What synchronicity that the same day the High Court confirmed Qantas broke the law when it sacked 1,700 workers during the pandemic, property developer and eternal youth spruiker Tim Gurner came to global prominence courtesy of The Australian Financial Review. Gurner, presumably pausing from biohacking with a house-crafted protein bar in a hyperbaric pod, complained about arrogant workers who “decided they didn’t really want to work so much any more”.
The only solution was punishment: “Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50% in my view” (so, erm, to 5.5%?).
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”
Employer groups must be kicking themselves. Last week it was Qantas that distracted everyone from its campaign against Labor’s new laws designed to curb the exploitation of contractors, and here’s a billionaire property developer calling from his cryotherapy bed for them to suffer more pain.
But Qantas wasn’t finished yet, of course. At 10am, the High Court revealed it had rejected Qantas’ appeal against the Federal Court ruling that it had illegally sacked baggage handling workers, because the goal was to prevent them from exercising their legitimate rights to take industrial action under the Fair Work Act.
Over decades of industrial relations reform by both sides of politics, Australia has become a tough place in which to take industrial action. That’s why days lost to strikes now are a minuscule fraction of what they were in the 1990s, let alone the 1980s. But Qantas sacked 1,700 people to stop them from even exercising those highly restricted rights. It wasn’t good enough for former CEO Alan Joyce, his management, Qantas chairman Richard Goyder and his board that the playing field between employers and workers is now heavily tilted against workers — they wanted to throw the latter off the field entirely.
Qantas offered one of those half-baked “apologies” after the court decision — not for its illegal conduct, but for the harm its actions might have inflicted on the sacked workers. That is, it apologised if anyone was offended. And it said that it “accepted” the decision — in contrast to what, one wonders? Call for a return to Privy Council appeals, perhaps?
Business groups in Australia, from the top end of town at the Business Council of Australia (BCA) down to small businesses, continue to demand yet more “industrial relations reform” to tilt that playing field even further against workers. Economists and newspaper columnists continue to support them. No amount of “flexibility” is ever enough for Australian employers and their cheerleaders.
And if they don’t get it, they’ll simply resort to breaking the law.
Qantas isn’t alone in acting unlawfully toward its workers. Around 40% of Qantas’ fellow members of the BCA — the biggest firms in Australia — have (like Qantas) been guilty of wage theft, stealing billions of dollars from their employees. Underpayment is so systemic it has become a basic feature of how Australian businesses operate.
Big business — amazingly given they claim underpayment is because of “confusing” awards — is even worse than small and medium businesses; work by the Fair Work ombudsman in 2019 suggested that “just” a quarter of smaller businesses were guilty of wage theft. Because when employers don’t get more “reform”, they resort to breaking the law.
That’s in addition to their use of the existing system to impose wage cuts on workers over the past decade, with real wages in many private industries declining even before the pandemic and the ensuing inflation. Since then, all workers have endured a significant cut in real wages despite fantasies of the “wage-price spiral” conjured up by business and the Reserve Bank. Virtually all the productivity growth in that time has gone directly to businesses’ bottom lines, helping the profit share of national income to record highs as the wage share fell to record lows.
Throughout that time, we were constantly told that the problem was overpaid, unproductive workers and the lack of legal sanction against militant unions (despite the serial failure of most cases brought against unions such as the CFMMEU).
Strangely, no-one ever mentioned militant employers and their enthusiasm for breaking the law, when a large proportion of Australian business was engaged in wage theft.
Gurner might be a wanker, but he’s refreshingly honest about his loathing of workers. It’s clear that many businesses in other sectors feel exactly the same way: workers are lazy and need to be taught a lesson, the kind of lesson significantly higher unemployment would teach them — to be grateful to employers and to accept what they’re given. Gurner just said it. Much of Australian business has been doing it, for years.
