Newcastle view: Rudd's new work laws

Cheryl McGregor
Newcastle Herald Monday 06 July 2009

On one of the back roads to Charlestown there's a very high power pole. It's on the hill side of a steep road, which makes it even higher.

And right at the top of the pole, in a spot where only a cherry-picker or a supremely confident lineman could reach, is a "Your Rights At Work" sticker.

At a bet, it'll stay there till it wears off, like the old 1940s "Menzies Out!" slogan under a railway bridge up the Valley.

It'll take a while to wear off, too, because those stickers were apparently made to last. They still line up on the bumper bars of cars parked down our battler-neighbourhood street at night: "I Fish and I Vote" plus YRAW; nurses' and teachers' pay campaign stickers plus YRAW; and every known version of how various tradesmen Do It, plus YRAW.

YRAW, brainchild of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was probably one of the best organised, most comprehensive, most expensive and most desperate political campaigns the country has ever seen.

The desperation came from the evidence that Australia's system of industrial arbitration, praised even by a passing Pope (John Paul, 1986) as a "unique system" that had "helped defend the rights of workers", was being systematically and deliberately destroyed.

Fear of that drove 586,000 Australians onto the streets on a sweltering November day in 2005. I spent my birthday that year marching flat-footedly from the Workers Club to the rally on The Foreshore (constantly outpaced by a seven-month-pregnant colleague).

The ACTU kept that momentum going for two years and nine days, ending with a walloping win for Labor on November 24, 2007, on a promise to wipe out the WorkChoices laws that had spearheaded the destruction of the arbitration system.

Last week the Rudd Government kept that promise, delivering in spades: 13 major pieces of legislation that supported the right of workers to bargain collectively and set up a new authority, Fair Work Australia, that will take over and expand the work of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission.

Small wonder that the president of the ACTU, Sharan Burrow, urged workers across the country to make it a day of celebration.

Did I? No. Did you? Can't say I saw it, and it's a bit hard to miss half a million people celebrating.

Partly, I guess, we felt flat because somewhere between 2005 and now, somebody pulled the plug on the world's economy.

But also partly, I suspect, because it's not yet clear whether we've got what we asked for.

For one thing, despite an election that suggested that the public wants unions in the country's industrial mix, some sections of the Opposition apparently still don't see them as rightful players.

"The unions have a seat at the table regardless of whether employers want them or not," huffed their spokesman on employment, Mr Michael Keenan, to news media.

It would be pleasant to believe that human nature is so benign that individual workers could sit down with their bosses and work out fair conditions without anyone else involved.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened when individual contracts were in force. In the first month of their operation, every single one filed cost an employee at least one of the working conditions that were supposedly protected, and 16 per cent overrode them all.

Employers, too, are skittish, They are worried about the extension of unfair dismissal laws to small businesses. Some fear that a declared union intention to seek a pay rise of up to 6 per cent will lead to the return of "pattern bargaining" the system in which a union, having secured a favourable condition from one employer, uses that to pressure others into giving the same.

The Australian Industry Group, representing about 10,000 employers, has already tried to corner the debate by insisting that the new rules don't allow it.

The ACTU batted that one back to the bowler: "No union is going to bargain a company out of business," Ms Burrow said.

At Fair Work Australia, the new body is cutting its teeth on what may seem a less controversial issue, with a case before it from the previously unrepresented staff of luxury hotels.

But, since a claimed 70 per cent of these workers are casuals, the decision, whatever it is, will have wide repercussions in the food and hospitality industries.

Even the ACTU, while playing a straight bat Ms Burrow dismissed as "vicious rumour" any suggestion that the union peak council wasn't entirely happy with the way promises have been kept is gently suggesting that there is "more work to do" to see that unfair laws covering construction industry workers are withdrawn.

Nobody's out in the streets protesting. But we're not all celebrating yet, either.