However, the pandemic also highlighted stark fissures in Australia’s labour market. The employment and income impacts of the pandemic were starkly unequal, across different groups of workers. This report highlights several ways in which the pandemic has increased inequality in Australia, and reinforced the dominance of insecure work in the overall labour market.
A year-end review of the dramatic changes in Australia’s labour market in 2020 has confirmed that the worst economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic were felt by Australians in relatively low-paid, insecure jobs.
Key Findings:
Workers in casual jobs lost employment at a rate 8 times faster than those in permanent positions
Part-time workers suffered job losses 3 times worse than full-time workers
Young workers, women, and workers who do not work in offices also suffered disproportionate job losses during the initial shutdowns – and continue to experience much worse employment conditions
Worse yet, the report shows the rebound in employment that began in May has seen a historic surge in insecure jobs – which account for the vast majority of new jobs created since the economy began re-opening
“It is painfully ironic that the worst impacts of the pandemic were felt by those who could least afford to lose their work and income,” said Dr Jim Stanford, Director of the Centre for Future Work, and co-author of the report.
“Both on the way down, and on the way back up, this recession has reinforced the dominance of insecure work in Australia’s labour market.
“Precarious work strategies explain why the effects of the pandemic were so painfully unequal, and this new surge in insecure work makes Australians even more vulnerable to such shocks in the future.
“Covid-19 had a terrible impact on both the quantity and quality of work in 2020. Because Australia has been relatively successful in controlling the virus, the labour market could improve significantly in 2021, however, the rapid expansion of insecure work poses a major challenge to the stability and prosperity of Australian households,” Dr Stanford said.
Other findings of the report include:
Since May, over 400,000 casual jobs have been created (2200 per day, on average), accounting for over 60% of all new waged positions since the recovery started. That is the largest surge in casual employment in Australia’s history – contradicting business and government claims that uncertainty about casual employment rules are holding back hiring.
Workers over 35 years of age have regained all of the jobs lost in the pandemic, and then some. All remaining job losses are concentrated among workers under 35.
Office-based occupations (professionals, clerical workers, and most managers) have also regained pre-pandemic employment levels. But other occupations (especially community and personal services, sales workers, and labourers) continue to suffer major employment losses.
New labour laws proposed by the Commonwealth government would accelerate the surge in insecure work: liberalising the use of casual labour by employers, and allowing them to treat permanent part-time workers more like casuals.
In this extended commentary, Senior Economist Alison Pennington explains the main components of the IR Omnibus Bill, assesses their impacts on workers’ wages and labour protections, and offers some strategic analysis on how labour advocates can work towards addressing insecure work.
Scott Morrison’s Industrial Relations Laws Are a Kick in the Teeth for Australian Workers
By Alison Pennington
The Morrison government has proposed sweeping changes to Australian labor laws intended to cut wages, entrench precarious work, and cripple unions. The proposed changes would sweep away the remnants of collective bargaining and hand dictatorial power to bosses.
Just a few months ago, Australia’s Coalition government was singing the tune of compromise and cooperation with unions. Now they’ve thrown away the songbook and taken the gloves off. Scott Morrison is giving Australian workers and unions class war — just in time for Christmas.
Thanks to pandemic stimulus spending, 2020 was already a Christmas-bonus year for big business. With company profits up nearly 19 percent since 2019, they have already benefited to the tune of billions.
But it’s never enough. So, industrial relations minister Christian Porter has introduced the Industrial Relations (IR) Omnibus bill. It’s a withering pro-business offensive aimed at slashing wages and resetting work conditions to boost profitability in the long term.
The core of Porter and Morrison’s plan will grant employers the power to expand insecure work freely and to hijack enterprise bargaining. If it goes ahead, it will inflict a double wound on the working class, by degrading the Awards system (that sets minimum wages and conditions across industries) and by weakening what little remains of unions’ collective bargaining power.
Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
The idea that workers’ economic security should be subordinated to business demands is archaic. It’s a form of employment that unions have fought bitterly since the nineteenth century, winning historic victories to curtail piece-work or at-home work, and to end the dictatorial control of gang masters over who did and did not work, and under what conditions.
