TANYA PLIBERSEK MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR WORK AND FAMILY
SHADOW MINISTER FOR CHILDCARE AND YOUTH
SHADOW MINISTER FOR WOMEN

TANYA PLIBERSEK MP

Long hours, job insecurity, unpredictable pay and conditions - Australia's workplaces are changing.

In October, the Howard Government is going to use its complete dominance over the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass extreme new industrial laws.

Workers will lose protections we have relied on for decades.

Workers will be expected to work longer for less. They will be easier to sack. Their pay and conditions will be unpredictable.

What is the work and family balance?

Before the last election the Prime Minister called work and family balance the BBQ stopper issue, but everything this Government has done has made life harder for people trying to balance work and caring responsibilities, and this set of proposed changes will make things even worse.

Australians are working longer hours; the longest in the OECD. Much of this work is already unpaid.

In June 2005, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) released a report which revealed that the hours of paid and unpaid work parents do each day shows an alarming level of exhaustion with a majority of parents reporting feeling "always" or "nearly always" stressed.

Thirty-five per cent of Sydney fathers spend more time commuting than with their children. The cost of mortgages, healthcare, education, petrol and other necessities are rising, causing people to feel under constant financial pressure.

Child care costs alone have risen five times higher than the Consumer Price Index in the last financial year. In Sydney prices are as high as $90 a day.

Parents are reporting incredibly long child care waiting lists. Unfortunately we don't know the exact extent of this problem because the federal government refuses to collect data on the number of people who can't get childcare and where the shortages are. They say its up to the market to solve the problem.

This is putting enormous pressure on family budgets and many women are prevented from working when they want to, or they're finding it too expensive to work.

How will the IR changes affect women?

Recently, 64 national women's organisations released a damning joint-statement outlining their concerns about how the Government's proposed industrial relations and welfare to work changes will affect women. These groups are not party political. They are community organisations with a history of advocating for women.

The key concerns they raised were:

• Women may well have less income security, lesser work stability;
• Women have a greater reliance on award rates of pay, penalty rates and other award-based conditions and so will be disproportionately affected;
• Women generally have a lower capacity to engage in workplace negotiations and will be disproportionately affected with lower standards of living;
• Newstart and other allowances under associated income support programs do not recognize the role of women with school age children and the impact the changes will have on their ability to undertake work;
• Existing mechanisms to assist people move from welfare to work will not be able to cope with the increased demand as people's rights to income support diminish and so many will be left without sufficient income to look after their children or themselves if disabled; and
• It will be harder under the new rules for sole parents or disabled women to undertake study and so improve their economic wellbeing.

Unfair dismissal

While we haven't yet seen the government's legislation, we have a good idea of what it will contain because of speeches made by the Prime Minister and by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. One change we are certain of is unfair dismissal.

This will cause up to 90 per cent of Australian workers to lose unfair dismissal protection. Under John Howard's plan, unfair dismissal laws won't cover anyone working for a business with fewer than 100 employees. This means up to 4 million Australians will go to work each day not knowing if they will have a job at the day's end. They will be able to be unfairly sacked. Reform of unfair dismissal shouldn't mean junking the system entirely. The government says that you should relax because although you can be unfairly sacked, you can't be "unlawfully sacked". It's true that if your employer is stupid enough to tell you they're sacking you because of your family responsibilities you might have a cause for action against them.

If, on the other hand, your family responsibilities are the real reason but your employer says they're sacking you because you're slack or there's not enough work - then you've got to prove they're lying and the real reason is your family responsibilities before you can expect any restitution.

Conditions at risk

The current Award based 'no disadvantage test' will be replaced by just 4 minimum conditions. This means future agreements will not have to meet at least the relevant Award as a minimum, putting at risk penalty rates, allowances, meal breaks, minimum call out times and many of the conditions that civilise working life.

Many employees rely on allowances to make ends meet. Some estimates have nurses earning 40-60% of their take home pay through allowances. Its penalty rates which make working weekends, nights and other anti-social hours worthwhile. The government is removing the protections that help ensure employees are not required to work long, anti-social hours without extra pay to make it worthwhile.

