The Australian Workplace (Dis)agreement
These days The Australian often reads like it is edited by the Liberal party. Today's editorial regarding Labor's IR policies is no exception. The backhanded compliments to Labor for "fine tuning" its IR policy do little to disguise the fact that the Australian apparently believes that the only way that Labor's IR position is going to be "acceptable" is if it mirrors that of the Liberals. The arrogant attitude that the only way that thinking of "the left" can be respectable is to become the same as ideology of "the right" was revealed in previous the Australian editorials.
This misleadingly complimentary editorial is perhaps more dangerous than the previous diagnosis of non right-wingers as "psychotic". Let consider the following statement:
The elephant in Labor's IR room, however, remains Ms Gillard's pledge to scrap AWAs. The Australian accepts collective agreements may be a beneficial safety net for low-paid workers. We accept that collective bargaining should be a right for those who seek it, but we fail to see the need for intrusion into the lives of highly paid workers who want to enter an individual non-union contract. To us, the Government's no-disadvantage test for workers earning less than $75,000 a year appears to be a reasonable compromise.
Let's forget for a second that the government doesn't have a "no-disadvantage test" - that's the test that it scrapped when it introduced WorkChoices. What it did introduce is the so-called "fairness test" (which is unlikely to remain for long should the government win the next election). Not only is the operation of the test uncertain, it is unreviewable by either the employer or the employee (except via the High Court). What is "fair" is decided by a government agency and there are no avenues for appeal or review. A right is not a right at all if it can't be enforced.
It is good to know that the Australian accepts the right to collectively bargain if an employee wants it, but that acceptance does not address the problem that employees face if their employment is made conditional on signing an AWA. The right to collectively bargain is meaningless if an employee has to chose between waiving that right and unemployment.
What the Australian editorial also seems to overlook is that, with or without AWAs, there is nothing stopping an employer and employee negotiating an individual non-union contract which is more favourable than award or collective agreement. What is objectionable about AWAs is that they can be used to undermine award or collective agreement conditions because they prevail over those agreements. Ie. AWAs remove the safety-net. An individual contract cannot prevail over collective agreements, but it will not stop "highly paid workers" negotiating more favourable conditions than the award safety-net.
The apparent reasonableness simply serves to conceal the disingenuousness of the stated position. The need to abolish AWAs stems not from "demands of unions", as the editorial suggests, but from the need to protect workers, especially vulnerable workers from exploitation. It is about our rights in the workplace.
By the way, yesterday I had the good fortune to attend a function where Julia Gillard gave a speech discussing, among other things, the impact of AWAs in the workplace, especially the impact on women. It was a very impressive speech and I'll do one or more posts about it in the next few days.
Thanks for reading.
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