Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today in Canberra we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day. Indeed, many Australian towns enjoyed unseasonably warm weather today, up in the high 20s and 30s. Around the country, Australians were taking advantage of the weather to indulge in an ice cream—maybe a Magnum, maybe a Golden Gaytime or perhaps indulging in the childhood nostalgia of a chocolate Paddle Pop.

Far less enjoyable than ice cream are the current challenges that are faced by the workers who make those ice creams—the workers at the Streets Ice Cream factory in Minto. In July, staff at Streets Ice Cream rejected a proposed new enterprise agreement. This isn't uncommon in a process of negotiation. But rather than continue to negotiate, Unilever, the British company that owns Streets, applied to terminate the 2013 agreement. The case will be heard by the Fair Work Commission later in the year. If the application to terminate the agreement is successful, the employees will revert to the award rate for the food industry. In some cases, their union, the AMWU, argues, this will almost halve hourly rates.

There's a significant broader issue here: employers are terminating enterprise agreements as an industrial tactic. It works like this: firstly, the employer fails to properly engage with staff and unions on a proposed new agreement. Indeed, dragging it out and failing to reach an agreement actually benefits these employers. They've got no interest in renewing the current agreement. Once the agreement's out of date, the employer terminates the old agreement, citing a deadlock. What you see is actually a pretend negotiation, where the aim is to sabotage the bargaining process in order to reach the true goal, which is to terminate the enterprise agreement. There is no opportunity for bargaining because these companies aren't interested in negotiations. That is what is happening at Streets now and it's what we saw happen at Carlton & United Breweries.

The decisions to terminate agreements at Horizon Power, Esso and AGL show that the use of agreement termination and the threat of award wages as a business tactic can have a devastating effect. The approach preys on vulnerable workers and targets people who are not in a position to reject minimum wages. It disadvantages people who don't have the resources to match the deep pockets of a large multinational corporation. In a time of record low wages growth, work conditions are more important than ever. Overtime, shiftwork and other pay and conditions might be ideal budget lines to trim if you're a consultant with an MBA who's sitting on the other side of the world, but for many families these conditions mean the difference between getting by and missing a mortgage payment.

We need to call this for what it is; it amounts to industrial blackmail. It's why Labor committed at the last election to stopping this practice. There should be no place in our industrial relations system for Streets Ice Cream's behaviour. Making ice cream is no excuse for leaving your workers out in the cold.