Stuart Munckton
Scrapping unfair dismissal laws
Workers employed by businesses with less than 100 employees are no longer covered by unfair dismissal laws, which prevent a boss from sacking you without a good reason and provide you with the ability to appeal your sacking to the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC). Also, if you are a casual worker and have been in your job less than one year, then whatever the size of the company you work for you are no longer covered by unfair dismissal laws. Ninety per cent of all workers have lost their access to unfair dismissal provisions!
Individual contracts
Work Choices greatly increases bosses' ability to force workers onto individual contracts — known as Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs). As opposed to having most baseline conditions written into law and/or worked out via collective bargaining (between a boss and the relevant union), this means the conditions of employment will be "negotiated" between the individual worker and their boss. In theory, the worker and the boss negotiate as equals. In reality, the boss puts a contract in front of you and you sign it — or you look elsewhere for work. The idea of a teenager, for instance, negotiating as an equal with a boss who might be older than their parents is a sick joke.
In March, before Work Choices was even implemented, workers at Bakers Delight in regional Victoria were given individual contracts to sign that eliminated their sick pay, annual leave entitlements, and penalty rates for working overtime or on weekends, in return for only a $0.75 per hour pay increase. This means a 16-year-old employee working on weekends or a public holiday would get only $8.13 per hour, yet if they were covered by the award rather than a workplace agreement, they would receive $17.88 per hour for the same work!
Attacking wages and conditions
Before Work Choices, award conditions legally protected a wide range of rights relating to your wages and conditions. Under Work Choices, only five conditions are legally protected: the minimum wage, casual loading, the 38-hour week, four weeks' annual leave and sick/carer's leave. Even then, a lot of these rights don't apply to casual workers. Pretty much everything else, such as penalty rates for overtime, public holidays, weekend or night work, can be traded off in an AWA. If you don't sign the AWA, you can expect to not get (or keep) the job.
Your wages aren't safe either. The minimum wage will no longer be set by the IRC, but by a government-appointed "Fair Pay Commission". The federal government has said the minimum wage is $70 per week too high.
Criminalising union organising
One of the best ways that workers have been able to defend their rights against bosses looking to rip them off has been through trade unions. But Work Choices severely restricts unions' ability to do this. It is now much harder for a union representative to visit a work site and it is illegal for workers to go on strike unless they are in a formally recognised period of bargaining with an employer. The government has the right to order the termination of a bargaining period. Non-union members cannot join a strike, and if they do the whole strike becomes illegal and the union will be subject to huge fines.
It is obvious — if we don't fight, we will lose out! We need to be out on the streets on June 1 — and again on June 28 for the national trade union-organised day of action — to say loud and clear "Up yours Howard!"
[Based on a speech to a meeting at Penrith High. Stuart Munckton is an activist in Resistance, a socialist youth organisation. Visit <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 31, 2006.
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