The Treasurer has even suggested people should be able to trade away lunch breaks and holidays: imagine the pressure from employers to do that. How will parents - already struggling to cover 12 weeks of school holidays - cope with losing annual leave? How will the health of workers be affected if they don't take lunch breaks or leave?

The flexibility that the government champions is one-way flexibility designed only for the benefit of employers. The government's proposals will lead to unpredictability of pay and working conditions:

• unpredictable hours affect family life. It's impossible to arrange childcare, let alone commit to training the kids' soccer team; and
• unpredictable pay affects the family budget: you can't get a car loan let alone a mortgage if you don't know what you'll be earning next week (or whether you'll be working at all).

Individual Contracts

This government has presided over massive casualisation of the workforce with one in three women working as casuals with no access to paid sick leave, annual holidays or public holidays. Now they want to fragment the workforce further by driving workers onto individual contracts. The notion that this will somehow lead to empowered workers demanding Wednesdays off to go to uni, or telling the boss they won't be working after 3 pm because they need to pick the kids up from school is an absolute nonsense.

This casualisation and fragmentation of the workforce is designed to destroy the power of workers banding together to work collectively to improve their rights and conditions. It's not about flexibility for workers - just for employers.

Although the Government says no worker will be forced to sign, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations' own Department of Workplace Relations staff have been on strike because new staff are forced onto individual contracts.

Women do much worse under individual contracts than under collective agreements. Women already earn $150 a week less than male employees (and the pay gap has grown under the Howard government).

And women who are on AWAs do worst of all - they receive 11 per cent less per hour than women on collective agreements.

Recent examples in the media show the potential for AWAs to rip women off:

• Earlier this year 4 mothers were sacked from the Merbein Mushrooms' farm, near Mildura after they refused to sign AWAs, fearing pay cuts of over 25 per cent;
• In South Australia a 15 year old woman who was working at the Dernacourt Baker's Delight was told that she must leave work in the middle of a shift because she had complained about low pay. Deanna Renella's wage was $8.35 per hour - 25 per cent less than under the state award. The IRC ordered that the franchise pay Deanna back $1438.34; and,
• Krispy Kreme have pressured their staff, most of whom are young, to sign AWAs. Staff did not want to sign the AWAs because their penalty rates would be removed and take home pay reduced. One young woman worked 16 hours straight without any penalty rates.

Is this the sort of choice and flexibility the Prime Minister keeps promising under his changes?

To this day, the Howard Government has refused to guarantee that no individual Australian employee will be worse off under their changes.

Family Friendly Agreements?

The Government's rhetoric is that individuals will be able to negotiate great family-friendly agreements with their employers.

The reality is 93% of employees in the private sector that are on individual contracts (AWAs) have no additional family-friendly rights for workers. Recent research revealed that:

• fewer than one in twelve (8%) provide paid maternity leave;
• only one in twenty (5%) provide paid paternity leave; and
• one in twenty-five people (4%) provide unpaid 'purchased' leave such as extra leave during school holidays.

Individual contracts are clearly hostile to family life. The Government's own data also shows that:

• penalty rates were lost in more than half (54%) of individual contracts;
• annual leave was lost in more than one in three (34%) individual contracts; and
• sick leave was traded away in more than one in four (28%) individual contracts.

Minimum wage

Women make up more than 60 per cent of the 1.6 million people on the minimum wage. Threequarters of Australian employees who earn less than $600 per week are women.

Many of these women also face other hardships in the workplace and are either:

• from migrant backgrounds, making up to three-quarters of low-paid workers;
• young;
• working in small businesses;
• working in non-unionised workplaces; and/or
• indigenous.

They rely on minimum wage rises awarded by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to increase their pay.

The Government is attacking the longstanding role of the Commission. Minimum wages will now be determined by a new hand picked body and the Commission will be stripped of most if its powers.

John Howard repeatedly says: "judge me on my record".

Let's look at his record:

The Howard Government has opposed every minimum wage case awarded by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) since 1996.

If the Government had had its way, Australian workers on the minimum wage would be $50 a week worse off now than they are: that's $2,600 a year. For workers who earn under $25,200 per year, that's a lot of money.

