When Tony Abbott’s government asked the Productivity Commission to review Australia’s “workplace relations framework” it was for the sole purpose of providing it with cover for more attacks on workers’ pay and conditions.
One of its terms of reference was to examine the ability that employers had to “flexibly” manage and engage with their employees.
Flexibility is a word that once commonly conveyed a positive sense of resourcefulness and adaptability. But the notion of flexibility that the Productivity Commission refers to is one shaped by employers.
It emerged in Australian industrial relations debates in the 1980s as an explanation of the supposed success of the US economy in creating insecure, part-time, casualised and non-unionised jobs. This success was attributed to the “flexibility” of the US labour market, in contrast with the “rigidities” of the labour markets in northern Europe and Australia, such as protection for workers against redundancies and arbitrary sackings.
Since the 1980s, the Australian labour market has been steadily “deregulated” or, more accurately, re-regulated in favour of capital. For industry groups though, it still hasn’t gone far enough.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) asked the Productivity Commission to remove industrial awards, weaken unfair dismissal laws and abolish penalty rates. In the name of flexibility, the Australian Industry Group wants to bring back individual contracts, pare back an already emasculated award system and give employers the right to sack workers without redress of any kind. In short, they want a return to the John Howard government’s assault on workers, and low-income workers in particular, with the WorkChoices legislation.
The Productivity Commission report has 10 key recommendations, all of which weaken workers’ rights and entitlements. The recommendation that small businesses have access to “enterprise contracts” goes further than WorkChoices, with the trade-off of existing award entitlements becoming a condition of employment.
When negotiating agreements on “greenfield sites” — where work has yet to start — employers would have the right to ask for arbitration to defeat union claims. The already inadequate minimum wage is also under threat from the Productivity Commission’s report.
Unfair dismissal claims would be watered down and penalty rates would become a two-tier system with Sunday penalty rates in the hospitality, retail and entertainment industries reduced to the lower Saturday rates.
The Productivity Commission decided not to attack the penalty rates of “emergency’’ workers such as nurses, firefighters and paramedics because these organised workers had threatened immediate industrial action if they tried to do so.
It is impossible that the Productivity Commission was unaware of the template enterprise agreement between the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) and Business SA this year, which scrapped Saturday penalty rates and halved Sunday penalty rates. The commission would have taken great comfort from it, but this didn’t stop the SDA national secretary from asserting that “weekends are a special time” and vowing to campaign against changes to penalty rates for retail workers. We live in strange days indeed.
The Abbott government is well aware that the ACTU campaign against WorkChoices leading up to the 2007 federal election led to the Coalition’s defeat and then-prime minister Howard losing his seat.
After the report was released, Abbott was at pains to point out that it was a draft report only: “It is a report to government not a report from government,” he is quoted as saying. Well, yes, but it was a report commissioned by the government, with the terms of reference set by it and the outcome pre-ordained to deliver what the government wanted.
The final report is due in November and the ACTU has declared that it will be campaigning to make sure that the report’s recommendations are not implemented.
The slowing of the Australian economy and the squeeze on profits for parts of the business sector wasn’t brought about by the actions of low-paid workers and we should all reject the idea that they should pay for it.
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