The outrage over the government legislating “the right to disconnect” for workers is palpable, with employer groups and their media cheerleaders frothing at the mouth about their right to ring workers at midnight. Although, it’s a fair question to ask whether ministers, or politicians generally, will bother giving their staff the right not to be contacted at all hours.
That it’s part of a broader suite of changes designed to provide better protections for exploited gig economy and casual workers only makes it worse — it’s all about “extending the archaic inflexibility of Australia’s complex, legalistic and proscriptive industrial relations regime”, the Financial Review yelled today.
That’s the complex, legalistic and proscriptive industrial relations regime that delivered unemployment with a three in front of it, a decade of wage stagnation, a record low of industrial disputation that is a tiny fraction of 1990s levels, and a shift in the profit share of national income to record highs. Then again, many employers and the AFR won’t be happy until the last dollar is ripped from workers, and their last protections stripped away in the name of profit.
Labor has — rightly — come under fire for ditching its hard-and-fast promise to keep the stage three tax cuts. Oddly, however, it’s being relentlessly criticised for keeping its industrial relations promises. It went to the last election with a clear agenda to legislate changes on gig workers, workers kept casual despite being effectively permanent, same-job-same-pay requirements, criminalising wage theft and tilting the industrial relations playing field slightly back in favour of workers. Minor additions such as the “right to disconnect” were made in order to get the central reforms through the Senate with support from the Greens.
What business and their mouthpieces are really angry about is that after a near-decade of being given everything they want by the Coalition, they’re facing an environment in which workers have greater power and willingness to use it. The working-from-home “debate” is a classic example: old-school employers — who think workplaces can only function if they can see and directly control staff — and commercial property owners demand workers return to the office despite no evidence that WFH impacts productivity (the latest data, from the San Francisco Fed, shows no impact either way).
The “right to disconnect”, if more trivial, is very similar — it’s about unlimited employer control of staff, the demand that workers always be available in exchange for the privilege of having a job. It’s taking business a long time to adjust to a new industrial relations environment in which workers are increasingly rejecting such demands for control. That’s partly because the demographic tide is turning: even with record participation levels, we don’t have enough workers, especially in service industries, and our reliance on importing them is growing even as communities become more restive about high immigration levels. Employers have to compete much more vigorously for talent.
But it’s also partly because this is the industrial relations environment that business itself has created. Employers spent 2013-22 doing their best to immiserate workers with no wage rises or, in some major private industries, real wage cuts. They spent it demonising unions, outsourcing work to sham “contractors” paid below award rates, stealing wages across virtually every industry large and small in the country, exploiting foreign students and temporary migrants to undercut wages for Australians, cutting penalty rates and using new technology to create an underclass of service workers in the gig economy.
But that wasn’t enough for them — they always wanted more “flexibility” and less “regulation”; every claim for a wage rise was opposed as job-destroying, every industrial dispute the result of “militant” union thugs, every court decision in favour of workers a blow to investment and growth. Having treated their own workers so badly for so long, employers now complain about poor productivity (even as Australians work longer than ever) and say workers are lazy.
Does anyone blame workers for not wanting to deal with such people face to face, or give up ever-reducing family time in order to work unpaid out of hours? Does anyone seriously blame workers if they want some basic protections? If employers want to complain about productivity, or lack of flexibility, or laziness, maybe they should look in a mirror first.
And now that the demographic tide is turning in favour of workers, they might need to accept the easy days of exploiting workers for an ever-increasing profit share are coming to an end, and start seeing them instead as valuable partners. Imagine that.
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Littleproud was outright lying this morning claiming a radical new right for unions to make unannounced visits to workplaces and creating biosecurity risks. The right is one where if they think wage theft is occuring, they could apply to Fair Work for a one off right to make one unannounced visit.
Appropriately named. Little to be proud of.
Because they probably aware that in permanent population working age passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’ over decade ago when boomersstarted retiring with a heaving mass of boomers retiring, should mean increasing demand and leverage for employees.
Employers have the right to talk to my message bank at midnight, and it’ll be unread until the following morning. DND settings on phones now let you be really selective.
