The
traditional habit of Australian governments returned with somewhat
thinned majorities is to thicken their position with a fight for the
centre. Hawke did after 1984, Howard after 1998.
But Turnbull has chosen instead to chow down on his own wafer-thin reelection and spit out what he doesn’t like – namely, any Australian encumbered with the gauche obligation of performing waged work.
With the “Protecting Vulnerable Workers Bill”, which comes before the senate next week, Turnbull is putting even more legislation to strip people of their workplace rights before the parliament, even though Australia’s present industrial relations laws are “not only in breach of international law, they are without peer among advanced economies with a tradition of civil liberty in oppressing the right to strike”, according to ABC’s Stephen Long.
His government doing so coincides with some other newsworthy industrial revelations. Yes, just like everyone said, Turnbull’s $4-an-hour Path programme really is a youth exploitation scheme that undercuts real wages in our economy. Yes, the majority-Aboriginal workers obliged into his much-expanded “community development programme” in remote areas really are being left without food for failing to meet discriminatory work demands over and above “work for the dole”. Yes, under his watch the Fair Work Commission really made the unfathomable decision to cut penalty rates, and now has cancelled, the entire enterprise agreement covering Murdoch University staff. 3,500 people who already work in one of the most insecure and casualised industries in Australia have just lost the protection, wages and conditions they negotiated with their employer in good faith.
Industrial lawyer and advocate, Josh Bornstein, is unambiguous on the implications of the decision. “The Murdoch University decision shows how easy it is for employers under our legal system to quickly eliminate employment conditions obtained from decades of collective bargaining,” he told me.
Turnbull, of course, is not intervening. Is it an act of punishment
towards those from whom Turnbull has lost favour? Like a child denied a
chocolate bar at the checkout, whose frustrated entitlement impels him
to come back with a brick to smash up the shop?
Or is it just that now that the Tories have created their neoliberal wonderland, they’re just plum out ideas? Where $65bn tax freebies can be handed out to corporate Australia, where penalty rates have been cut and 40% of the workforce is already casualised, the Coalition only really has one policy yearning yet to fulfil. It’s obviously not job creation, an education nation, health outcomes, social cohesion, solving the energy crisis or action for the climate. Not when underemployment is something Michaelia Cash boasts about, where Simon Birmingham tells universities to “get used to” funding cuts and fee increases. Not where there’s a postal survey on the right to marry and “energy week” extends as far as “billing better”.
It’s the complete annihilation of the last remaining rights of working people and the unions that fight for those rights.
How else to explain the crueller details of that very “Protecting Vulnerable Workers” Bill, in which mockery of the labouring classes is referenced in the title? It is a Dickensian cartoon of faux-benevolence pretending at the prevention 7-11 style wage exploitation. The bill actually expands the government’s ABCC-style industrial thuggery into every workplace in Australia. First they came for the construction workers … then, should this bill in its present form pass, any worker at any workplace who took what should be legal industrial action could be coerced before the Fair Work Ombudsman to give testimony against themselves, their colleagues, their union. And failure to comply with a FWO notice can bring with it a $126,000 penalty. Unlike the rights provided actual accused criminals, there will be no right to silence.
Delicate bourgeoises of the suburbs may imagine that such powers – never, by the way, actually requested by the Fair Work Ombudsman – are only enforceable on the grubby and industrially unseen. Be aware; each one of those nice, middle-class Fairfax journalists who participated in the “fair go” action last year would have been liable to interrogation without the right to silence should this bill have been in effect.
It’s coercion designed to frighten and intimidate workers from taking the industrial action that the RBA - the RBA! - insists is necessary to restore wage growth to the economy.
“Employers are using a wide array of strategies to drive down wages and conditions of employment, deunionise the work force and, over time, eliminate workplace bargaining,” Josh Bornstein says.
Condemning the Murdoch decision, ACTU secretary Sally McManus did not waste words. “This shifts power radically to employers,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
And the colour of one’s collar is no protection in this government’s modern industrial state. What they have done to too many already, they are more than prepared to do to us all.
But Turnbull has chosen instead to chow down on his own wafer-thin reelection and spit out what he doesn’t like – namely, any Australian encumbered with the gauche obligation of performing waged work.
With the “Protecting Vulnerable Workers Bill”, which comes before the senate next week, Turnbull is putting even more legislation to strip people of their workplace rights before the parliament, even though Australia’s present industrial relations laws are “not only in breach of international law, they are without peer among advanced economies with a tradition of civil liberty in oppressing the right to strike”, according to ABC’s Stephen Long.
His government doing so coincides with some other newsworthy industrial revelations. Yes, just like everyone said, Turnbull’s $4-an-hour Path programme really is a youth exploitation scheme that undercuts real wages in our economy. Yes, the majority-Aboriginal workers obliged into his much-expanded “community development programme” in remote areas really are being left without food for failing to meet discriminatory work demands over and above “work for the dole”. Yes, under his watch the Fair Work Commission really made the unfathomable decision to cut penalty rates, and now has cancelled, the entire enterprise agreement covering Murdoch University staff. 3,500 people who already work in one of the most insecure and casualised industries in Australia have just lost the protection, wages and conditions they negotiated with their employer in good faith.
Industrial lawyer and advocate, Josh Bornstein, is unambiguous on the implications of the decision. “The Murdoch University decision shows how easy it is for employers under our legal system to quickly eliminate employment conditions obtained from decades of collective bargaining,” he told me.
Or is it just that now that the Tories have created their neoliberal wonderland, they’re just plum out ideas? Where $65bn tax freebies can be handed out to corporate Australia, where penalty rates have been cut and 40% of the workforce is already casualised, the Coalition only really has one policy yearning yet to fulfil. It’s obviously not job creation, an education nation, health outcomes, social cohesion, solving the energy crisis or action for the climate. Not when underemployment is something Michaelia Cash boasts about, where Simon Birmingham tells universities to “get used to” funding cuts and fee increases. Not where there’s a postal survey on the right to marry and “energy week” extends as far as “billing better”.
It’s the complete annihilation of the last remaining rights of working people and the unions that fight for those rights.
How else to explain the crueller details of that very “Protecting Vulnerable Workers” Bill, in which mockery of the labouring classes is referenced in the title? It is a Dickensian cartoon of faux-benevolence pretending at the prevention 7-11 style wage exploitation. The bill actually expands the government’s ABCC-style industrial thuggery into every workplace in Australia. First they came for the construction workers … then, should this bill in its present form pass, any worker at any workplace who took what should be legal industrial action could be coerced before the Fair Work Ombudsman to give testimony against themselves, their colleagues, their union. And failure to comply with a FWO notice can bring with it a $126,000 penalty. Unlike the rights provided actual accused criminals, there will be no right to silence.
Delicate bourgeoises of the suburbs may imagine that such powers – never, by the way, actually requested by the Fair Work Ombudsman – are only enforceable on the grubby and industrially unseen. Be aware; each one of those nice, middle-class Fairfax journalists who participated in the “fair go” action last year would have been liable to interrogation without the right to silence should this bill have been in effect.
It’s coercion designed to frighten and intimidate workers from taking the industrial action that the RBA - the RBA! - insists is necessary to restore wage growth to the economy.
“Employers are using a wide array of strategies to drive down wages and conditions of employment, deunionise the work force and, over time, eliminate workplace bargaining,” Josh Bornstein says.
Condemning the Murdoch decision, ACTU secretary Sally McManus did not waste words. “This shifts power radically to employers,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
And the colour of one’s collar is no protection in this government’s modern industrial state. What they have done to too many already, they are more than prepared to do to us all.
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