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Industrial Relations Omnibus Explainer

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The Government’s IR omnibus was gutted last week before it passed the Senate. I was disappointed to see that the wage theft and enforcement measures were not passed. The insertion of a detailed definition of casual worker is good for certainty.

The inclusion of a right to get conversion from a casual position to a permanent position was also a welcome addition. Industrial Relations must return to the fundamental relationship between the employer and employee. The complexity of the Fair Work Act is the cause of many of our problems in IR. It must be simplified if we are going to have a productive country.

Transcript

Last Thursday’s industrial relations changes are a win for employees and for employers. I was disappointed though to not see more, especially the wage theft and enforcement measures in Schedule 5. I’ve been very vocal and active working for casual miners and workers, and want to share what last Thursday’s changes mean.

Firstly though, the government agreed to my demand for a comprehensive review into the employment of casuals in the Hunter Valley. The government committed to the Fair Work Ombudsman doing a thorough review. Secondly, after almost two years supporting injured casual coal miners, it’s time to look for a broad and complete solution.

I invite the key stakeholders to join me at a round-table to discuss solutions for the problems that I have identified facing many workers in the Hunter and throughout Australia. I will be inviting key stakeholders including unions, employer groups, and government to come together to work cooperatively and then report back on the results.

It’s time the facts came out and are addressed. Thirdly, the IR Club, class-action lawyers, and political parties with vested interests have driven a dishonest misinformation campaign protecting their easy profits and their power over workers.

So now, here are the industrial relations changes and what they mean:

Casual workers now have a pathway for conversion to secure permanent work. There are 2.5 million casuals in Australia. In some industries casuals want to stay as casuals for the loading or for the lifestyle. 830,000 casuals are employed in small business, our country’s largest employer and largest provider of jobs.

Most awards already include casuals. The Black Coal Mining Industry Award though, did not have provision for casuals on production, and only in staff jobs and the unions refused to fix that. Despite that prohibition on casuals, the Hunter Valley CFMEU negotiated and signed enterprise agreements that allowed abuse of casuals.

It did that without casual conversion and that had locked many miners into being casuals forever. Some enterprise agreements that the CFMEU had agreed to were for substantially lower pay rates than mine owner enterprise agreements. I tried many ways to overcome this, yet once I realised that union bosses had signed these enterprise agreements with lower pay, I knew that the workers were then legally bound by that deal.

It’s important to know that some workers value casual employment as a way of getting into the coal industry or as a way of getting more money quickly and then leaving the industry. Workers and employers have a definition of casual employment now that provides clarity to protect all businesses, small and large, and gives workers a fair go.

The definition is complex yet detailed and comprehensive. We negotiated a 12-month review of the new law to identify and rectify any unintended consequences, it’s one of our amendments to protect workers. Employers will be protected from paying twice for casual workers’ entitlements as that could have driven businesses, especially small businesses, insolvent.

And workers can still get their entitlements, and will get their entitlements. Permanent workers will get their entitlements while casuals will continue to be paid a casual loading in lieu of the entitlement, it just means people won’t be paid twice.

This protects small business from double-dipping where workers are paid a casual loading in lieu of entitlements, and then paid for those same entitlements in addition. Now following my commitments and my comments opposing double-dipping, I should have been no surprise that I voted for this Offset clause.

The class-action lawyers and some union bosses who profit from signing the abusive enterprise agreements and then taking employers to court are worried about the changes. Employees in small businesses will have the option to ask for conversion to permanent instead of adding to busy small business employers’ paperwork having to track people.

This will ease small business red tape, and that’s an amendment we added. Preserving all workers’ entitlements and rights means that workers will still be able to file claims for wage theft or to vary enterprise agreements made incorrectly, we made sure of that. Now some enterprise agreements were for substantially lower pay rates than mine owner enterprise agreements on the same site.

Again, it’s the union bosses that signed those agreements and made them law, we can’t do anything about them. Workers have greater flexibility now in seeking to convert to permanent work when it suits them, while the many who want to stay casual can now have that option too.

Having worked at the underground coalface for three years, I proudly admit to having a soft spot for miners. Yet while taking care of miners, I have a responsibility as a national Senator to our whole country, including small business, Australia’s largest employer. Out of the hundreds of awards in place across Australia, only 12 don’t have clauses for casuals.

This law now covers all awards, including coal mining and small business, and miners now have a casual conversion option at last. Though we are also asking the Fair Work Commission to ensure that the awards align with the legislation. When this legislation was first introduced into parliament last year, we immediately wrote to more than 80 stakeholder groups, and invited feedback.

