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

I rise to speak to the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2023. Australia must have a fair and equitable workplace relations system that upholds the rights of all working people. We need a system that appropriately protects workers in a changing world. This bill is a modest but important step in the right direction. We in the Greens support this bill, given the important changes that have been agreed.

Minimum standards for employee-like workers in our gig economy are important. Standing up for casual workers, putting an end to sham contracting and strengthening union entry rights for suspected worker underpayment are all important. In particular, the Greens support better protections for gig workers and a stronger pathway to permanency for casuals. These are meaningful measures that are long overdue, but much more needs to be done.

The Greens are proud to have already passed an amendment to the first closing loopholes bill that ensures that superannuation theft is now a criminal offence alongside wage theft. Super theft is a form of wage theft, and it will now be treated as that under workplace law. The Greens have also amended the bill before us, with improvements to intractable bargaining provisions and protections for casual workers at schools and universities. But the bill lacks a key improvement, which is the right for workers to disconnect.

As we all know, Senate committees are powerful resources for gathering evidence from stakeholders across our country. We heard both during the inquiry for this bill and in the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care that workers are crying out for a better, fairer workplace relations system. Over the last couple of decades, the quality and security of jobs in Australia has been severely eroded. One-third of workers are now employed in insecure jobs as casuals and independent contractors—so-called—in labour hire and gig work. All of those are on the rise and now very significant in our labour market. Job insecurity brings with it unpredictable working times and hours and takes a toll on our health, our household budgets and our capacity to plan for the future.

This bill will allow the Fair Work Commission to set minimum standards and offer increased dispute resolution for employee-like digital platform workers. Our employee-like workers or gig workers are still just that. They are workers. They're entitled to minimum protections, including a minimum wage, paid sick and holiday leave and a safe workplace.

The committee inquiry into this bill heard that injury among gig workers is endemic, especially for those who deliver our food and our parcels. The evidence is very confronting. Seventy-three per cent of food delivery workers fear serious injury or death while at work, and no less than one-third have been seriously hurt or injured. Tragically, at least 13 delivery drivers have died on Australian roads in recent years. This is unacceptable in a civilised country.

Gig workers are often immigrant workers, who are among the most powerless in our workplaces. I've heard testimony from family members talking about the loss of their children, of their nephews and of their kids in unsafe working conditions. These are workers who have paid for their jobs with their lives in delivering our food and our goods. It's not good enough, and we have to do much better. We cannot run our labour market on the lives of those gig workers. We cannot have them doing the work, systematically, year after year, on wages that are so far below the minimum wage. Big corporations such as Uber and DoorDash have exploited their workers and profited at their expense for far too long by taking advantage of loopholes in Australia's workplace relations law. Well, no longer. Gig workers deserve better, and it's so important to see real change in this very significant area of workplace relations.

This bill will also make changes to the Fair Work Act to strengthen protections for casual workers. It does this by strengthening the conversion pathways for casuals whose jobs resemble permanent jobs and are casual in name only. These are positive developments. However, we know that they're not enough. We know that Australia has one of the highest rates of insecure employment in the OECD. A third of our workforce are now insecure and working in precarious work. Too many casual workers lack knowledge of what hours and pay they will have tomorrow or next week. Too many work regular hours year after year on low pay, even including the casual loading, and don't get paid holidays or paid sick leave in real terms. We know that the casual loading does not compensate for job insecurity or a lack of leave entitlements. It barely compensates for the insecurity alone of your job in terms of what it does to your life and to your earnings.

In addition to the measures in this bill, there are other ways in which we can improve working conditions for our casual workers in this country. We've previously called on the government to establish a right for all workers, including casual workers, to have pro rata sick leave and holiday leave. We also need incentives for businesses to create ongoing, secure positions rather than relying upon precarious forms of employment.

The Australian Greens support greater protections for casual workers, and this is why we've supported amendments in the lower house to protect teachers and university lecturers from a double-barrelled disadvantage. The problem is that many people in these organisations and workplaces have been classified as casuals or put on short-term arrangements and, come the end of the semester, find themselves out of a job and out of an income. They're often employed the year or the semester afterwards, providing their skills continuously but with broken employment contracts that make it really hard to put together a life and to do the work that so many of them love.

Teachers and lecturers on those fixed-term contracts will now be excluded from the definition of a casual worker, as supported by the National Tertiary Education Union. Workers in schools and unis who are not ongoing employees will either be classified as fixed-term employees or casuals—not both. In reality, this will mean increased job security for thousands of staff in our schools and in our universities. It is very relevant to the matters we were just discussing around the quality of education in this country.