Some fruits of that multigenerational battle still remain embedded in today’s standard employment relationship, which guarantees rights to ongoing work and basic entitlements. However, neoliberalism’s decades-long onslaught has weakened unions. As a result, all of these abuses have returned, sometimes in new packaging — as is the case with the “gig economy.”
An Uber Eats part-time worker. (Jack Taylor / Getty Images)
Today, 2.6 million Australian workers are defined as “casual.” This means that one in every four workers has no right to ongoing work, and no basic holiday or sick leave entitlements.
This is justified by the claim that casual workers receive “casual loadings” (extra pay) to compensate for forfeited conditions. But this is a myth. Far from being compensated for the value of lost entitlements, most casuals are in fact much worse off.
One third of all casuals receive no loadings at all, and most casuals are not paid more than permanent workers in the same jobs. In industries with high casual density, the premium is around 4-5 percent — far from the oft-cited figure of 25 percent.
Bosses love to praise the virtues of “flexibility,” claiming that casuals don’t want permanent work. But this mantra is also a lie — half of all casuals have worked regular shifts for one year or more.
Rather than simply allowing firms to employ a few extra workers on a seasonal basis, casual work is increasingly the way that Australian businesses meet their medium- and long-term labor needs. And, in the post-COVID era, they increasingly see casual labor as the foundation for boosting profits.
Accelerated Precarity
Two recent major court cases found that businesses which employ casuals on regular, stable, and predictable schedules are liable to pay leave entitlements. It was estimated that this would cost employers over $39 billion.
In response, business lobbyists unleashed campaigns to “resolve the definition issue” so as to avoid court-ordered repayments. This — as well as the growing importance of casual work to profits — explains why Morrison and Porter have made entrenching casual work the cornerstone of their IR Omnibus bill.
They want to define casual work in the broadest possible terms. Any job deemed casual by the employer will be, legally, a casual job. This means your job can look like a permanent job and smell like a permanent job — but employers will still be able to legally engage you as a casual and strip your legal entitlements at will. This is a body blow to the present system of legal protections.
The pandemic has highlightedthe dangersof insecure work. But for the Coalition and their business allies, it changed nothing. Even while frontline, often insecure workers risked their lives, the government was keen to increase the number of workers trapped in precarious, low-wage jobs.
First, the Coalition excluded over one million casuals from the JobKeeper wage subsidy. Then, they reduced the Coronavirus Supplement, hoping to force the unemployed and vulnerable into insecure work while making it cheaper for businesses to rehire workers. Next, Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced JobMaker — a payment that directly subsidizes new, insecure youth jobs that will allow bosses to sack existing, more expensive and older workers.
The JobKeeper subsidy is set to end in March, exactly when Porter’s sharpened wage-cutting tools are due to kick in. Employers will go on the offensive, recouping lost public subsidies by taking even more from their workers.
The bill’s supposed sweetener is a measure that will require employers to offer casuals permanent work if they have been employed for twelve months, with six months of continuous regular hours scheduling. Not only will it be easy for employers to vary hours and schedules to avoid meeting that high benchmark, they will also be allowed to refuse to make an offer on so-called “reasonable grounds.”
The government was sure to define “reasonable” in incredibly broad terms and to deny workers the right to appeal a decision through the Fair Work Commission (FWC). Got a problem with your employer’s decision? The Federal Court will hear your case — but only if you have a spare ten or twenty thousand dollars lying around.
Deregulating Permanent Work
Accelerating the growth of insecure work is also about cannibalizing protections for the permanent workforce, by making permanent jobs resemble casual ones. New so-called “part-time flexi” reforms will let bosses employ permanent part-time workers as though they were casuals.
Only sixteen hours will have to be paid according to normal permanent rates and entitlements, while an additional twenty-two hours (comprising a total work week of up to thirty-eight hours) will be free of overtime loading. With the stroke of a pen, this threatens to dissolve hard-won rights that deliver predictable and stable schedules for permanent part-time workers.
With a flexible twenty-two hours of ordinary-time labor up for grabs, employers will be able to work these “part-time” workers like full-timers on a regular basis — as supervisors and managers, for example. But they won’t have the security of regular hours or receive overtime compensation for being at the employer’s beck-and-call. The flexibility will be blissful — for bosses.