The CFMEU construction division said it was the only invitation they received from a politician. In total, we listened to around 100 groups, some more than once, including the ACTU who had three meetings with me. The big problem for casual coal miners were the cracks they fell through because union bosses were happy to sign agreements knowing there was no definition for a casual coal production worker, and this disadvantaged casual coal miners.

The union didn’t care about that for years. The lack of a definition of casual coal mine worker that the union bosses, the Fair Work Commission, and the Fair Work Ombudsman, and the Government ignored for years until now has caused huge problems for workers. Now we have a definition, and this should only be better for workers.

Groups representing small business as well as individual business owners have been very positive about the changes that One Nation advocated for economic recovery.

These include: the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia, COSBOA,

the Small Business Association of Australia,

the Australian Retailers Association,

the Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman,

the Australian Hotels Association, taking care of pubs,

the Australian Industry Group,

the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry,

and the Queensland Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Opponents of these reforms have been treated harshly by employers and employees alike. For example, the ACTU reportedly copped it from small business employees. Simply saying it’s bad for workers, it’s not enough to describe this legislation, that’s nonsense.

Some workers are taking time to understand the changes, yet small business employees and employers have been quick to see the benefits. The main negatives we faced have been from class-action lawyers and the Industrial Relations Club, so we must be doing something right for workers.

The negotiation process has confirmed some core truths: Firstly, the Fair Work Act is the real culprit. It’s six bloody inches thick. How can any worker or small business know their entitlements, rights, and protections? They can’t. And that’s why workers have lost entitlements and unions have lost members.

The Fair Work Act is the root cause of the complexity and problems, and we must do something about that. And we had success during negotiations with unions and employer groups agreeing to my invitation to them to discuss what employers and employees need in order to restore Australia’s productive capacity, and to give workers a fair go.

The Rudd-Gillard-Shorten Fair Work Act has led to a drop in union membership and a deterioration of management and executives right across our country. People are going around the laws. Workers and employers are both losing and hurting. Employers could not afford the complex system or the cost, and nor can the workers.

We need to restore the primary workplace relationship between employees and employers to make work safer and more satisfying for our workers and employers, and make it more productive for our country’s future.

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Will the government make a commitment to actual IR reform?

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Instead of propping up the industrial relations club with excessive, needlessly complex legislation, we need to simplify it. Regulations are written at the moment for the few people, employers and employees, who do the wrong thing.

They should be written for the majority of good people, the fine Australians, with severe penalties for the bad.

We need to turn it upside down: instead of penalising the 100 per cent with the ridiculous workplace arrangements, we need to penalise the real shonks, the real criminals.

Transcript

As an Australian who has been elected to serve the people of Queensland and Australia, I’m very proud to say that I have worked in many countries and I am genuinely proud of Australian workers. We have a phenomenal human resource in this country, unequalled anywhere in the world—the initiative, the hard work, the honesty and the integrity of workers in this country, and of many businesses in this country, especially small businesses, which are the engine room of our economy. More people are employed in small business than in any other sector of the economy. We need to get back the dynamism that has been lost in Australia—lost largely because of the decisions that come out of this building.

The MPI is ‘The Morrison government’s failure to address job security is giving companies that exploit workers an unfair advantage against honest employers.’Let me talk about the example in the Hunter Valley of the exploitation, the abuse and the casual discarding of people who are tossed on the scrap heap when they’re burnt out. Casuals have been exploited in the Hunter Valley by BHP, a major mining company, and Chandler Macleod Group, one of the world’s largest labour hire firms, an offshoot of Recruit Holdings from Japan, with the complicity of the Hunter Valley division of the CFMEU. It would not have happened without all three being complicit and working together.

But let’s go back to the root cause. The root of casualisation started in small business because employers were so confused by the complexity of hiring people and so confused by the complexity when there was a problem to discuss, so they went to employing casuals because it became too hard to deal with disciplinary issues in small business.

Quite often we see a small business having problems with an employee who’s stolen something from their business, and the small business owner then simply trying to address that ends up just paying $8,000 or $10,000. We heard last week from COSBOA, the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, about some companies, some small businesses, paying $20,000 in shut-up money for problems to go away. One of the root causes of the insecurity in this country is the highly complex, needlessly complex and destructive industrial relations situation.

