by the opponents of this bill, our shouty, blokey, labour law debate—if we can dignify it with that title—is awash with alarm about the possibility of horrors like more collective bargaining. We need reform of our labour law, but it needs to leave behind the tired old preoccupations and myths of business collapse and instead recognise the reality of work now.

We are not in 1950. We do not have a wife at home. We are in a different world, where half of workers are women—most of them carers; where a third of workers are insecurely employed; where only 13 per cent of workers are covered by enterprise agreements; where union density is now at 14 per cent; where our underinvestment in the infrastructure of work, like child care, has created a workforce shortage crisis; where undervaluation of jobs in the care economy means early childhood educators, teachers, nurses and aged-care workers are voting with their feet and leaving jobs they love; and where so many workers have no say over their rosters and have to choose between care for their kids and getting a pay packet.

Australia's workplace relations system is broken. It is built for the workplace and workers of the last century, not this one. It is built for someone who can work a standard working week when our lives are no longer standard. It is not the 1950s. It is not even the 1980s. Most of us hold down a job over our life cycle and have kids who need our support, as any parent who has parented a teenager knows, not for a few years but for decades. In an ageing population we have older parents and friends who also need our care.

We need a labour law that has our back as we put together our jobs and our care. We need a labour law that does not make insecurity the absence of paid holidays or sick leave, and low pay and unpredictable working time the price of being a mother or a father. We need a labour law that does not reward a lifetime of working and caring with an old age of poverty. We need to ensure that the paid workers who do the work in our care system, in early childhood education and care, aged care, respite care and disability care—the people who enable so many others to get to work—are paid decently, with jobs that enable them to both work and care.

Our IR system needs a complete reset. It is not fit for purpose. Australian workers are enduring real wage falls despite historic profit levels. Too many are working casually—25 per cent of our workforce, young people, women, migrants. Too many workers are on a perpetual cycle of limited-term contracts that get rolled over every year or every few months with no pay certainty and no career.

The gig economy is growing very fast. It's now over 250,000 workers with no job security, no access to safe work and no predictability in terms of pay and hours. As things stand in Australia, our army of five million working carers, most of us over our life course, and 40 per cent of all workers that work on any day of the week in Australia are contorting themselves around outdated labour law unsuited to the world out there.

In too many workplaces wage theft is real. It is robbery. It needs to be outlawed with a criminal penalty. Unpaid overtime is common. The average Australian now works six weeks of unpaid extra hours every year. Our workplace is now on the phone, in our handbag or in our back pocket, and it's in vigorous competition with the rest of our lives, especially if we have to stay sweet with the boss to keep our shifts or to get a promotion. A right to disconnect from work when the paid hours that we are paid to do are finished is a remote possibility but a real need for so many Australians.

New technologies that promised freedom and a shorter working week have instead tethered too many workers to their phones and their laptops, extending the length of the working week but without pay. A proud nation that led the world on shortening the working week in 1856 with the eight-hour day is now going the wrong way, with long hours for many and no sign of the four-day week promised by new technology and productivity increases.

The productivity gains of recent years have flown straight to profits, with a wages system which has made it too hard for workers to bargain collectively to get a pay rise—unless, of course, you happen to be in the executive class where wages have accelerated obscenely in recent years, leaving ordinary Australian workers far, far behind.

When the Keating Labor government introduced enterprise bargaining in 1991 with the accord mark VII, many women, including myself, said it would not work for women, it would not work for the low paid and it would not work for whole industries that had no elaborate working conditions or lengthy classification structures to compress or trade-off for a pay rise, and so it has proved. It was an enterprise bargaining system that suited more powerful workers and male dominated industries, but it failed women, it failed the low paid and it failed young people. Thirty years on it has run its course. We have reaped what the Keating Labor government sewed, along with the fruit of successful Liberal government workplace reforms that have stripped back working conditions, accelerated an epidemic of job insecurity, seen real wages fall and stalled the gender pay gap.

This system, with its failed regulation piled on failed regulation, has now failed most workers. It is rife with secrecy about pay. It has seen the introduction of repressive anti-union machinery, like the ABCC and the ROC, built to create a punitive anti-union regime that stops unionists from doing their jobs and stops workers from being able to join their unions.

