March 1, 2021

Unions

“Cruel” IR omnibus bill passes Lower House 

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The Morrison Government’s industrial relations omnibus bill has passed its first hurdle by being passed in the Federal House of Representatives. 

The bill seeks to shift power away from employees towards employer groups and big business. It will do this by changing current bargaining dynamics, re-defining the definition of a “casual worker” and removing current rights to dispute resolution through the Fair Work Commission that workers and their unions currently hold. 

Australian Unions President, Michele O’Neil, said that “The Bill fails to address the systemic issue of insecure work in Australia. 

“It shifts power towards big business and leaves working people worse off. 

The bill was supported by the Liberals and Nationals, as well as independent MP Zali Stegall. It was opposed by Labor, the Greens, Centre Alliance, Katter’s Australia Party and independent MPs Andrew Wilkie and Dr Helen Haines. 

Travel exemptions for family members of nurses and midwives

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Josh from the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre shares with The Lamp some information around getting travel exemptions for family members of nurses and midwives.

Immediate family members of temporary visa holders in Australia will need a travel exemption from the Australian Government before travelling to Australia.

To be eligible for a travel exemption, immediate family members of temporary visa holders should generally:

  • Hold a valid visa for Australia; and
  • Have compelling and compassionate reasons for coming to Australia.

Compelling and compassionate reasons may include that the family member in Australia is providing critical skills (e.g. a nurse) and there is a high risk they will depart Australia if the overseas family member cannot come to Australia.

The family member should provide documentary evidence to support their travel exemption request, including evidence of the ongoing criticality of the skill of the family member in Australia.  Evidence from a state or territory government is preferable.

Travel exemption requests can be lodged here.

If a travel exemption is granted, people travelling to Australia are also required to provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test taken no later than 72 hours before their scheduled departure.

If a person travels to Australia without a travel exemption their visa can be cancelled at the border and they can be detained and removed from Australia.  Visa cancellation and deportation can also affect any future visa applications to come to Australia.

The above is not intended to be relied on as legal advice.  Before planning for family members to travel to Australia you should contact NSW Nurses and Midwives Association for a referral to Visa Assist, the free and confidential immigration advice service for union members.

Scott Morrison’s workplace laws will hurt workers who saved the economy

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Navigating the dangers of a global pandemic is not the only threat that Australian workers and their families have to deal with in 2021.

They are also faced with a threat to their job security and livelihoods posed by Scott Morrison’s proposed new workplace laws.

True to form, the Liberal Government has resorted to its old playbook when faced with any economic challenge – cutting workers’ pay and conditions – as though it were some magic solution to a problem they neither have the policies to address or the commitment to fix.

With over 15% of the labour force either unemployed or underemployed (that’s over 2 million Australians), what’s Scott Morrison solution?

It is the same old trickle-down economic dog-and-pony show the Liberals have been hawking about for decades now, and once again, unions and workers everywhere are standing up and saying no to a failed ideology that has only the interests of big business and the well off in mind.

So, what’s in the legislation that Attorney-General Christian Porter dropped in Parliament just before Xmas?

It’s a grab bag of the business lobby’s wish list favourites that contain some real nasties for workers, including.

  • From cleaners to miners, aged care workers to waiters, checkout operators to nurses – all could take a massive pay cut if Morrison is successful in suspending the Better Off Overall Test.
  • If you abolish something called the Better Off Overall Test, guess what will happen: workers will be worse off.
  • Workers could lose their public holiday penalty rates. They could also lose their weekend, early morning and late-night shift penalties under these changes.

ACTU President Michele O’Neil has made it clear that Australian Unions will stand their ground in opposing the Government’s plans to shift the burden of recovering from the pandemic’s economic impact squarely onto the shoulders of Australian workers.

“The Government has listened to the more extreme elements of the big business lobby, and they have breached their own assurances that no worker would be worse off,” Ms O’Neil said.

“So if they proceed with [the bill], then they’ll pay the price of that.”

ACTU Secretary, Sally McManus, is adamant that the proposed laws shift the power imbalance further in favour of employers and big business, which would be a disaster for workers.

“This is what happens when there is a serious power imbalance in our workplace laws. Employer’s having too much power equals very low wage growth”, she tweeted.

When the full scale of the COVID-19 pandemic began to materialise in early 2020, it was Australian workers who faced the greatest risks posed by this deadly virus. These were the very people who stepped up and took on the responsibility of shepherding a frightened nation through uncertain times.

They are the frontline workers in our hospitals and nursing homes dealing with the sick and frail, retail workers in shops and supermarkets serving stressed and worried customers, public service workers who kept the wheels of government turning, and educators who kept Australian kids learning and gave them a sense of normalcy amidst the crippling uncertainty of lockdowns and outbreaks.

Those workers kept their end of the bargain by ensuring Australia functioned at great risk to their own personal well-being.

And what will be their reward for the hard-won gains of stabilising our communities and keeping the risk of a widespread outbreak of the virus to a minimum?

