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

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023. The provisions in this bill are important. They will usher in changes to our workplace relations laws that will deliver real benefits and protections for Australian workers. The world of work in Australia is changing, and we need workplace law that plays catch-up. Too many Australian workers are not being paid what they are entitled to. They are robbed. Too many people, especially young people, are being robbed of their super and of their wages. Too many Australians are not being paid the same rate as the permanent worker alongside them because of confected arrangements by devious employers who want to get workers on the cheap.

I've listened carefully to Senator Cash's comments. She made no comment about wage theft. What does she think should happen for the millions of workers who lose their wages, who approach their retirement without being paid up to $3.4 billion a year in superannuation theft? Senator Cash has made a speech about jobs—about how jobs are everything and they are a contract between the employer and the employee. But it is not just about getting a job in Australia; these days it is also about the quality of the job that you get. If you do not get a job that offers you security of employment and does not offer you safety at work, then your life is on the line, and that is why this bill is important. It will make a difference. It will improve the lives of so many workers.

The bill will simplify workers' access to compensation when they're suffering from PTSD. This is incredibly important to our police, our firefighters, our ambos and our emergency services workers, who do things every day that are critical to the functioning of our society: rescuing the sick, protecting the vulnerable and saving lives. We must support those workers who put themselves on the line for us.

The bill will also add silicosis to the remit of the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency. We do this on the day of the 20th anniversary of when we made asbestos illegal in this country. We need to do the same in relation to silicosis. This will help with setting up a national plan and coordinating efforts to tackle silicosis. That's important, but we need to do more. And this chamber only two weeks ago was in 100 per cent agreement that the cost being imposed especially on young people by silicosis is not acceptable. Every day that we delay banning the import of manufactured stone is costing workers their lives. We need to implement the recommendation of Safe Work Australia to put in place a national plan before 1 July 2024 to ban manufactured stone, which is killing Australians. We know silicosis is entirely preventable. We should be acting on that in ways that go further than what is in the bill.

The bill will also prohibit an employer from taking adverse action against a worker on the basis that the worker has experienced family and domestic violence. We have an epidemic of domestic violence in this country, and it affects so many women at work. We need to have support for workers in their workplace to deal with this epidemic. And we know it's on the rise. In my own state, there were five deaths in a single two-week period in recent times. Our labour law has to play catch-up because of the role it can play in protecting women and ensuring that the attacks on women, the damage to women, are shut down and that women are assisted by proper action in the workplace so that they get the support they need in the workplace.

The bill will close a loophole whereby small businesses don't have to pay redundancy to workers where they downsize due to insolvency. That's important when businesses go under. We need justice for workers, especially that last group of workers, who are often at the tail end of an extended period of redundancies. That's an important protection for those workers. The bill will close labour hire loopholes used to undercut wages and working conditions. Currently bosses can pay workers employed on labour hire contracts a lower rate of pay and offer them worse working conditions than staff. I just listened to Senator Cash say that's a device to avoid unionisation of those workers. That is rubbish. It is a device used to minimise the costs of labour for very large employers in Australia, and it is completely unfair. In inquiries we have heard evidence from worker after worker about $50,000 wage gaps, for example, in very big corporations which make billions of dollars in profit but who are not paying the workers working right alongside each other with the same skills and requests of them the same. They are underpaid. This loophole is used to exploit workers, and it has to be shut down. It is overdue for reform.

We've seen very active campaigns by employers, pouring money into defending this kind of poor behaviour, this unfair behaviour, and misinformation campaigns trying to shoot down this amendment. It's important that we take action, and the Greens back it. I want to assure the Senate and the public out there that the sky is not going to fall because of this amendment. I have personally given evidence as a researcher at inquiry after inquiry for the last 30 years about the evidence on this question. I hate to invoke the ghost of Senator Abetz—a ghost of workplace relations Christmases past—but I've certainly sat opposite him many times when giving evidence on this question, and it is time that we face up to the reality that the sky will not fall when we see workers paid the same rate of pay for the same rate of work for the same job description for the same effort. It will mean fairness for those workers and for their families. They should be paid an appropriate rate of pay. Chicken Little has no role in this campaign and should not be financed in a campaign to attack the attempt to reform this part of our labour regulation.

The bill will criminalise wage theft. I was waiting for Senator Cash to mention wage theft. It is straightforward theft. It should be criminalised. It is worth billions of dollars in the Australian economy. Stealing wages from workers, especially workers with low bargaining power, like young women, young people and migrants, causes serious harm, and it is the most powerless who are most affected by wage theft. This is straightforward greed. It should be a criminal offence.

