Spacehamster’s Blog

I don’t often like proselityzing about politics, outside of a few private forums - but there are some issues I feel strongly enough about that I don’t mind posting my views. This is one of them. I tried to come up with a clever quip, but I think these new IR laws are far too momentous to joke about. The number of changes that the Federal Government is making will completely transform the market for every single worker and business in Australia. For business, this is absolutely fantastic - the new laws give them complete and total hire-and-fire powers over their employees, with no interference from the unions. For employees…well, it takes away many of the rights that we had under the “old” IR regime.

Take a look at this list of changes (taken from this Age article) -

These changes are called WorkChoices. Will I be able to choose whether I work under a collective agreement, Australian Workplace Agreement or award?
No. As now, that will depend on your negotiating power with your employer. Under the proposal, employers will be able to require workers, including existing workers, to take an AWA as a condition of employment.

The employer could instead choose to negotiate a collective agreement, which must be approved by most of the workers it covers, or the employer could choose to be covered by the relevant award. A worker cannot be dismissed for refusing to sign or negotiate an AWA. If an existing agreement expires and employer and worker cannot agree on a new one, they are in no-man’s-land. Their relative industrial strength will determine what happens.

The Government says this legislation will lead to higher wages. How will it do that?
That is really not the purpose of this legislation. Its central purpose is to roll back decades of union gains through awards and collective agreements, and return wage determination to a contract between employer and employee, based on their relative market power. For most employees, this will not lead to higher wages.
But there will be exceptions. Workers with special skills or those who are more forceful negotiators could do better by negotiating on their own rather than with their colleagues.

The response among some people has been dissapointingly apathetic. The believe that these changes will not mean anything - especially for medium- to high-income workers in highly skilled jobs like IT. Most IT people are used to negotiating for individual contracts, they’re used to being hired- and fired- on a regular basis, and they don’t think Unions are really all that useful. What these IR laws actually do is spread this philosophy and environment to markets that have never seen or experienced it before - and that’s where the controversy arises.

Regardless of how any of us feel (and that includes myself) - just keep in mind that a large majority of Australians voted for John Howard’s Government in the last Federal Election. By doing so they gave him an electoral mandate to make these changes. Surely people that voted for John Howard did so because they also supported the new IR and Terrorism laws? If they didn’t want these laws to pass, why else would they vote for his Government?

Right?