Kevin Rudd marked the second anniversary of the government's Work Choices laws, saying it was now down to trench warfare until election day.
Mr Rudd said Peter Costello's claims that he had suddenly decided Work Choices should go no further were not believable as they stood against everything he had done in his political career.
"It just ain't right and it is not decent for working people to have to struggle to retain their penalty rates and overtime and some decency in the workplace," Mr Rudd said.
"It is a set of laws which don't belong in this country.
"To get there (to abolishing Work Choices), it is trench warfare from here to election day."
Mr Rudd's comments coincide with media reports that the government's workplaces relations watchdog had rejected half of all Australian Workplace Agreements as being unfair.
Mr Rudd said the Liberal candidate for the Adelaide seat of Makin, Bob Day, was a former office bearer of the HR Nicholls Society, the extreme right-wing industrial relations think tank of the nation.
"It is where Peter Costello learned to read and write," he said, adding that Mr Costello had stated previously that only a minimum wage was necessary in an IR system and all else should be up for negotiation.
"That is the scorched earth policy, that is the law of the jungle on industrial relations that Peter Costello, Bob Day and the HR Nicholls Society stand for."
Labor deputy leader and workplace relations spokeswoman Julia Gillard said figures released on Friday showed a backlog of almost 140,000 agreements in the office of the IR watchdog.
"How many piles of paper is that sitting in the workplace authority," she said.
"Then they can't be clear about the status of lots of these agreements because they are circulating around somewhere between the authority and the employers.
"You imagine being a small business who just wants to know 'Is the agreement that I have given my worker OK?'. You won't get an answer for month and months."
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