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.