Industrial relations

I meant to post some­thing on this earlier, but last week I was too busy mark­ing and tonight has been a nightmare.

Anyhow, tomor­row. Protests in your city.

Why are the IR changes bad?

Read this. You don’t get to choose, even though it’s called WorkChoices. Com­pan­ies with fewer than 100 staff can sack you for no reason. Com­pan­ies with more get new excuses to sack you without having to give you redund­ancy pay­outs: now you can be let go for “tech­nical” or “oper­a­tional” reas­ons with no recourse.

“Even if work­ers and their bosses want to provide appeal rights for work­ers who believe they were sacked unfairly, or man­dat­ory union involve­ment in resolv­ing work­place dis­putes, it will be illegal to include such clauses in work­place deals.

Unions can be fined $33,000 and indi­vidual work­ers fined $6600 for seek­ing the inclu­sion of such terms in employ­ment contracts.”

Women will be paid less. So will juni­ors, down to as low as $4.75 per hour. In fact, the pro­posed law claims that the cur­rent min­imum wage is too high: because it’s one of the highest in the world. Instead, we should be cel­eb­rat­ing that.

This was the first coun­try in the world to win the right to an 8‑hour work­ing day. Don’t let this gov­ern­ment turn back the clock on basic rights and hard-won indus­trial rela­tions gains.