We Greens have worked very hard to extend that criminal offence beyond the straightforward matter of stealing from someone's pay packet to stealing from their future in the form of stealing their superannuation. With the passage of this legislation, it will be a criminal offence for an employer to intentionally not pay their workers the super they are owed. This amendment places that theft in a similar legal category to wage theft, exactly where it should be, and ensures that workers are protected against the boss who wants to avoid paying them what they're due. This is a big problem for casual workers, especially in hospitality, who may find that superannuation was stolen years after the fact. They've got no way of getting it back. It especially affects many women and those young people and migrants. It's an industry, a robbery, that's worth billions of dollars every year. On average, the workers being affected are out of pocket by $1,700 a year. That's around $3.4 billion that employers are holding onto which is due to working families and working people as they approach retirement. Superannuation is not an optional extra. It is a critical workplace entitlement, and it protects a decent life for Australians into their older age. Not paying it should be criminalised, and this amendment will make sure that happens.

This bill will introduce new protection for union delegates so that they continue to play their vital role representing workers and advocating their rights. The changes enable greater communication with members and accessing workplace facilities. The changes will prevent an employer from unreasonably refusing to deal with delegates or obstructing them in any way. This is vital in terms of communication within a workplace, especially around matters like health and safety.

All the issues addressed in this bill have been there for many years in front of us demanding action. They're matters which the Greens want to help the parliament step up to and deal with. They should all be passed in this parliament, and we need them. We need them as soon as possible, but we need a whole lot more. There are massive changes underway in our workplaces that must take us beyond dealing with the important emergency measures that are in this bill. We 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 slipping behind. Some measures missing from this bill are those incorporated in the original closing loopholes bill. The measures in the bill before us are urgent, but the other measures are also urgent.

We must also attend to some very important, wide-ranging issues, like the epidemic of job insecurity, which affects one in four Australian workers on casual terms and a third of Australian workers in precarious employment. These workers run our universities. They teach our kids in schools. They serve us in restaurants. They hold up many elements of the health system. They are vital parts of our labour market, but they don't necessarily know, in many cases, what their hours will be next week or next year, and their casual loading does not compensate them for all that they lose—unpredictable ongoing employment and the loss of holidays, sick leave and so many other conditions, such as the opportunity to train on the job and to progress in a career. We need to see improvements in security for so many Australian workers. We also need to look after the growing army of gig workers, who are dropping food parcels to our workplaces and our homes and are such an important and growing part of our labour market. They deserve a right to safe work and to a minimum wage.

There is also the question of the right to disconnect, which I have spent many minutes talking about in this chamber. Over Christmas, many Australians are going to be answering their emails, picking up their phone, responding to their employer and trying to stay sweet with their work and keep their job secure by responding when they get some kind of contact through their device from their boss. There are many countries who now recognise this is a pernicious labour market practice that costs people their health. It costs people their family time and it steals their working hours from their communities. We have to see a right to disconnect in this country.

Ongoing casual workers must have more opportunity to convert to employment where they are in ongoing employment, to be protected by consistent hours and pay. They should receive—and we saw the cost of it in the pandemic—paid sick leave and paid holidays. The casualisation in our workforce has eroded workers' protections, and the casual loading does not even begin to compensate for those changes. Workers are reliant on their wages to live, and they deserve certainty about their working time and their pay so they can put food on the table. I know, from a great deal of evidence that we took in the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care, how many people in our supermarket chains have no predictability about their working time. They cannot tell what their pay packet will be next week. Their boss can tell you how many Granny Smith apples will be in row 5 next Wednesday morning, but they can't tell their workers exactly what hours of work they'll have next week. We need much more predictability around working time and roster justice.

Most importantly, we need to improve conditions for gig workers. Many of them are an important part of our economy, but they pay too much in terms of their own health and safety and their low pay for their jobs that they are desperate to do—so many of them immigrant workers and powerless in our labour market. I've sat in hearings listening to family members talk about the loss of their children, of their nephews and of their kids in unsafe working conditions, killed on the job delivering our food and the objects and goods we want delivered to our homes. We cannot run our labour market on the lives of those workers, and we cannot have them doing their work systematically, year after year, on wages that are well below the minimum wage. We have to improve our protections for gig workers. Next year I'm hoping we're going to see real change to protect those gig workers to keep them safe and make sure they get the minimum standards that every Australian worker since Federation has thought is an important right—that if you give your time to an employer, then you have a right to be safe at work and have enough food on your table and predictable working time. We need to extend minimum standards and we need to include in those minimum standards the rates of pay and safe working conditions. We Greens will continue to fight for these changes to be passed next year.

We must also see next year a real improvement alongside other countries in that right to disconnect, so that people can save their time that they are not paid for for their families, their communities and their own health. Unpaid overtime is a multibillion-dollar problem that robs Australian workers and communities of our time. On average Australian workers are donating seven weeks a year to their workforce. That is wrong. It affects their health, it affects their families and it affects their communities. We're doing some really important things today that will make a difference, and will narrow inequality in our labour market and protect people who can least defend themselves, but we've got a lot more we need to do. We need to make sure we protect the working time of Australians so they have predictable hours and predictable pay. We need to make sure we aren't running our industries on workers who are unsafe driving around in our streets and paid well below the minimum wage—many of them, we've seen in recent times, potentially subject to the risk of losing their lives. We need to improve immediately the protections around silicosis which affect so many young people, and we need to introduce real improvements across the labour market.