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

The provisions in the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023 and related bills before us are important. They are changes that will make real benefits of significance to many Australian workers. We Greens support the changes that are before us. We support and thank the government for the work that embedded these changes in the closing loopholes bill. I agree with many of the comments that have been made here this morning by Senator Lambie and Senator David Pocock.

The bills make important steps forward in relation to workers compensation and rehabilitation. They strengthen workers' health and safety. They ensure workers in smaller businesses have access to redundancy payments; they improve provisions there. Most importantly, alongside all of those measures, they strengthen workplace protections for people experiencing family and domestic violence. All of these are matters that this parliament should be passing legislation on. They have all been there for many years, in front of us, demanding action, and they are matters that the Greens are keen to see the parliament step up to. We want to see vigorous action around them.

I will just mention the first responders, and Senator Pocock spoke at length about them. These moves will simplify the access of workers to compensation when they're suffering from PTSD. That is such an important measure for the AFP, firefighters, ambos and emergency services communications operators. The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency) Bill 2023 will broaden that agency's functions to include coordinating action on silica safety and silica related diseases. That's so important to so many families supporting people affected by those diseases. That will include developing and promoting a silica national strategic plan. Those are all good steps in the right direction. In terms of protections against discrimination, we Greens are very supportive of improving protections against discrimination for employees who have been or continue to be subjected to family and domestic violence. Specifically, these measures will prohibit an employer from taking adverse action against a worker or a potential worker on the basis that they've experienced family and domestic violence. Finally, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Small Business Redundancy Exemption) Bill 2023 addresses an important implication arising from the small business redundancy exemption. It will give support to those employees who are often right at the end of the chain of a series of redundancies and find themselves, under existing provisions, missing out on the support that they need when a business becomes insolvent.

We need all of those changes. We need them as soon as possible. But we need a whole lot of other things as well. There are massive changes underway in our labour market that must take us beyond dealing with these very important emergency measures. In some households, these will make a difference at a time when households are under very particular stress—when workers' health and safety is at risk. But we also need to raise our eyes from those matters and consider the larger question of how our workplaces have changed and how our legislation around workplaces is limping along behind.

We need urgent change in our industrial relations on other matters as well. We've seen a massive shift in our workforce in terms of its gender composition, its care responsibilities and the security of employment. We are now a labour market which is a standout in international comparison in terms of the proportion of workers who have no security in their jobs. They don't know if they'll have a job tomorrow. A quarter of Australian workers are now employed on casual terms. Many of them are actually in permanent work. They need protection from the insecurity that affects them, their families and their ability to hold the household budget together. That's a quarter of our workforce. A third of our workforce is precarious in more general terms. They're on short-term contracts. They're driving on a gig platform. They're very insecure. This is not how the Australian labour market should operate, and we need urgent action. It is urgent that we see action to protect casual employees, give them stronger pathways to permanency and prevent the ongoing exploitation of casual work.

Work is now a place where we see widening inequality. We see people at the bottom of the labour market not only insecure but very poorly paid or in a black economy where they're not paid the wages they should be. Wage theft is endemic in our labour market. It especially affects young people, and it's particularly important for migrant workers. This is a pressing question. People are having their wages stolen in very significant numbers across a range of occupations, and there's a lot of evidence about it. It imposes big costs on workers and our economy. And it's not just wages; it's also superannuation. In fact, if you look at the numbers and the proportion of money that's lost to workers in forgone and stolen superannuation, they're several times larger—in the billions—than wage theft more narrowly defined.

The work done by this Senate and the committee I chaired on work and care and the need to update our industrial relations legislation is also pressing. We need to improve workplace relations systems that support workers who are holding responsibility for the care of someone else while they're at work, whether it's for care of someone with a disability, for child care or for aged care. We've got systems of industrial relations in our country that don't give people security around their rosters. It's incredibly important for families and working parents to know what hours they're working tomorrow and next week. Too many Australian workers don't have any security around their rosters. That's also a pressing question. So there are many issues that arise out of our work and care report that should be considered as matters of urgency in our industrial relations reform.

Our workplace relations laws are inadequate. The opposition has had years to attempt to fix some of these problems, and it has failed to do so. Personally, I have appeared with many other workplace relations academics over decades, bringing forward evidence about insecurity of employment and the high cost it imposes on young people, and we've failed to see action on that front and other fronts. It is vitally important that we look at the changing nature of the workforce and update our industrial relations law fulsomely to deal with a wide range of issues that affect workers in Australia. We need a fair and equitable industrial relations system that upholds the rights of all working people and goes to the question of a secure job, receiving the pay rate that you properly should be and being free from discrimination of all forms. Working people have the right to just and favourable conditions of work and, of course, appropriate protection when their small business becomes insolvent, as well as protection for their health and safety in relation to the chemicals and materials they use at work. Security of employment and wage theft are matters which also matter a great deal. Our workplace laws should also be supporting people in terms of their workplace balance, in the ability they have to put together care for kids and turn up for work. Our provisions at present are inadequate.