For all the Coalition rhetoric about “job creation,” this wholesale deregulation of working hours really means that bosses will be able to cheaply increase hours for existing workers in line with fluctuations in demand. That will free them from having to hire more people. It’s galling that the government would present the creation of a “part-time flexi” employment category as a solution to record-high and growing underemployment.
There’s no shortage of glossy marketing. For example, low-wage work will be expanded under the guise of “roads to permanency.” But when you cut through the spin, the Coalition’s agenda is to reduce the incomes of millions and to deny millions more decent jobs. During a recession, with labor-force utilization already low, they’re arming employers with powerful weapons to cut wages and conditions in the jobs that remain. These moves will generalize despair and desperation across the entire workforce.
Hijacking Collective Bargaining
Worst of all, the IR Omnibus bill contains a trifecta of changes to the laws governing enterprise agreement (EA) making. These changes will allow businesses to draw up workplace agreements by themselves more easily — that is, without a union. They will be allowed to undercut the minimum rates and conditions outlined in industry Awards with these nonunion agreements. Additional changes will let employers lock in wages stipulated by an enterprise agreement for eight years at a time.
This is nothing less than a hijacking of what’s left of collective bargaining. In fact, handing employers unilateral power over enterprise agreement wage-setting was the cornerstone of former Liberal PM John Howard’s infamous WorkChoices legislation.
The Coalition’s plan will allow employers to bypass the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) for two years. As it is, the BOOT ensures that new agreements do not leave workers worse off than under minimum Award conditions. The suspension of the BOOT coincides with new measures that will weaken scrutiny of subpar nonunion agreements by the FWC, unions, and employees.
The move has been taken straight from the wish list of business lobbyists. It will open a floodgate of nonunion below-Award agreements that will permanently damage living standards.
There’s a precedent for this. Under Howard’s WorkChoices, the “No Disadvantage Test” was abolished and unions were denied the right to contest agreements, leading to an explosion of nonunion agreements. Between 2004 and 2009, the proportion of nonunion agreements approved in the private sector rose from 20 to 60 percent.
After 2009, when WorkChoices was partly rolled back, the number of dodgy agreements dramatically declined to pre-Howard levels. Why? Because as part of the Fair Work Act, the Better Off Overall Test was introduced.
Even so, the WorkChoices-era surge in nonunion, low-wage agreements had a lasting, negative impact on wage growth. “Zombie Enterprise Agreements” persisted for years. For example, Merivale, a Sydney hospitality empire, paid over three thousand staff up to 20 percent below Award wages on an expired nonunion EA set in 2007 for over ten years.
This is possible because EAs live on, sometimes for years, until they’re replaced or terminated — usually on request by unionized employees. Today, tens of thousands of workers are still languishing on Howard-era below-Award enterprise agreements.
Unfair Work
The FWC has the power to change and approve agreements so long as employees remain better off overall, compared to the relevant Award. On top of this, there already exists a relatively untested provision whereby the FWC may approve agreements with below-Award conditions in so-called “exceptional circumstances,” provided they meet the overall public interest.
A couple who both lost their jobs recently watch local news in their apartment. (John Moore / Getty Images)
The IR Omnibus bill will weaponize the “public interest test” governing this power, enabling business to push even further. The Coalition’s hand-picked business leaders in the FWC will surely oblige.
Australian business and their allies in the Coalition have dedicated enormous resources to crushing what remains of collective bargaining. Their goal is to corrode the infrastructure of the labor movement’s past victories.
This is why the Coalition also wants to introduce eight-year agreements on new projects valued at over $500 million or $250 million, if the project is of national significance. Existing laws mean that employers can only seek FWC approval on agreements for new projects (called “greenfields” agreements) after six months of bargaining with the relevant union.
However, if the BOOT is scrapped, employers could feasibly draw up greenfields agreements undercutting Award conditions for up to eight years, circumventing unions and simply hiring a new workforce under the new agreement.
Since Australia’s draconian anti-union laws prohibit industrial action at any time outside an EA bargaining period, eight-year agreements give employers the power to block strikes as well as to cut wages. There is also a political logic to it: it’s a cost and risk reduction strategy, guarding against any future joint campaigns that link unions with other elements of civil society. For example, unions will face crippling fines for striking at any time during the eight-year period to support campaigns against inappropriate development, or against new mining projects.