The Greens have also fought to improve intractable bargaining provisions that were introduced in the secure jobs, better pay act. In this act, the government introduced provisions for the Fair Work Commission to intervene in bargaining that has reached an impasse. The purpose was to prevent protracted bargaining disputes, by giving the Fair Work Commission the power of compulsory arbitration. This is a good provision, but it's had some unintended consequences. Concerns have been raised that employers have been advised to wait out negotiating periods in order to get a backdoor result by going through the commission and ratcheting down conditions. Our amendment ensures that, if you end up in arbitration, you can't go backwards. It maintains the spirit of the underlying principle of the act, which is that agreements remain in place until a new one is negotiated. It fixes a loophole in Australia's arbitration system, protects workers and puts integrity back into the bargaining process.

I now turn to the issue of the right to disconnect, which has generated a lot of lively discussion in recent days in our media and in many of our communities. Workers are no longer able to knock off when they clock off. Too many workers have their leisure time and their family time interrupted by calls and contact from their workplace, which results in them working unpaid working time. They feel obliged to do it, and they pay a price, as do their families. Time is our most basic human resource. It is our life. It's the only true resource we have, and Australian workers give away, on average, five hours and 20 minutes of unpaid work a week. This is seven weeks of unpaid time every year. The average worker loses over $11,000 in unpaid overtime, and this cannot be allowed to continue.

We Greens have long called for a right to disconnect. We were pleased to see that the Senate inquiry report for this bill recommended a legislated right to disconnect in the Fair Work Act, supporting the development of clear expectations about contact and availability in workplaces and after your paid working hours are finished. The issue of unpaid overtime and of what many people call 'availability creep' is persistent and systemic. It affects workers in all industries and occupations—public and private, all kinds of work—and in organisations both big and small. The proliferation of communication technology in our working lives means that workers are now always contactable. Seventy per cent of workers in Australia regularly perform work outside their agreed working hours. Work is encroaching into every facet of workers' lives, and the workplace relations system has been inadequate at protecting a work-life balance.

I've written a few books about this and done a lot of research and interviewed many, many workers. My first book, called The Work/Life Collision, was published in 2003. That's 21 years ago, and here were are playing catch-up to give workers some protection around the actual boundaries of their working day. There's a lot of Rolls-Royce-grade research about this problem. When workers aren't able to find time for themselves and those they care for outside of work, it leads to poor sleep, to stress, to burnout and to degraded relationships with friends and family, and it imposes a very significant mental health burden on our country. We need a right to disconnect, and this is not a fringe, radical or wacky idea. It is tested. It can be created in a simple way, in a clear way that workers and their employers and communities will understand and benefit from.

There are currently more than 56 enterprise agreements across Australia that have created a right-to-disconnect clause in their bargaining for their workplaces. These agreements cover workers in our schools, in our banks, in newspapers, in local government, in universities, in transport and in logistics. The list goes on. In the inquiry around this bill we heard evidence from workers who are crying out for a right to disconnect in their workplace. We heard from teachers, such as Ms Butler and Ms Yewdall, that as a direct consequence of being unable to disconnect from their work they are burnt out and considering leaving their professions. We lose them, we lose their skills and we pay a price for that in our labour market, especially at a time when their skills are so sorely needed. We are losing our best and brightest workers because there is no limit that they can currently place around their job in terms of being contacted outside their paid working hours. Almost 20 other countries have faced up to this problem and created a right to disconnect. Enshrining this right in Australia at the federal level is simply playing catch-up with the rest of the world. Australia has been falling behind.

I'm proud of the work of our party and the great deal of research and consultation that we've engaged in to create this amendment. Some employers say it's unnecessary to legislate this right. They don't understand how much women's lives and the lives of carers and workers have changed and are affected by the encroachment of work. Evey time any positive workplace relations reform is attempted in this country we hear the same argument over and over again. I've been listening to it for 40 years: the sky is falling; nothing will ever be the same. Well, I can assure you, the sky is not falling. What we propose is a reasonable, flexible, workable right—one that is desperately overdue. With this change, the right to disconnect, we are going to pull our labour law into the 21st century and help it deal with the changing technologies that shape so much of our lives and our jobs, and we need that new 21st century labour law to respond to the changing circumstances of people's lives.

The final report of the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care, which I chaired, agreed to by both Labor and the Greens, recommended a whole-of-government approach to the challenge of work and family across our country. The majority report pushed for a range of measures, including a right to disconnect.

There's still a lot more for us to do in our workplace relations systems. Workers face problems on multiple fronts: intrusive technology, insecure work, lagging real wages, gender inequality and wage theft, all of which detract from the quality of work and personal lives. Many employers and workplaces are already dealing with things like the need to disconnect. They are in conversation with each other. They find practical ways to do it. The right to disconnect and the amendments that we are proposing and want to see will enable those in workplaces where their power is limited and weak, giving them a first brick to back them up when they ask for control over their working time.

The key purpose of a workplace relations system must be to protect the interests of working people fairly from the disproportionate power of employers, big contractors and monopolies. The Australian Greens have already secured amendments in the closing loopholes bill that will improve working conditions, and we urge the parliament to support our amendment and to legislate a right for workers to disconnect. It is good for workers, good for their kids, good for their mental health, good for our communities and also good for our productivity.