I want to particularly mention the fact that many, many workers on labour hire contracts work alongside others and are not paid a fair or equivalent rate of pay. We've heard this in inquiries before the Senate previously, for example, from mining workers, who are working in what are called casual or contract jobs. They know what their shifts will be for a whole year ahead of them, but they're termed 'casual' or 'contract', and, in some cases, they're receiving up to $50,000 a year less than the permanent workers they work alongside. That's a failure in our labour hire regulation and our protection of casuals and contract workers. There needs to be fairness in pay across a workplace, regardless of the form of your employment. They deserve parity, and we need an industrial relations law that properly protects that fairness.

We need more than that. Many of us now can carry our office and our workplace in our back pocket in the form of our phone. The boundaries around work, the nature of the workplace and the places and times that you do work are now, for many of us, dictated by the phone we carry in our pocket. So we need a new right that recognises changing technologies and changing practices of work and allows workers, once they've done their hours of work, to turn off. We need a right to disconnect. It is vital. Many countries around the world are recognising this. They're recognising that unlimited, unbounded hours of work which give the boss the chance to send you an email and require a response in the middle of the night or on a Sunday afternoon are bad for you, bad for your health and bad for your family's health. They put pressure on you and your household and are undermining community life for too many Australian workers and their families. We need a right to disconnect. It is vitally important that we start to build back control over working time and regulate and contain it to your contracted hours of work. Unpaid overtime is endemic in too many Australian workplaces. It leads to wage theft and is a great injustice for too many workers.

Australian workers now work, on average, six weeks of unpaid overtime every year. A lot of it is because they don't have the right to turn off their office, to turn off their phone, and to work their legal hours. That amounts to over $92 billion in unpaid wages across the economy every year. We've seen very strong evidence of the cost of that in the recent reports of employment conditions in very large consultancies.

Elizabeth Broderick did an analysis of EY recently—a very big workforce, thousands of workers—where conditions at work were incredibly difficult for too many young people, too many people at the bottom of a very large workplace who were unable to control their hours of work and felt extreme consequences for their personal health and for their households. They worked long and unsafe hours. They felt exposed to bullying because the business model pressures them to work long hours and the culture of chasing money at the top of their business creates appalling working conditions for them. They need protection from untrammelled working demands from their bosses, and they need a right to disconnect.

We know the research evidence tells us that, if you work long hours, if you're bullied, if you are under unfair pressure at work, you are going to be affected in your sleep, you'll certainly suffer stress consequences, you're highly likely to experience burnout and your relationships will be degraded. This is an important reason to contain and actually regulate working hours and introduce a right to disconnect. Almost 20 countries, including France, Spain, Italy and Ireland, have already taken a step in this direction, and it is urgent that this parliament consider ways in which we adapt our workplace regulation to deal with that kind of change in our community. I have mentioned super theft. That is also an important thing where we need to provide greater support for workers so that, when their employer knowingly steals their super, they have the opportunity to bring their employer to account and for thar behaviour to be criminalised. It's a very, very important additional steps.

While I support the four measures that are in these bills and the Greens strongly support the need to protect things like access to support if you are suffering from domestic violence or from silica related illness and a range of other matters, there is so much more that is needed in our industrial relations system, and we believe we need to make moves on a much broader front. We need to be protecting our gig workers. We have seen evidence in committees before this parliament that these workers are losing their lives because of unfair conditions, very poor pay and an unregulated gig sector. We know that we need to protect workers who are in labour hire conditions to provide some fairness and parity in their working conditions. We need to criminalise both wage and superannuation theft, and we must address the insecurity of workers in so many Australian workplaces. It is affecting our productivity, it is affecting fairness for individual workers, and this makes putting together any kind of life outside of work incredibly difficult.

We're an international delinquent on that front, and it is a pressing question that this parliament should consider as a matter of urgency. There are so many urgent problems sitting before us., not least trying to improve the conditions of casual workers in terms of their access to sick and annual leave. We have workers in this country who work regularly every week for a year and have no access to paid sick leave or annual leave. That's an important provision that we Greens would also like to see addressed. In conclusion, we need to see all kinds of changes that actually respond to the nature of the workplace as it is now, and that includes a range of measures. These measures are included in these four bills, but many other measures are urgent needs for Australian workers if we want a just workplace, if we want fairness for workers and if we want safe work for our Australian workforce.