Bleedin’ obvious and many times said but worth repeating and appreciate the detail. The central KPI for any manager is maintaining and increasing productivity. And that doesn’t mean whipping the slaves harder or going to the government for help to keep the slaves under the lash. Australian management has being failing abysmally at productivity for almost a generation. And those most to blame are the top levels who somehow get away with claiming their ridiculously high salaries compared to those who work for them are down to international competition! As opposed to a cosy lack of accountability offered by supine boards on the same gravy train.
Most Australians who work in large organisations will tell you productivity innovation usually comes from the floor and the middle in the face of resistance and indifference from management. Management is more interested in whinging, junketing and creating pointless managerial gestures that can be reported in the next board paper, then shoozhed up by marketing and used to support their next claim for a bonus. A country, or at least private sector, run by second rate people indeed. Donald Horne was generous.
‘The outrage over the government legislating “the right to disconnect” for workers is palpable, with employer groups and their media cheerleaders frothing at the mouth about their right to ring workers at midnight.’
As noted by Bernard Keane, the outrage is from employer groups – not from actual employers.
A significant point. Rather like some so-called think tanks and similar bodies, it would no doubt be informative to expose the real agenda and funding of these groups.
They are the business owners’ Unions.
And, in the case of Willox and Westacott, extravagant work-for-the-dole schemes that give the otherwise unemployable something to do. Oh, that all welfare recipients were so fortunate.
Exactly, the employer groups are funded by employers to exclusively only put forward, absolutely single-mindedly, the interests of those employers. Often they are staffed by as few as four or five people. To a certain extent they are a tail that wags the dog since their energy is solely devoted to exercising influence public and private, constantly having positions on things. They are however also always performing for the pipers who pay them, eager to keep their well-paid jobs. What they are never doing, is thinking about the greater good or the public interest if it gets in the way. Posing as if they do care is however part of being successful.
That’s not an adequate description. Are you saying all employers contribute, and all employers have a real say in where the group stands on issues, such that when the group gives its opinion it genuinely speaks for all employers as their genuine representative? Or perhaps these groups are more like the Catholic church, so that when the leader of the group gives a formal opinion, it resembles the Pope speaking ex-cathedra on a matter of doctrine, binding on all Catholics?
Or are these groups more like those astro-turf organisations that pretend to be speaking for the grass-roots of some community, while actually being controlled and directed from elsewhere?
[Posted in the middle of the afternoon on the 8th, and blocked every time by the ModBot, even after many editing attempts to remove any possible trigger words, before reverting to the original. Thanks, ModBot. Any explanation?]
Modbot has gained conscience?
Well resemble unions I suppose, Hotel association, pharmacy guild, Australian Industry Group, all funded by fees on members. Put forward positions that accord with members interests, though members not polled on everything and not all will necessarily agree with all positions. But big strategy and key positions are worked out and agreed to, at least by biggest contributors in the group. So not as relatively autonomous as the Pope, after all the Catholic Church is not remotely supposed to be a democracy.
Indeed. Some things never change. All the raging and moaning and Chicken Little clucking about the sky falling if anything at all is done for workers has been heard so often before, all the way back to 1830s and the first Factory Act in the UK that provided some specific protection to employees, thanks to Parliament finally deciding Something Must Be Done about the regular reports of carnage in industrial work places. The factory owners produced all the arguments we still hear, with suitable variations: their mines and factories were private property on private land, the arrangements between them and their employees were private contracts freely made, the children in the mills and mines were only injured or killed if they were careless and it was their own fault, if mines exploded or factory buildings collapsed it was an Act of God, wages were solely the result of market forces, the national economy and civilisation would end if the wicked, wicked, government interfered with God’s great plan for private property and private rights to operate freely …
To be clear, the justified criticism of Labor is for making so many promises over the years since it voted for Stage 3 not to change the cuts, with no wriggle room and no hint that changing circumstances might require some revision. Finally amending the cuts was a good move (though could have been better), but the preparation beforehand was atrocious.
Here, here. Albanese certainly had me convinced that he wanted the pernicious S3 to pass unchanged. Labor didn’t even have to vote for them in the first place, and certainly didn’t gain any significant number of votes by apparently supergluing themselves to them at the last election.
How very interesting and pertinent , this historical reference . Thanks for sharing . I have Screenshot it . ?