In my state, South Australia, only five per cent of workers are now covered by collective agreements. Most Australian workers have to wait for a national minimum wage increase to get a pay rise and they are falling behind. We need a return to a more collective arrangement that sets decent liveable wages and conditions, not a bare minimum that leaves too many in working poverty. We need to make it easier for undervalued occupations, women's jobs like childhood educators, to get better pay that recognises their skills and their experience.

Too many workers now cannot predict their rosters of work—not next week, not tomorrow. They are nervous about refusing a shift or about asking for flexibility. Their employers can put them on minimum hour contracts of, say, 10 hours and then every week give them an extra 15 hours without any penalty rates for their extra time, and no guarantee they can truly rely on those hours into the future. How can they organise care for their kids or a housing loan? Roster injustice is rife in our workplaces and it must be fixed.

We Greens have pushed hard from the very beginning of this process of reform to get some long-standing Greens' policies reflected in labour law. I'm pleased that Labor heard us and built some of them in. This bill will help lift the pay of the lowest paid. With new Fair Work Commission objects of job security and gender equality, and new panels, the commission can more easily act to revalue care jobs that are underpaid. It removes the anti-union devices of the ABCC and the ROC. It takes step to abolish endless limited-term contracts. Most importantly, we have worked very hard to ensure that the better off overall test continues to protect workers; that no-one falls through any cracks in the BOOT; that it protects the most disadvantaged, including retail and hospital workers, indeed all workers.

The bill puts an end to corrosive pay secrecy—the enemy of fairness and of gender pay equity—and it offers improved prevention of sexual harassment and better prevention of discrimination around breastfeeding and gender identity. Importantly, the bill, with our amendments, fixes the anomaly that left just two of the 11 National Employment Standards—the right to request flexibility or to ask for an extension of unpaid parental leave—without any enforcement mechanism. What do you call a labour law without enforcement? A failed gesture.

We have the evidence on this. Around five in 10 Australian workers would like to ask their bosses for flexibility, and around two in 10 do ask, and they get what they want. There are a further three in 10 who would like to ask and who don't. They are fearful about the culture in their workplace and the stigma that will arise from asking. The existing unenforced right to request flexibility made no difference to that statistic. This bill fixes that, and it has long been Greens policy. We know that Australian workers need this flexibility, and they need more.

So we will move amendments to widen eligibility for the right to request flexibility. This right should be available to all employees, not just those with narrowly defined family responsibilities. It is only when seeking flexibility is something that is available to all that the stigma will be removed from asking for it, and we will see more men seeking flexibility and, hopefully, sharing domestic and care responsibilities as a result. Wider eligibility for flexibility has been adopted in the UK on clear evidence about its value, and guess what? The sky has not fallen.

We will also move amendments to establish a positive duty in favour of creating flexible workplaces in Australia. A modern workplace should create an environment that actively anticipates the needs of workers and doesn't require individuals to have to push for it, one by one.

We will move an amendment that allows the Fair Work Commission to deal with employers who unfairly deny a request for an extension of unpaid parental leave. This will support parents in taking the time they need to care for their child. It's an important step forward alongside other important steps, like an increase in paid parental leave.

We will also move an amendment to increase the minimum wage to ensure that all workers have a meaningful living wage. Our amendment aims to establish a new minimum wage, at 60 per cent of the median wage. This is based on international best practice. It will lift the minimum wage—so important in the current cost-of-living crisis.

Australian workers need improved workplace laws, laws that deal with 21st-century life and work. The job of reform is not over. There is more to do. The Greens want to see all workers get paid sick leave and holiday leave. The pandemic has shown us how important sick leave is, and anyone who works for a year, whether casual or permanent, should get a chance for rest and recuperation. New Zealand has done this; we should do it too.

We also need to see improved job security. Casual work should not be endemic. It should only exist where work is genuinely casual, intermittent or seasonal. We must protect the rights of gig workers, we must criminalise wage theft and we should improve roster justice. Workers need a right to disconnect from the technologies which tie them to work when their paid hours are done. They should not be doing six weeks unpaid work every year.

We've made an important start on reforming Australia's labour law to make it fit for the current century and the kinds of workers that are at work in our workforce. It's an important and valuable set of changes. We'll be back. We want to see real change on other pressing work issues of our century, but this is an important, positive step to begin.