The Government big-notes itself on real wage rises of 14.9 per cent. That sounds OK, but when you take out managerial wages, the figures change substantially. If you look at the average weekly earnings for employees on AWA's, it went backwards from 2002 to 2004 by $110 per week (11 per cent), while over this same period employees on collective agreements had a wage increase of just $46 per week, or 6.2 per cent.

I think John Howard should be judged on his record: and it's a shocker.

Big business family-friendly provisions

And yet, despite the government winding back the clock, some businesses are choosing to implement some family friendly initiatives in their workplaces.

The businesses which are making changes are doing it because they're in a "war for talent". They realise that to attract and keep great staff they have to accept that humans have caring responsibilities - they're not just workers. Unfortunately, the workers most likely to get these better conditions are well-paid sought after workers, not the struggling low-paid workers who arguably need more help.

A report was released last week outlining that 4 in 10 big employers are providing maternity leave. This figure has doubled since 2001. Telstra recently achieved a 100 per cent return to work rates after maternity leave, because of its flexible policies for employees.

The survey revealed that six weeks (42% of employers of 100-plus workers) are still the most common duration of paid maternity leave, followed by 12 weeks (21%).

Some 2% provide 13 weeks, 4% provide 14 weeks and 2% more than 14 weeks. Paid maternity leave is most prevalent among medium to large employers in power, gas and water supply (79%), education (76%) and communications services (73%).

Research over the years has shown that the cost of replacing staff is high.

Happy workers are productive workers.

This is not new news. Japanese research published in the Osaka Economic Papers earlier this year found that companies which provide childcare support for employees enjoyed increased productivity and company earnings.

It's a shame that the government is actually worse than many employers when it comes to helping workers balance their work and caring responsibilities. The government actually opposed some of the ACTU's claims in the Work and Family Test Case before the AIRC which the employer groups were prepared to accept.

Only last month, the AIRC delivered its final verdict on the ACTU's Work and Family Test Case.

It ruled that all employees have the right to two years of unpaid parental leave after the birth of a child and the right to request part time work when they return to work.

This decision represents a healthy balance between the interests of the employee and employer and reflects changes in the UK which give all workers the right to request part time or more flexible hours.

British experience has shown that companies which have responded positively to these requests are seeing benefits in better recruitment and staff retention; lower sick leave and absences and better performance from more satisfied, less stressed employees who provide better customer service.

Labor alternatives

Under these extreme changes, many women and their families have got nothing to look forward to other than having their wages reduced, conditions and entitlements slashed and safety nets removed.

Labor is campaigning with unions, community groups and churches to express our concern about the changes. The ACTU campaign has been fantastic, and is having a real impact on the community. It will be the community campaign which stops this legislation, or forces the Government to water down the worst provisions before it is introduced. The campaign won't be won in the parliament but on the streets.

Labor believes in an industrial relations system that is based on fairness and includes:

• The need for a strong safety net of minimum award wages and conditions;
• A strong independent umpire to ensure fair wages and conditions, and to settle disputes;
• The right to join a union and to be represented by a union.
• Proper rights for Australian workers unfairly dismissed;
• The right for employees to bargain collectively for decent wages and conditions; and
• The right for workers to reject individual contracts which cut pay and conditions, and undermine collective bargaining and union representation.

If these disastrous changes are passed, Labor when next in government will have to rebuild the Australian industrial relations system from the ground up.

We will be working in a landscape so different to today's, that it is difficult to imagine.

We will also do more to help workers balance their work and caring responsibilities.

The first thing to do will be to address the issues of cost and availability of childcare.

Before the last election, Labor also promised:

• to encourage the Industrial Relations Commission to allow parents returning from parental leave to make a reasonable request for a return to work on a part-time basis;
• to require the AIRC to consider practical provisions to help employees to combine work and family responsibilities when making awards and approving workplace agreements;
• to encourage the AIRC to give casuals employed on a long term basis the right to make a reasonable request for conversion to permanent employment;
• a baby care payment, payable in instalments over a minimum 14 week period;
• mentoring and other community-oriented policies which would help in creating a cultural shift in workplaces towards respecting the range of responsibilities and interests that Australians have.

The Government's extreme and unfair industrial relations changes won't be stopped in the parliament, no matter how good Labor's campaign is.

They will only be stopped by community pressure. That's why the role of unionists and workplace delegates is so important.