Do you think Gurner’s remarks accurately reflect how employers feel about their workers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Eternal youth? I’m the same age as this man, enjoy beer, whiskey, wine and cannabis in healthy doses, and exposed myself to the sun excessively in my naive youth. He looks no younger than I do. Plus, he’s a contemptible prick, while I’m only obnoxious.
Well said. Perhaps Gurner’s ‘eternal youth’ thing is more a case of wilfully failing to grow up? He certainly comes across as a spoilt child.
Brat.
It is not possible to stay young forever but it is easy to remain immature.
Couldn’t have put it any better myself. And yes, he apparently IS a contemptible little prick.
He calls for ‘punishment’. He really ought to be careful what he wishes for.
Its beadle the prick !
that ol Dickensian nut job – who ended up down mine in my fantasy
If he didn’t have security before, hew might need it now
Obnoxious or not, I like you. Swap out the whiskey with a bourbon and we’d have a lot in common. : )
I think you’re alright!
Yeah, agreed. I’m about the same age and I’ve never made any special attempt to “take care of myself”. My wife assures me I’m far better looking, which I will take to mean at least no worse. And even my slightly receding hairline looks bountiful compared to this bloke’s six-head.
“Reports vary…”.
Abstenance doesn’t make you live any longer it just feels like it.
Grifters gonna grift
Gurner’s remarks should be given maximum exposure. By making clear how employers want workers to be powerless, and how far employers are prepared to go, he makes the strongest case for workers to organise in unions. Power is never given, it has to be taken, and workers need to unionise to defend themselves, advance their conditions and avoid being reduced over time to modern serfdom with no rights, no security of employment and subsistence wages (or wages so low that survival is only possible with welfare on top). Whether Labor can be any use is unclear; its commitment to the interests of business above anything else suggests not. Workers are pretty much on their own, which makes getting organised all the more urgent.
business in welfare you know this ? Well they are in lucrative contracts telling those unemployed ex Qantas workers how ” to look for work “, whijst the middke men courtesy of Roberts / Morrison etc set up the lobby contracts on our public pie – 58 million for 7 k unemployed – include parents , carers , Ndis disabled clients – and us as charged for zero skills ( zero training zero agency
Yes, this Gurner guy is a nasty, spoilt prick devoid of empathy or personality it seems! This story needs to be on Channel 9, 7 etc and A Current Affair. I suspect it won’t be and many people will miss it. Do Tradies even follow the news?? They should.
He is also weird looking!! What planet is he from???
Just another over-weighted sociopath in the business fraternity.
Looks like he was born prematurely.
A bit mean…..but now that you mention it! He has just made a statement apologising for his previous comments!! Sincerity level???
I think, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, that it’s quite clear whether Labor is a benefit or a hindrance to organised labour.
It’s worse than workers being on their own; Labor is firmly against them.
No confusion warranted.
Just like the US. Where you can be a full time employee at Wal Mart but you still need food stamps and government assistance to stay just above the poverty line. And then there are some over there that want to cut this additional support.
In some states in the US teachers qualify for food stamps.
The same are mirrored by too many elites in Australia looking down on the rest of us or e.g. a former MP in Sydney spoke of welfare wastrels in the western suburbs….
Old and new, a form of corrupt RW nativist Christian nationalist authoritarianism representing not just the GOP, Tories etc. and race issues of neo-eugenics movement, but class and the pecking order; if no immigrants then workers, unions, students and unemployed would get it even more in RW MSM cartel.
Who was this former MP? Wastrel is an old English term and it is only old blighties that would ever use it.
Who are you, the police and what’s the obsession over an English expression representing meaning, not in quotation marks? Then claiming it’s from blighty, hence, irrelevant?
Not see https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/pru-goward-afr-column-on-underclass-condemned-as-disturbing-and-abusive
Further there was and has been too much similar bipartisan language from MPs, Ministers and influencers of imported blighty and US loaded terms i.e. ‘carrying capacity, ‘limits to growth’, ‘sustainable population’, ‘post 1970s immigrants’, ‘degrowth’ etc. for astroturfing the centre, and for the more extreme demands for refugee border security, immigration restrictions and population control; straight from the now fossil fueled eugenics movement.