As if this weren’t enough, the Coalition is bolstering the power of the courts and the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission to inflict millions of dollars’ worth of fines on unions for activities which are entirely normal and legal in other democratic countries.
It couldn’t be clearer. Just as the Coalition’s 2020 budget gifted business with billions in subsidies, tax cuts, and other handouts, this, too, is a vast gift to capital, purchased at our expense.
A Common Enemy
The union movement has a good chance of stopping the BOOT changes in the Senate, where minor parties hold the balance of power. But everything else is up for grabs thanks to the Coalition’s Christmas “spirit of compromise.”
Insecure work is the enemy of unionization. Workers living in permanent precarity and intermittent poverty are less likely to join unions. Only 8 percent of union members are casuals. And when the bargaining power of unions declines, all workers suffer.
By expanding casual work, the IR Omnibus bill will strike the harshest and most comprehensive blow to wages and living standards in many years, both now and in the future. This is why the union movement must resist insecure work everywhere it rears its head.
We need unions that are willing to build power among existing, permanent workers who are in a better position to endure the risks of industrial action. It’s still harder and more expensive to sack permanent, more senior workers. But without a fight back, this will change too — the growth of precarity means that even secure workers are on increasingly unsteady ground.
Permanent conversion rights for casuals don’t work without workplace union power. Unions must unleash aggressive collective bargaining campaigns aimed at bringing all workers under the same agreement “roof” and into permanent work. This would have to include bringing contracted-out and labor-hire work back in-house.
Since the most precarious sectors of the workforce have lower union power and no access to collective bargaining, we also need a united union movement willing to mobilize all of our 1.5 million members, linking the pockets of union power in the private sector (including construction, ports, and logistics) to our largest public sector bases in health care, education, and social services. We must weave good jobs back into the fabric of Australia’s social contract — this means fighting for jobs that offer rights to ongoing employment and basic entitlements like holiday pay, sick leave, and superannuation.
Most importantly, reviving unions after years of decline will require determined efforts to rebuild a modern workers’ movement with deep support and social roots. This will mean working with climate action, anti-poverty, welfare rights, and other social justice and community organizations.
Unions and their allies have to push for working-class politics at every level of government, from local to federal, and build a broad coalition that will put decent jobs and economic democracy at the center of a progressive vision for Australia.
Public institutions like Medicare, public education, TAFEs, superannuation, and corporate taxation are widely popular. Australians broadly agree with the need to rebuild a domestic manufacturing sector and to refund the arts and tertiary education. The union movement could be the vehicle that makes these aspirations real.
This project can be popular. This year, the profit-hungry zealots of Australian business and the Coalition’s conservative apparatchiks told us that “we must learn to live with the virus.” But Australians overwhelmingly disagreed, and instead supported the subordination of short-term business interests to the public good. Despite a well-funded conservative campaign, large majorities overwhelmingly supported shutting down the economy to save lives.
Now we must protect ourselves against another virus that would irreparably damage the quality of workers’ lives in the name of higher corporate profits. That virus is insecure work. It’s lived among us too long — it’s high time we shut it down.
We have launched a search for the first Carmichael Fellow. Please see the below call for applications for further information. Applications close at midnight (AEDT) on Monday, 18 January. Thank you for your interest in the Carmichael Centre!
The newly formed Carmichael Centre will be established at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, in the name of legendary manufacturing unionist Laurie Carmichael, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 93.
Laurie Carmichael played a pivotal role in Australia’s union movement over several decades. He campaigned to protect the right to strike, negotiated shorter working hours, developed innovative workers’ education and training programs, helped to negotiate the Prices and Incomes Accords in the 1980s, served on several federal government boards and commissions under the Hawke and Keating governments, and opposed Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He served in numerous leadership capacities during his career, including with the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
The Carmichael Centre is being established with the support of Carmichael’s family, and with funding from two of the organisations which Carmichael led: the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU, formed in 1995 through a merger that included successors to Carmichael’s former unions) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (for which Carmichael served as Assistant Secretary from 1987 through 1993).
Among other activities, the new Carmichael Centre will:
Host a Distinguished Research Fellow position, who will conduct and publish research on themes related to Carmichael’s legacy, including: industrial relations, social policy, manufacturing and industry policy, vocational education, international labour solidarity and peace, and the impact of unions on social well-being.
