The government’s ongoing attempts to sabotage industrial relations in this country are making me very, very angry. I was at a meeting today where the University of Melbourne explained why they are offering Australian Workplace Agreements to all staff. They have been bribed to.
The deal is this: unless the University “complies” with the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements, it won’t get the $12 million in Commonwealth research funding that is tied to compliance. To me, that is utterly abhorrent.
Of course, the University does not feel it can just turn its back on $12 million, so it plans to comply.
It says the difference between the AWAs and the current Enterprise Bargaining Agreement will be negligible: there will be a requirement to submit invoices within a fortnight, but otherwise the only difference is that an AWA is made with an individual and an EBA is made with a collective.
And here’s the crux. As an anarcho-syndicalist, and therefore outside of this traditional left/right political rhetoric, do I believe more in the rights of the individual (do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law) or do I believe more in the rights of the community (‘an it harm none)? And yes, that invocation, so to speak, of a pagan discourse was deliberate.
Costello speaks of the individual’s right to negotiate. But his world ends up with some individuals having a great deal because they have more bargaining power while other individuals suffer. I want every individual to have equal rights. Equal wealth, equal opportunities. I suspect that the only way to protect those too weak to bargain is if we bargain collectively for the rights of all.
Sure, the AWA system allows an individual to appoint a ‘bargaining agent’ and that bargaining agent can be a union. But the sheer amount of time it will take the unions to bargain so many individual AWAs instead of one EBA is surely going to cripple the process. And I suspect that’s what the government wants.
I’m also, separately, very concerned at this ongoing discussion of ‘cashing out’ annual leave and now lunch breaks! I worry that the culture that leads to overtime pressure will lead to pressure not to have lunch or take annual leave. We’ve already seen pressure not to take sick leave when genuinely sick and that’s *before* the legislation passes. This is not currently a worker-friendly society.
It’s so hard. I think about the ‘liberal ideology’ that gave our Liberal party its name: Mills and Bentham, social idealists trying to fight slavery and dreaming of a world with maximal happiness through legislative change, where the individual had rights… but they, on the whole, ignored notions of collective duties… and I don’t think they would have been proud of you today, Howard and Costello. I think they would have been ashamed.