“Power is never given, it has to be taken” is the crux. Real power has ebbed away from unions and workers with the active participation of the ALP when in govt, going back to the Hawke Keating accord. Gurner is nothing new, I have heard similar sentiments expressed for over 40 years by the entitled class.
You must also consider that workers can join unions all they like…the trouble is that they cannot engage in the sort of industrial action legally that they used to engage in in the past. Action which won them the rights and benefits that workers enjoy today. The Fair Work Act is WorkChoices lite. I know this through my ‘yellow’ union, the CPSU, and their negotiations with the Dept of Home Affairs from 2014-2017. The union had to give so much advance notice so the agency could bring in scabs from Canberra and elsewhere. They could send it back to the parties for renegotiation and make the union take it to the FWC through a convoluted path via lawyers and the Public Service Commission, who took on the additional role as roadblock in chief. Worker cannot effectively legally strike. With our current workplace laws, the FWA, we wouldn’t have the 8-Hour Day.
Yes; and the governing parties – all of them – have succeeded in stripping unions of the means to work effectively for their members because the unions did not have sufficient membership to fight back. When trade unions began in the UK they were completely illegal, membership was a criminal offence, but still there those with the guts and determination to stick with it. (Those found guilty of joining a union could end up in Australia, as you no doubt know.) Trade unions had to fight every inch of the way to get the rights they had a few decades ago. Like I said, power is never given, it has to be taken. So now joining a union is only the first step on a long road, not the whole answer. Unions would probably do well to set up a political party to represent their interests in parliament. Not an original idea, of course, but previous attempts in that direction have failed to deliver. Some lessons need to be learned.
As someone once said, they only call it class war when the workers start fighting back.
Gurner has turned on its head years of PR trying to turn him into some sort of luxury apartment selling fountain of youth wellness guru. Instead we see the real Tim. The so called billionaire property developer so lacking in empathy that he wants to see hundreds of thousands of Australians thrown out of work just so he can get a margin increase return on his overpriced luxury chicken coups by frighting tradies into lower paying subserviency. It must be so frustrating being only worth one billion poor thing.
like the studio exec in the States who said of the current writers strike, that the corporations would just wait them out until writers started losing their homes … the writers are still striking (135 days and counting) while some studios are having to advise their investors that profits will be down this year
… speaking of which – i’d be interested in Crikey’s take on the USA’s “Hot Labor Summer” – unions winning dramatic increases for their members across multiple industries, union membership growing and new unions forming … all very interesting and making Australia’s draconian strike legislation look as anti-worker, anti-community and anti-democratic as it actually is
And the Peter Malinaas… in Sa doing the worst thing – in Labor ‘s Don Dunstun rolling in the grave – Labor Party ????
Makes you wonder if it has to get as bad (or even worse) here, before it even looks like turning around…
I am sure some of Gurners cohort miss the stories of the old days and having convict labour, pacific island slaves and no age barrier child workers as well. The unions just had to ruin the party. I can’t understand why anyone who works for a wage or salary isn’t in a union of association of some description. I wouldn’t advocate union militancy but just having common funds to run legal cases against companies like the successful case against Qantas just shows the power of the collective. All those illegally sacked workers get justice thanks to the union. Joyce and the Qantas board happily sacked all those workers in the middle of a pandemic crisis while taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the tax payers to say afloat. I hope the ACCC gives another legal uppercut for the ghost flight scam as well to Qantas and its board and the new CEO shouldn’t even move office or unpack her cardboard box until that case is resolved. If the big shareholders had any guts the whole Qantas board should go. Tomorrow.
Union militancy…
Union won benefits, all won by these evil union’s action and effort are you and yours prepared to go without?
Annual Leave started in1936 spread through the C of A then came annual leave loading from 1973
Awards integral in ensuring workers get ‘fair pay for a fair day’s work’.