Organise an annual lecture by a prominent labour speaker on Carmichael’s legacy.
Develop and publish an annotated on-line bibliography of Carmichael’s writings and other contributions.
The formation of the Carmichael Centre follows two years of discussions among unions and colleagues to plan an appropriate recognition of Carmichael’s influence and legacy. The Centre for Future Work is launching a public search for the first Distinguished Research Fellow, who will be appointed early in 2021.
“The Carmichael Centre will carry on Laurie Carmichael’s mission, based on his conviction that strong, innovative unions can help build a better society for all,” said Andrew Dettmer, National President of the AMWU
“Laurie Carmichael was a principled, innovative, progressive union leader who understood that workers need collective power to make economic, social and democratic progress. We are so glad his ideas will receive the continued attention and study they deserve, through the work of the Carmichael Centre,” said Sally McManus, National Secretary of the ACTU.
Carmichael is survived by his son, Laurie Carmichael Jr. “The values Dad fought for all his life are more important than ever: fairness, equality, democracy, and peace. I am deeply proud that his legacy lives on, including through the work of the Carmichael Centre,” Carmichael Jr. said.
“The Distinguished Research Fellow will make a very important contribution to progressive labour research in Australia. We are deeply honoured to host the Carmichael Centre, and to advance Laurie’s vision of a better, fairer world of work,” said Ben Oquist, Executive Director of the Australia Institute.
Released following the UN Climate Ambition Summit (12 Dec), which highlighted the need for Australia to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels, the report finds that delaying climate policy cannot protect the quantity or quality of fossil fuel jobs, which will inevitably decline as the global energy system shifts quickly to renewables. To best protect these workers and communities, pro-active transition planning must start now.
Key findings of the report include:
With strong commitments to alternative employment creation (including, but not limited to, jobs in renewable energy projects), a transition away from fossil fuels can occur without involuntary layoffs or severe disruption to communities.
Direct employment in fossil fuel industries is relatively small, just 1% of total Australian employment, and in any single year the overall economy produces twice as many new jobs, as are employed in total in fossil fuel industries.
Health care and social services employs 13 times as many people as fossil fuels. At current rates, it would take just two years of new work in health care alone to fully offset all current jobs in fossil fuel industries.
Fossil fuel jobs are especially important in some communities, but the number of such communities is small. In just 11 out of 350 Australian communities do fossil fuel jobs make up over 5% of local employment. Strong, focused supports, paid for by the country as a whole, can help those communities adapt to the coming change.
Examples of previous transitions in other countries (including Germany, Canada, and Spain) confirm that fossil fuel sectors can be phased out with no involuntary redundancies.
Dr Jim Stanford, Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work, and author of the report, highlighted the benefits of long-term planning, an announced timetable, and pro-active transition supports (including supported early retirement, job mobility across sites as fossil fuels phase out, and ambitious regional development and diversification efforts) to avoiding involuntary redundancies or economic damage to regional communities.
“In fact if managed well, most people currently employed in the fossil fuel industry will not even need to find alternative work: as the industry gradually winds down, most will transition directly from fossil fuel work into retirement, or other forms of voluntary severance.”
The report was commissioned by HESTA, the industry super fund in the health care sector, and a leader in adjusting its investment portfolio to be consistent with the movement toward net-zero emissions. Mary Delahunty, HESTA’s Head of Impact, noted that “Investment back into a nation’s ‘caring economy’ – health, education and social services – is the most effective way to stimulate economic activity and creates higher-quality, more sustainable, long-term growth.”
“This report demonstrates that with appropriate investment this can go even further, supporting a manageable, sustainable phase-out of fossil fuel jobs,” Delahuunty added.
“HESTA was the first major Australian super fund to commit to a total portfolio ‘net zero by 2050’ emissions target as part of our ambitious Climate Change Transition Plan. Supporting a planned transition is crucial to us achieving these ambitious goals and to protecting the long-term value of our members’ investments.”
We are pleased to reprint (download below), with kind permission from In the Black, this profile, titled ‘The People’s Economist‘. Many thanks to the journal and to Ms. Leggatt for the generous article!
