While the financial crisis and economic downturn has played havoc with the Government’s emissions trading plans, it occupies the same tactical position on industrial relations reform that it did last year. Which is to say, completely dominant, and ready to use the issue to inflict maximum hurt on the Coalition.
Anyone who reckons different — viz., The Australian’s anti-union cheer squad — is letting their ideology get in the way of the facts.
For a while, employer groups were starting to get traction with their campaign against elements of the Julia Gillard’s bill, but issues like union right of entry and compulsory bargaining never got any real momentum behind them. The issues are too arcane to really generate extensive debate.
More specifically, the argument that the economic slowdown required the Government to revise its bill in favour of employers was never going to work. Even a prolonged recession will only send unemployment to 10-11% tops. That leaves nine out of 10 workforce participants in a job. Arguing that they should surrender their rights for the sake of the employability of those without a job isn’t going to work. And if anything, people are likely to feel that a recession is the time when their industrial rights need the most protection, not when they and their kids can walk out of one job and into another like they can during a boom.
In any event, the impact of the Government’s reforms are likely to be swamped by rising unemployment from the slowdown.
The Senate dynamics are also more favourable to the Government. There is still talk of the Government’s mandate, which is the latest a mention of a mandate has been heard in the electoral cycle for many years. The Greens have been pushing for more worker-friendly provisions, including greater freedom to bargan, and now want to add restrictions on executive remuneration to the bill when it comes before Parliament this week. Bob Brown tipped his hand, however, when he said late this morning the Greens wouldn’t be blocking the bill — although he did intimate that the success of Green amendments might make Government-Green negotiations on forthcoming legislation like the ETS easier.
Steve Fielding voted against the WorkChoices legislation and Nick Xenophon said immediately after the election that his position on WorkChoices was much closer to the ALP’s than the Liberals’ and that it had been the primary reason for the Howard Government’s defeat, although he wanted some balance on the issue of unfair dismissal.
On that basis, you can see why Julia Gillard is happy to negotiate with the cross-benches and leave the Coalition to stew in its own ideological juices.
The Coalition’s official position on IR is to keep as low a profile as possible and hope the issue goes away. Can you name the Liberals’ IR spokesman? And no, it’s not Peter Costello, who will happily talk about the subject all day.
There are plenty in the Coalition party room who want to take the fight up to the Government on IR. Some in fact wanted to make IR the issue on which they took a stand rather than the stimulus package. The sentiment is especially strong among senators, possibly because they have not had to endure Julia Gillard beating them up in Question Time on Workchoices, which is a fate Coalition MPs will face this week.
This is not about denying the outcome of the 2007 election, although there are more than a few Coalition MPs who still blame it all on the ACTU’s “scare campaign”. Rather, in their view, this is about core Liberal values, and abandoning them for electoral benefit is not acceptable. The internal debate is therefore one of how their opposition is expressed so as to minimise the damage.
Given the Liberal Party haven’t managed to take a trick lately, it may yet become another debacle.
In my blog http://chriswhiteonline.org I post arguments that relate a different political story.
The government did not develop the Fair Work Bill (FWB) as a response to this most severe global capitalist financial crisis since the great depression. This means the FWB requires substantial amendments to better defend the economic, social and occupational interests of workers during a recession.
The FWB shortfalls outlined in my blog and by unions and labour law academics in the Senate submission for the protection and advancement of workers’ rights with devils in the details are significant. While welcoming the genuine reforms, the FWB is new ‘1984 doublespeak spin’ that ‘WorkChoices is dead’ and the FWB establishes ‘fair rights for workers’ and a ‘fair balance for all’ when again corporate interests rule over workers’ interests.
The collective bargaining system is not fair as the FWB deliberately retains the repressive regime against industrial action. The Deputy Prime Minister DPM’s ‘clear rules for the right to strike’ are but a cut and paste from WorkChoices. These strike restric bring shame on an ALP government. The failure to provide for the right to strike to enable workers to respond to the environmental crisis is but one example.
Is this fairness we can believe in? This Parliament can respond to the twin challenges of the GFC and the environmental crisis by recognising the legitimacy of the unions’ Your Rights at Work’ voice in the democratic elections by not selling out the justifiable political demands for workers’ rights.
I use in my blog the illustration of how Tracey – in the famous ACTU TV ad – concerned about her workplace rights and looking after her family. In many respects, Tracey is not better off at all, as key sections of WorkChoices remain and Tracey has no rights at all; e,g no right for friendly family employer response; no right to unfair dismissal case when in small business; on notice of redundancy or retrenchment payments;…
Small, medium and micro enterprises give rise to the overwhelming majority of private sector employment in Australia.
The egregious presumption that “issues like union right of entry and compulsory bargaining” are “too arcane” for the punters is a typically left-wing delusion.
Bernard Keane does not even bother to attempt a single analytical evaluation of the government’s Fair Work Bill.
Why bother examining the government when Bernard can indolently and contemptuously sidetrack and hoodwink ‘we the people’ with this claptrap?
I preface these comments by saying I don’t like anything too big because it is too tempting for that entity to push everybody around.
That said here we go….
This is the issue which cost the Liberal Party the last federal election and they look like they are about to get sucker punched again.
The original purpose of the IR legislation as I understand, before Big Business became part of it, was to stop Big Union bashing up Small Business so that little guys who were trying to make a go of something in their own right, and who did not have the financial or physical resources to fight Big Union, weren’t pushed out of business and sent to the wall destroying their own lives as well those of their families and their employees.
But Big Union hired Big Spin which extremely cleverly turned the argument into Big Business bashing up Defenceless Employee, the thing the legislation was originally trying to prevent happening to small business. Clever hey!
But the dopey Liberal Party just sat there and let it happen. Were they slipped a bait or what? Maybe they just didn’t twig to what was happening?
Now once Big Business and Big Legal got into the act, then the whole point of the legislation was going to get turned on its ear and the public who still have a spark of human instinct left, however dim, recognised that this was probably not going to be good for them. Once they worked that out, the new Labor leader had an armchair ride to the Golden Lodge instead of an ignominious exit via a Werriwa taxi.
I guess JamesK doesn’t like unions. When it’s all said and done, unions are a bit of a stalking horse for those who seek absolute dominance for employers in the employment process. In my experience, unions are irrelevant but I’m happy for them to advocate for largish groups with, perhaps less bargaining power. Whay ever you think, the legislation certainly doesn’t provide for an untrammelled workers’ paradise and if you think it does, yours must be a very mean, small world indeed. Anyway James, my point was to form your own opinion. You seem to have done so in spades. Good on you. Take it to the ballot box and see how you go.
For all the talk, the Government’s Bill is still pretty employer friendly. People don’t have to rely on Bernard or other scribblers to interpret this stuff, there’s no arcane knowledge required and regardless of the knots lawyers will tie the legislation up in over the next 10 years, the explanatory memorandum and the Senate Committee report make the issues abundantly clear. I can’r quite see what everyone’s so upset about.