Penalty Rates starting in 1947 for working outside normal hours.
Maternity leave working parents of children born or adopted after 1 January 2011 are entitled to a maximum of 18 weeks’ pay on the National Minimum Wage.
Superannuaion to which prior to 1986, only a select group of workers were entitled.Now it is available for nearly every worker
Equal Pay for Women for women was finally adopt in 1969
Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation This when unions agitated and campaigned for health and safety laws which compelled employers to provide a safe working environment.
Sick leave
Before sick leave, you turned up to work if you were sick, or you went without pay. Sick leave provisions began to appear in awards in the 1920’s and unions have campaigned hard for better sick leave conditions over the years, across all industries.
Long service leave introduced in NSW in 1951. Now C of A wide.
Redundancy pay The Arbitration Commission introduced the first Termination, Change and Redundancy Clause into awards due to work by metalworkers and their union. This entitled workers to redundancy pay.
Allowances: shift allowance, uniform allowance
Unions in different industries have campaigned for allowances that pertain to their members. Many workers who are required to wear uniforms in their jobs, get an allowance for this rather than having to pay for uniforms themselves. Shift allowances are money that’s paid for working at night or in the afternoon. Different industries have different allowances that were won by workers and their unions over the years.
Meal Breaks, rest breaks
Before unions agitated for meal breaks and rest breaks to be introduced, workers were required to work the whole day without a break.
Collective Bargaining
Enterprise Bargaining was introduced in 1996 which allowed workers and their unions to negotiate directly with their employer over pay and conditions. Evidence from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that collective bargaining delivers better wages than individual agreements for ordinary workers.
Unfair Dismissal Protection
Unfair Dismissal Protection came from the concept of a “fair go all round”, after the Australian Workers Union took a case to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission on behalf of a worker who had bee unfairly sacked in 1971 Since then, unions have campaigned for laws that reflect that ‘fair go’ principle, which is about having a valid reason to sack someone and that the dismissal cannot be harsh, unjust or unreasonable.
My first union membership was 1977 working in a supermarket as a student. Storeman and packers union. The union militancy I refer to was the rolling statewide and national stoppages that in the end just playing int the hands of all those that wanted to dilute and destroy union power and influence. I don’t disagree with your list of important achievements by unions but many of these have been eroded by falling union membership and low to nonexistent wage and salary increases over the years that have not kept up with cost of living increases. Wage theft and its consistent appearance is just an example of the erosion of collective representation and how business seems to get away with so much more these days. Gurner is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wanting more and more from the worker for less and less.
My Anglican priest father worked as a storeman at the Egg Board while he was completing his studies as an evening student at Sydney Uni and at Moore Theological College. He was not only a members of the Storeman & Packers Union , he was also one of the local union delegates.
You should have to be in a Union to have things like a liveable wage, safe workplace, etc.
This is not an argument against being in a union – by all means, leverage collective power to negotiate better remuneration – it is an argument that basic workers rights should be a fundamental part of employment and the law that governs it.
You should not have…
(Hopefully the rest of the comment made this typo clear.)
At the beginning of the 80s corporate culture went into an unforgiving, unrelenting and thus far unstoppable greed mode. That culture is now so embedded, only radical policy change can help. A living wage would be a good place to start. The people need help! Albo you wanna step in/up?
Albo: “Yeah, nah, I gotta a ribbon-cutting at a new coal mine. Soz.”
from the other side sorry not giving poor a hand out no wgay about not giving away free money and land to cartels mining profittering thieves and stopping tge rich tax cuts whiskt selling out lithium when we arent creating the high end jobs and design kyr sovereign manufacturing caoacity ; we did which is ehy we were rich and we alll could own a home or at least live in low pollution
Gecko: Greed is good!
Tim said the quiet part out loud. He probably regards himself as a paragon of capitalist virtue – a latter day John Galt – for developing properties in a market turbocharged by tax incentives, massive immigration and low interest rates for many years.