This commentary is a longer version of an assessment of the new legislation prepared by Jim Stanford (originally published in The Conversation).
We Were In This Together… For a Very Short Time
By Jim Stanford
“We are all in this together,” Prime Minister Morrison solemnly intoned to Parliament in April. And during those first frightening weeks of the pandemic, there was a brief moment when it seemed like Australia’s industrial relations protagonists actually believed it. For a short time, businesses, unions, and government put aside their usual differences and worked together to get through this existential threat. For example, they negotiated quick agreements to alter dozens of Modern Awards and enterprise agreements, adjusting rules and rosters to help keep Australians on the job.
Then, building on that spirit of cooperation, the government kicked off a new process to seek consensus around further improvements to workplace laws. The government abandoned its pre-COVID effort to impose harsh new restrictions on unions. Instead, five tables were established with business, union, and government leaders, debating reforms to improve the fairness and efficiency of the IR system. Some observes even smelled a new era of Accord-making in the wind.
Well, the Kumbaya moment didn’t last long. Within weeks the parties retreated to their corners and their standard speaking points. No meaningful consensus emerged on any issue from any table. Even tentative proposals – like an idea, supported by unions and the Business Council, to combine fast-track approval of union-negotiated enterprise agreements with greater flexibility in determining their suitability – were shot down in partisan gunfire by the more strident business lobbyists.
Now, in the absence of consensus, the government has picked up its traditional hymn book and is once again singing the praises of ‘flexibility’ and deunionisation. IR Minister Christian Porter tabled a series of changes in Parliament Wednesday that will further skew the already lopsided balance of power between employers and workers.
The government didn’t just take business’s side in the debates at those 5 discussion tables: it went even further. One of the biggest changes in the new legislation (suspending rules that prevent enterprise agreements from undercutting the minimum standards of Modern Awards) wasn’t even discussed at the IR tables. This confirms that the IR gloves are off once again.
If passed in the Senate, Porter’s omnibus bill will reset several aspects of current labour relations:
Suspending the BOOT: At present, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) must ensure enterprise agreements (EAs) do not undercut minimum standards guaranteed in the Modern Awards. The new legislation instructs the FWC to approve EAs even if they fail this ‘Better Off Overall Test’ (BOOT), so long as the deal is nominally supported by affected workers (more on this below) and deemed to be in the ‘public interest.’ It is important to remember that Australia (unique among industrial countries) allows employers to implement EAs unilaterally, without any involvement by a union. The BOOT is thus necessary to prevent EAs (especially non-union EAs) from undermining workers’ minimum rights. Porter’s suspension of the BOOT is planned for two years. But even if it is restored after that (which is uncertain), EAs negotiated during that window will remain in effect for years afterward. Even after they expire, under Australian law they remain in effect until replaced with new EAs, or terminated by the FWC – neither of which is likely in non-union settings.
EA Approval Process: Anticipating that non-BOOT-compliant EAs will be actively opposed by unions, Porter’s legislation includes complementary measures aimed at speeding those deals through the FWC. Unions will be restricted from intervening around EAs they were not involved in negotiating – even non-union EAs where no union was involved. And the process must normally be completed within 21 days, thus limiting opportunities for affected workers to learn about and resist sub-Award provisions.
Defining Casual Work: The growing use of casual labour was a hot topic at the IR reform tables. Porter’s legislation clarifies the definition of casual work in the most expansive way possible: a casual job is any position deemed casual by the employer, and accepted by the worker, for which there is no promise of regular continuing employment. In other words, any job can be casual, so long as workers are desperate enough to accept it. This will foster the further spread of casual labour. Most important, it removes a big potential liability faced by employers as a result of recent court decisions, under which they might have owed back-pay for holidays and sick leave to casual staff who worked regular shifts.
Casualising Part-Timers: Further casualisation will be attained through new rules regarding rosters and hours for permanent part-time workers. Porter’s bill would extend flexibility provisions originally implemented earlier this year – during that brief moment of pandemic-induced cooperation. The rules allow employers to alter hours for regular part-timers without incurring overtime penalties or other costs (currently required under some Modern Awards). This will allow employers to effectively use part-time workers as yet another form of casual, just-in-time labour.
