BY STUART MARTIN
In the last few years, the increasing use of labour-hire workers in the construction, manufacturing and telecommunications industries has generated a discussion among unionists about how to best fight it and preserve permanent jobs.
The term labour hire is used to describe workers who are employed by an employment firm, such as Manpower or Skilled Engineering, but work at another company. Companies use labour-hire workers because they are an easily disposable workforce, not usually entitled to conditions such as sick leave or permanency.
While it is often regarded as a new practice, labour hire has been around since the 1950s, when temping agencies began employing office workers. What is new is the sudden and dramatic growth in the proportion of workers employed through labour-hire companies. Casually employed manufacturing and construction workers are increasingly less likely to be employed directly by the company using their labour.
So what is wrong with labour hire?
Firstly, labour-hire workers do not necessarily get the same pay and conditions as the permanent workers they work alongside, or even as other labour-hire workers. In a submission to the NSW Labour Hire Task Force, the Finance Sector Union (FSU) commented that labour-hire staff in call centres were often paid less than permanent employees doing the same work.
Secondly, employers have more power over labour-hire workers. Labour-hire workers have less legal protection against unfair dismissal than directly employed casual workers.
Increasingly, labour-hire workers are employed as day labour even though the work may be continuous over several months. Thus, if a company has a dispute with a labour-hire worker, it can instruct the employment firm not to send it that employee the next day.
This makes labour-hire workers reluctant to take on their workplace bosses or their employment firm for fear of not getting more work. It also makes labour-hire workers more reluctant to take time off when sick, increasing their risk of injury at work.
Unions' slow response
The union movement has been slow to react to the spread of labour hire. Labour-hire companies began to expand in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the Prices and Incomes Accord between unions and the ALP government. The union-employer collusion under the accord accelerated work force casualisation, and fuelled a drop in union membership.The Coalition's 1996 Workplace Relations Act further helped employers to cut labour costs and increase their flexibility to hire and fire workers at will.
In the last few years, however, union opposition to labour hire has increased. Unions like the FSU, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) have been fighting to unionise and regulate communications workers, who are mostly casual and labour-hire workers. In particular, the CPSU's communications division has been fighting to the work practices of Skilled Engineering in Telstra.
The CPSU is attempting to get Telstra workers employed through Skilled Engineering covered by the Telstra award (at the moment, they are paid less than their Telstra-employed equivalents). The union has a case demanding this before the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC).
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) has been pursuing different tactics. Rather than relying on award coverage, it is attempting to:
- Get union agreements with labour-hire firms guaranteeing pay and conditions;
- Limit the time that workers can be employed through a labour-hire firm to two or three months, after which they should be employed as permanent workers; and
- Regulate the labour-hire industry through government intervention or an award.
In Victoria, the AMWU branch has focused on getting labour-hire workers covered by the same conditions as other workers, by making it a condition of all industrial agreements that any labour-hire firms used by the company also have an industrial agreement with the union.
A consistent approach to this in Victoria has reaped huge gains almost all the labour-hire firms have been forced into industrial agreements with the AMWU.
Although this approach has been attempted in other states, it has had much less success. Currently only three labour-hire firms in NSW have agreements with the union. So while a travel allowance for labour-hire workers is widespread in Victoria, it is almost unheard of in NSW.
One example of success was an enterprise bargaining battle led by the AMWU's food division in Victoria which won permanency for labour-hire workers in Simplot factories. Simplot workers in NSW and Tasmania subsequently won similar conditions by taking industrial action.
Another recent fight took place at BHP's Western Port work site in Victoria. The Victorian AMWU, with the Electrical Trades Union, took a week of industrial action to stop BHP replacing permanent maintenance staff with labour-hire workers disguised as contractors. Despite scabbing by Australian Workers Union members, BHP was forced to back down.
Labour hire award?
Up till now, unions have had a mostly reactive approach to labour hire: trying to prevent it replacing permanent jobs. The main tactic employed is regulating the conditions of labour-hire workers forcing labour-hire firms to pay the same wages as those received by directly employed workers, for example. The union submissions to the NSW Labour Hire Task Force in 2000 all focused on getting some government regulation of labour hire.At its July national conference, the AMWU announced its intention to get a labour-hire award. It was argued that this was similar to the current approach of industrial agreements with labour-hire firms, but would be easier to enforce.
But a federal award, or even state-based awards, would set in stone the continued use (and probable expansion) of labour hire. It could be used to argue against transferring casual labour-hire workers to directly employed permanents.
If such an award is won without a mass campaign, through negotiations in the AIRC, union members will not be mobilised to enforce its conditions and un-unionised labour-hire workers will still not feel secure speaking up for their rights.
But if there is to be a mass campaign, wouldn't it be better to mobilise members to eliminate labour hire altogether, as was done at Simplot?
Eliminate labour hire
These are the main arguments generally put forward for retaining some form of labour hire:None of these problems are new. Even during industrial boom times, they
existed and were managed. For example, specialised maintenance or trades
companies, employing permanent workers, were hired to do occasional work.
On June 21, speaking at Politics at the Pub in Sydney, Dr John Buchanan
argued for permanent labour hire: replacing the casual conditions which
labour-hire workers are currently employed under with permanent wages and
conditions, funded by banking the casual loading they currently receive.
A redundancy fund, similar to what Buchanan argued for, already exists
for construction labour-hire workers in Victoria. Bosses pay an amount
per day they employ labour hire (which is on top of the casual rate) into
the Incolink scheme, which is paid to the workers at the end of the job.
This sort of solution is a huge step forward, but does not solve the
problems inherent in labour hire. For example, workers are still able to
be sacked with little or no recourse.
Eliminating labour hire will require an effort by the whole union movement
to fight all forms of outsourcing. As long as regulation and awards
are the best many unions strive for, labour-hire will remain an integral
way bosses divide workers.
Industry-wide campaigns to get labour-hire casuals put on as permanents
directly employed by the company should be at the heart of union strategy.
Regulating labour hire should be supplementary to this, not a substitute
for it.
Unions such as the AMWU, the ETU and the CFMEU are already in a position
to pursue such campaigns and rank-and-file groups in the MUA and CPSU also
have this perspective. What we have to do now is carry it out.
[Stuart Martin is an AMWU member working in the labour-hire industry
and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 14, 2002.
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