Umpire Calls Foul Over Attack on Workers Rights

Former AIRC senior deputy president and judge, Paul Munro, has followed up his scathing attack last month on the Howard/Andrews IR platform with a message to employees: watch out, trust only yourselves, and look at the details.

In a paper delivered to a community IR forum in Canberra last week, he said that while the Prime Minister, John Howard, was exhorting employees to "trust me", the question they should be asking was: "Do I trust my present and future employer as a participant in the industrial system, and what should I trust him, her or them to do?"

And the answer?

"Common sense," he said, and "all available evidence points to a racecourse certainty. Employer participants in the labour market, of their own volition or under compulsion from competitors, will push down as fast as they can on terms and conditions or employment no longer secured in any way by the safety net.

"For those of you on salaries or incomes about $80,000 or so, if your job is held securely, you may not be much affected by the outcome of that certainty. You can fairly safely continue not to listen, trust John Howard all you like, or whatever.

"The rest of you ought to pay some attention. The Plan will result in a push down on terms and conditions of employment that relate to the pattern of work, times of attendance, rostering, overtime loadings, shift and other extraneous loadings and allowances."

Munro said the workers most affected would be casuals, women in part-time jobs, and anyone faced with a take-it or leave-it recruitment policy for an independent contractor or an AWA-only job.

The take-it-or-leave-it requirement, he said, would be "especially painful for a person whose eligibility for a CentreLink benefit turns upon not rejecting acceptable employment".

Munro continued that Commonwealth employees, including CSIRO and Australian Protective Service staff, should also pay close attention. Budget allocations, including specific-purpose grants to the states, had already been made conditional upon staff being subjected to the Coalition's de-collectivisation and individual contract negotiation policies.

The Minister's own department's was offering new starters AWAs only, "distorting and compromising public administration precepts and principles".

Munro said his "primary message" - directed to employees or workers on wage and contract incomes below $80,000-a-year - was: "Look to your defences. Trust only yourself. Look to the details".

"Community understanding will only grow if the detail, the fine print, is explained in a way that brings the potential impact home to an actual workplace, or an unemployed person's exigency."

Providing an example of how an AWA or non-union collective deal paying ordinary rates only could lead to a minimum wage worker being $31.85 worse-off a week, he said the Howard/Andrews plan would "open the way to reductions in take home pay that dwarf the amounts said to have been at issue in debates about the appropriate level of the $12.74 minimum hourly rate."