Long-Term Project Agreements: Finally, Porter has granted one more big wish from the business list: allowing super-long enterprise agreements at major new projects. Agreements would last for up to eight years, and can be signed, sealed and delivered before any workers start on the job (thus denying them any input into the process). Under the revised BOOT provisions, they could also undercut the minimum standards of the Awards.
These changes are being advertised as a boost for post-pandemic job-creation, but this claim is hollow. In fact, the changes in part-time and casual rules will actually discourage new hiring: since existing workers can be costlessly flexed in line with employer needs, there is no need to hire anyone else. Weaker BOOT protections will spur a wave of new EAs: most union-free, and aimed at reducing (not raising) compensation and standards. This makes a mockery of the goals of collective bargaining, and grants Australian employers further opportunity to suppress labour costs (already tracking at their slowest pace in postwar history).
So what do we make of that short-lived spirit of togetherness which purportedly sparked this whole process? In retrospect, it seems to have been just an opportunity for Coalition leaders to pose as visionary statesmen during a time of crisis. Now, mere months later, the government is back to its old script – and the pandemic is just another excuse to scapegoat unions, drive down wages, and fatten business profits.
Alison Pennington, Senior Economist with the Centre for Future Work assisted The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) preparing the timely report Leaving Women Behind: The Real Cost of the COVID Recovery. The report documents the gendered impacts of the crisis and the federal government’s COVID-era policies, and outlines a public investment strategy to undo the damage of the crisis, and ensure women play an equal role in an inclusive economic recovery.
To mark the release of ACTU’s report, the Australian Trade Union Institute hosted a webinar with ACTU President Michele O’Neil, Centre for Future Work’s Alison Pennington, Karen Batt (CPSU VIC), Helen Gibbons (UWU) and Julia Fox (SDA). The session presented the main report findings and considered how they might support campaigns for a gender-inclusive recovery.
The full 38-page ACTU report is available below together with Alison’s presentation slides presented for the ATUI webinar.
Heading in to next Summer season, new research published today by the Centre for Future Work, outlines why working in extreme heat is a growing and urgent issue for workers, and what can be done by Governments and workplaces to mitigate these risks.
Key findings:
Heat stress poses serious health and safety risks for many workers across Australia, and Australia must act on the causes of rising temperatures and changing weather patterns.
Four key groups of workers are at high risk of heat stress:
Workers who work inside, in environments with poor climate control, or whose work requires them to be exposed to heat and humidity;
Outdoor workers, especially those who are weather-exposed;
Workers moving between different climates as part of their work (i.e., moving between extreme heat and cold); and
Workers whose roles expose them to situational extreme heat, such as emergency workers and firefighters.
Current labour protections, including health and safety laws, are inadequate.
Many workers say that OHS policies might appear to offer protection, but in practice it is simply not the case.
Workers say that employers do not want work to stop even when heat stress risk is very high, and that employers prioritise productivity over worker health and safety.
The hazardous heatwaves, air quality, and bushfire smoke over the recent Black Summer has emphasised the inadequacy of current OHS regulations.
The conditions of a person’s employment fundamentally shape their experience of heat stress. Workers who are employed casually, who work in labour hire arrangements, or who are gig workers, often have less capacity to take action on the effects of heat stress.
Recommendations include:
The Australian Federal and State Governments must urgently review the management of the current and likely impacts of climate change for workers, and develop national and state-based regulatory frameworks that provide strong protection in relation to heat stress and bushfire smoke.
Governments and employers must be required to provide adequate resourcing for at-risk workers.
Policymakers should strengthen current laws to ensure workers do not lose income when unable to work due to heat stress.
“Last year’s devastating Black Summer bushfires highlighted that for many workers across Australia, appropriate policies and plans are not always in place to ensure that they are protected from dangerous heat stress related conditions that could cause illness or injury to themselves or others,” said Dr. Elizabeth Humphrys, associate at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work and co-author of the report.
“Workers need to be afforded greater protections to ensure their health and safety are paramount in extreme heat conditions. Our research shows that current workplace conditions are woefully inadequate, while climate change will only serve to make conditions worse.
“To protect workers and the wider community, not only must policymakers act to mitigate the impacts of heat stress, but they must also act on the causes of the climate heating, itself.”
