[Muanet] Forget the Government's spin, The whip is returned to the employer

[Chris Latham]

The whip is returned to the employer

By Tim Colebatch, The Age
October 11, 2005


Forget the Government's spin, the workplace is in for a change of power.

THERE is a good reason for the Government to redesign the workplace 
relations systems to give more power to employers. But it is not given 
in the 68-page spinsheet it issued on Sunday.

Instead, we are paying for a tsunami of spin to persuade us that the 
Government just wants to lift our wages and make the system fairer and 
simpler.

They say this will modernise the system to improve outcomes for 
employers and workers alike. But, in reality, it is about shifting the 
balance of power.

Employers will get more power to decide how Australians work and what 
they are paid. Workers will lose power, unless their boss needs them 
more than they need him.

John Howard and his team talk of employer and worker sitting down 
together with equal power to decide the worker's wages and conditions. 
It makes you wonder whether these guys have ever held a real job. Real 
workplaces are not like that.

Take the way the Howard Government itself acts as employer. If you are a

senior public servant, it insists that you accept an "individual 
agreement". And those individual agreements are essentially pattern 
bargaining in which the employer lays out the conditions, and the worker

signs on the dotted line.

True, top public servants can negotiate minor amendments. But ACTU 
secretary Greg Combet tells of Telstra workers being presented with 
"individual contracts" with a covering note warning that the contracts 
are non-negotiable.

If this legislation makes it easier for workers to negotiate 
family-friendly changes to working hours, for example, of course that is

good. But, in reality, the work choice the Government offers is mainly 
choice for the employer.

Suppose you want a pay rise, and your employer says no. Well, he can go 
on saying no indefinitely; there is no umpire any more. If he is rough 
enough and employs fewer than 100 workers, he can make your "work 
choice" very simple - accept his terms, or be sacked.

There is no requirement for good faith bargaining. Unless you are on or 
near minimum wage levels, rises set by the Fair Pay Commission will not 
flow through to you. Your only weapon is to quit.

But wait, you say. Workplace Minister Kevin Andrews points out that we 
are moving from a period of labour surplus to one of labour shortages. 
The long slump in birth rates means that by 2020, excluding migrants, 
the number of potential workers will roughly stabilise.

Employers will have to compete harder to win those they want. Won't that

shift bargaining power to workers?

Yes - for workers whose skills are scarce, who work in areas and 
industries with competing employers, and who are sufficiently free of 
commitments to use threats to resign as a bargaining chip.

Young workers in the cities, being most free, will benefit most. But, as

the workforce ages, they will be a minority.

Those without special skills - or with skills specialised to one 
employer, those in country towns offering fewer choices, and those tied 
down by family responsibilities will be in a weak bargaining position, 
and will not benefit.

Howard is right to say the modifications announced on Sunday do not 
significantly change the package. They are window-dressing that puts 
employers on notice that their contracts must include clauses on penalty

rates, overtime loadings and so on.

The spin emphasises that the bill will protect workers' wages and 
conditions. The reality is that while four minimum conditions are 
guaranteed, everything else is up for negotiation. The real purpose is 
to allow employers to take back by legislation the powers unions won for

workers over decades of industrial battle.

Take the shift of wage-fixing power from the Industrial Relations 
Commission to a Fair Pay Commission. Since 1996, the old commission 
granted low-paid workers cumulative increases totalling $50 a week more 
than the Howard Government wanted. Now the Government is taking away its

power to set wages.

Ask yourself: is the Government doing that to lift real wages, or hold 
them down?

Very little is really protected. The most sweeping change will leave 
workers in small and medium business - half of all employees - with no 
protection from unfair dismissal, and no right to redundancy pay if they

are sacked. Ask yourself: what does that do for their bargaining power?

Yet there is one positive for workers in all this. But it is too bleak 
to be mentioned in Government spinsheets.

Australia has been able to cut unemployment to 5 per cent only by living

on debt. In six years we have run up another $200 billion of net foreign

debt, and that spending has flowed through into higher wages and more 
jobs than we would have otherwise. The OECD says Australian 
manufacturing workers are the second highest paid in the world.

But no family or country can go on increasing its debt forever. One day 
Australia will have to live on what it earns, and the change could be 
ugly. Inevitably, it will mean lower wages and fewer jobs.

On that day of reckoning, if employers have the power to cut wages, the 
pain will be spread more fairly. Wages will fall more, and jobs less. 
Globalisation punishes countries that overpay workers. And the ultimate 
effect of this package will be to lower future wage growth.

For all the spin, the reality is the Prime Minister who promised to make

us more "relaxed and comfortable" is changing workplace rules to make it

easier for us to be sacked, or to have our wages and conditions stripped

back, with our only alternative being to quit the job.

Some choice.


            Tim Colebatch is economics editor.