Industrial awards to be gutted

Industrial awards to be gutted

By James Vassilopoulos

From July 1, all industrial awards (which specify working conditions
and wage rates) will be stripped to the bone. The regulation of working
conditions will be reduced to 20 items or less, unlimited use of casual
workers will be permitted, working hours will be extended, rostered days
off will be lost and management will be able to decide who to sack, without
consulting the unions covering the workers concerned.

 

The big losers will be the 50% of workers currently covered by awards
but who are not in a union and therefore have little chance of including
these conditions in an enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) with their
employers.

Those workers in unions which do not have much industrial strength or
which collude with management will also lose out.

For 90 years, industrial awards have been the key safety net for unionised
and un-unionised workers in Australia. The erosion of this safety net is
resulting in Australia's labour market becoming increasingly like that
of the United States, where millions of workers earn barely enough to survive.

The framework for the destruction of working conditions was set by the
Reith-Kernot Workplace Relations Act, which came into operation on January
1, 1997. This act included many nasty provisions, including limits to the
right to strike and increased penalties for unions which defied the new
rules.

Allowable matters

One particularly draconian part of the act was section 89A(2) — “Allowable
matters” — which outlines which working conditions can be covered by awards.
Under the act there are only 20 allowable matters. These include conditions
such as ordinary hours of work; rates of pay; annual leave; allowances;
overtime, casual and shift loadings; superannuation; and jury service.

All awards that have not been “simplified” (i.e. slashed) by July 1
will automatically be reduced to the 20 matters.

There have been a number of test cases in the Australian Industrial
Relations Commission to decide if a condition is an allowable matter or
can be stripped from the award. (The act requires that if the bosses and
unions can't agree on what should be cut, the AIRC must decide).

One of the first cases concerned the hospitality industry award. The
workers covered by this award are relatively poorly organised by the union
so it is no surprise that the bosses attacked it first.

Last December, the full bench of the AIRC removed a number of conditions
from this award, including such hard-won workers' rights as the limits
on the number of part-time workers, the requirement on bosses to consult
with unions before sacking workers, that union members to get preference
in hiring, anti-sexual harassment rules and prohibitions on managers forcing
workers to perform work outside their normal duties.

A “facilitative clause” was added allowing bosses to go behind the back
of unions to make agreements with individual workers willing to trade off
further conditions (such as penalty rates, in exchange for a larger one-off
pay rise).

In March, the Australian Hotels Association also tried to eliminate
penalties from the stripped back award, even though penalty rates are an
allowable matter. The AIRC ruled against this attempt.

On May 4, the AIRC handed down a decision which stripped back the restaurants'
award such that casual workers who work between midnight and 7am on a weekday
would get only an extra $1.50 per hour. Weekend penalty rates were also
reduced.

Literally hundreds of awards are now being slashed or have already been
slashed in the commission, covering agricultural, aircraft, bank , coal,
public service, teaching, university, nursing, meat, metal, stevedoring,
transport, telecommunications, automobile and retail workers.

Coal and metal industries

Even in the most organised and militant industries, awards are being
stripped. In a major defeat for the Construction, Forestry, Mining and
Energy Union, the AIRC has decided to eradicate seniority (in which the
last worker hired is the first to go when sackings take place) in the coal
industry. Seniority is a safeguard against the boss deciding to target
union militants in sackings.

Tony Maher, senior vice-president of the CFMEU's mining and energy division,
says “seniority has for 96 years protected coalmine workers from victimisation
and cronyism.

“With its removal from the award, the CFMEU will scrutinise every single
decision by employers and we will do whatever is necessary to ensure the
use of fair and objective criteria when it comes to retrenchments”, Maher
warned.

This AIRC decision also did away with clauses giving hiring preference
to union members and retrenched miners. Bosses can now hire (and refuse
to hire) whoever they want and workers have much less say in work issues.

The carving up of the metal industry award left workers without the
right to be consulted and informed about workplace changes and redundancies,
and without the right to amenities like lockers. It also abolished union
organisers' right of entry into workplaces.

Worse, a facilitative clause now allows bosses to sidestep what's left
of the award and cut a range of other conditions if workers in a particular
workplace give agreement. This could result in the abolition of weekend
penalties, weekly (rather than monthly) wage payments, limits on the span
of hours, the minimum 10-hour break between shifts and workers' control
of rosters.

These attacks have succeeded against a union which, just a decade ago,
was at the forefront of defending and extending workers' wages and conditions.

What strategy?

How has the union movement responded to these attacks on awards? Apart
from two national strikes by the CFMEU and some rallies outside the AIRC
to lobby the commission, the fight back has been abysmal.

Many unions have been negotiating with the bosses' federations and have
uncritically accepted the AIRC's decisions. The movement's main strategy,
however, has been to give up those conditions which do not fall into the
20 allowable matters and then try to have these included in the next EBA.

There are two major problems with this. These conditions, if incorporated
into an EBA, remain vulnerable to being lost each time the EBA is re-negotiated.

Secondly, this approach does not protect unorganised workers or workers
in weak unions, who previously have relied on flow-ons in wages and conditions
from strong unions like the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

The only way to defend awards is to campaign against Workplace Relations
Act, and defy it.

The stripping of awards affects all workers. This means there is a basis
to launch an all-unions campaign of demonstrations, strikes and public
education to defend awards. The opportunity to do this has not yet been
lost. The 100,000-strong rally in Melbourne in May against the Workplace
Relations Act shows what can be done. Such a fighting campaign could also
boost union membership as un-unionised workers come understand the need
for unions to protect their interests.