Then what we saw was large companies taking the small business model and using casuals for a ‘try before we buy’. In other words, they would watch the casual worker on their mine site, in their business, and if he or she came up with the goods then they would hire them. That has led to extreme abuse of workers in this country. It’s led to safety hazards, which I have complained about in my submission to the Grosvenor inquiry. But in the Hunter Valley it led to miners being intimidated and being threatened with the loss of their jobs if they reported safety incidents. How stupid is a company when that happens? They’re losing that prime source of information about their company.

I want to give Mr Bukarica, the national legal adviser for the CFMEU mining division, a huge compliment. In Townsville he had the guts, the integrity and the courage to acknowledge that the Hunter Valley CFMEU is part of the problem at those mines in the Hunter Valley because they enabled casualisation to happen. I also want to give him praise because he said that the CFMEU has not done enough for casuals. Indeed, they have caused the casual issue in the Hunter Valley and the casual abuse of casuals. And he’s admitted that his union will need to do more about it.

So what we see is the mess that’s been created in the past by labour laws that have become far too complex and by the Liberals not addressing this issue in 2016 when they should have. Casuals show us the pain of people at work. Casuals are also a sign of the failed industrial relations situation—no getting away from it. What the government is doing in its latest industrial relations legislation, proposed to come before the Senate next month, is shifting the liability for that mess from large business to small business. They’re helping a couple of large companies manage their risk.

We’ve approached this differently. We’ve gone out to listen. We’ve written to 80 different organisations—employers, employee groups, unions, union bosses, welfare associations, organisations, small business groups—and we’ve asked them for their advice, their views. They have come and given us their advice. They said no-one else has invited them to do that; we’re the only ones. In addressing this legislation, we have three aims that ensure security for Australian workers, whether they be in small businesses or large businesses, and security for small businesses and large businesses.

Our three aims are to protect honest workers, to protect small businesses and to restore Australia’s productive capacity. We see the employer-employee relationship as fundamental. It is the primary workplace relationship, and that’s what’s needed to empower workers. We’ve got the best workers in the world. What’s needed is for employers and employees to work together—empowered employees and empowered employers—because that is the only way to create jobs. Government doesn’t create jobs. As much as the Labor Party and the Liberal Party talk about it, government does not create jobs. Honest workers create jobs. Small businesses create jobs. Large employers create jobs. The government creates the environment. Labor and Liberal governments have stuffed this country’s workplace environment.

The Morrison government talks about security and recovery from COVID. How can that be possible when we’ve destroyed our electricity sector? How can it be possible when we’ve got one of the worse tax systems in the world? How can it be possible when we’re not supplying the right infrastructure? How can it be possible when we haven’t got the skills development needed? How can it be possible when we’ve got overregulation? Just go and talk to people, not only small or large business employers but also employees, who are sick to death of energy prices, which have gone from the cheapest in the world to the highest in the world under this government and its predecessor, the Labor Party.

Instead of propping up the industrial relations club with excessive, needlessly complex legislation, we need to simplify it. In fact, I put that to Peter Strong when he was in my office last week. I said to him that regulations are written at the moment for the few people, employers and employees, who do the wrong thing. They should be written for the majority of good people, the fine Australians, with severe penalties for the bad. We need to turn it upside down: instead of penalising the 100 per cent with the ridiculous workplace arrangements, we need to penalise the real shonks, the real criminals. Instead of assuming people are bad—employees are bad, employers are bad—we need to free people to produce. We need to penalise and handicap those who deserve it. That’s what we need in this country: empowering, not frightening.

What we see at the moment is an IR club of big employers, big industry associations, large unions, employee consultants, employer consultants, industrial relations consultants and, above all, lawyers. Again I come back to the ETU legal adviser in Townsville, Michael Wright, and Mr Bukarica from the CFMMEU, who both said that we have far too many lawyers involved in industrial relations and that’s why it’s a mess. They both said they want fewer lawyers, that they want to remove the lawyers. Full credit to the CFMMEU mining division and full credit to the ETU for saying that. The big companies and the crooks are the ones who do the best out of the industrial relations club, because they have deep pockets and they can afford to fund the lawyers and others who live off the backs of Australian workers.

What we need to get back to is a simple workplace relationship. Will Labor make a commitment to properly and honestly reform IR? Will you? Will the Liberal Party and the National Party make a commitment to properly and honestly reform IR, to free people so that they’re free to compete with the people in Korea, China, India, Africa, Malaysia and Singapore? That’s the way to get security of employment: by empowering people. One Nation is the party of energy security and affordability. One Nation is the party of job security.

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