Further cuts to their pay and conditions and the worry of infection being joined by the unease of not knowing if you’ll have enough work or money to pay the bills and send your kids to school.

Scott Morrison’s proposed laws are not only cruel, they’re economic trash as well.

Australia’s economy is driven by the engine room of domestic spending. Decent wages and secure work are the foundation stones that gives ordinary Australians the confidence to spend, generating more jobs and economic growth, something that benefits all of us.

There is no greater example of this than the success of the union led JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs that the Morrison Government finally agreed to after being scared into action by the appalling scenes of endless job queues snaking around Australia’s suburban streets.

The money from those programs kept the economic heartbeat of the nation ticking during the pandemic, and the principles underpinning the success of those programs remain as true then as they were then.

The key to a better, sustainable economy is one that puts workers, families and communities at the top of the list of priorities, not the interests of big business and consolidating wealth in even fewer hands.

Australian workers deserve to have an economy that serves their best interests and puts the wellbeing of their families and communities at the top of its agenda.

Scott Morrison’s workplace changes are a betrayal of the heroes of the pandemic.

And Australian workers need to make that loud a clear.

Francis Leach is a journalist who has worked for Triple J, SEN 1116, ABC and The New Daily. This article was first published by Australian Unions. You can listen and subscribe to Francis Leach and Sally Rugg’s new podcast “On the Job” here

Find out more about the campaign against Scott Morrisons’ proposed workplace laws here

 

Solidarity is at the heart of our COVID success

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The pandemic shows that when union voices are listened to, the country benefits.

To beat COVID, Australians have put individual needs aside to protect others, to protect strangers, to protect the whole, says ACTU Secretary, Sally McManus.

“At the heart of Australia’s social contract is a commitment to collectivism – a notion that when any of us stumble, the rest of us will be there to help them back up,” she told the National Press Club (NPC).

“And Australians overwhelmingly did this – we did this together. The success of the Victorian lockdown, in which 6.5 million people committed to collective action that would protect not only themselves and their families, but the whole of Australia, is testament to this.”

Sally said the response to the pandemic had also given us “a glimpse of what is possible”.

“For a brief period of time we came close to eliminating poverty by lifting JobSeeker; we cancelled punitive work for the dole in indigenous communities; we introduced free childcare for all, ended homelessness by housing people in hotels, and radically increased job security for the majority of the workforce with JobKeeper,” she said.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, says this hitherto hidden capacity of the state is an important insight coming out of the pandemic.

“What we discovered in 2020 is that governments had been choosing not to exercise their enormous powers.

“Governments that proclaimed their impecunity whenever called upon to pay for a hospital here or school there, suddenly discovered oodles of cash to pay for furlough wages, to nationalise railways, take over airlines, support carmakers, and even pop-up gyms and hairdressers,” he wrote on the Project Syndicate website.

The heroism of nurses

Sally McManus told the NPC that, for her, the heroes of 2020 were essential workers: “hard working, brave and humble”.

Even though they could see what was happening overseas “with ICUs full and health workers getting the virus, and many dying. They knew what they were facing and yet they kept calmly planning, preparing and turning up for work”.

Sally spoke of the many nurses in Victoria who came out of retirement and “volunteered to go into the aged care homes when the crisis was raging, people were sick and dying, and existing staff had been put into isolation”.

“What (they) experienced was horrifying and traumatic – but day after day, nurses put their hands up to step into these roles. They are absolute heroes. Their bravery is something we must never forget as a nation.”

Union reps step up

Sally said that union reps in workplaces all around the country also deserve praise for the way they have stepped up during the pandemic “to protect not only their members but the whole community”.

“They worked with their employers to make the necessary changes to see through shutdowns and adjust to the new COVID reality – to make workplaces safe, fairly manage reduced hours and rapidly transition to working from home.

“During this pandemic, the voice and role of unions has been central to the national interest.”

Sally says Australia’s unique industrial relations system “delivered when needed”.

“It balances fairness and flexibility, and it showed it was capable of changing rapidly and delivering both. This is something we should pause to acknowledge.

“The next time an employer lobbyist wants to say the system is inflexible, it should be understood that this is demonstrably untrue.”

Paid pandemic leave helped stopped the spread

Early in the pandemic, unions recognised there was a huge hole in our pandemic defence. On 
3 March – before any restrictions or shutdowns – the ACTU called for paid pandemic leave for all working people.

“We knew that people would not have the leave needed for this crisis – leave to stay at home when sick, or when waiting for test results, or because a close contact was positive, or when required to quarantine. And because they did not have this leave, the virus would be spread in workplaces,” says Sally McManus.

“The only way to address this was to give all workers paid leave to isolate. This was the way to significantly reduce the risk of the virus spreading with sick people going to work.”

Subsidising wages: a union idea that saved jobs

Similarly, on 25 March the ACTU publicly called for a wage subsidy. The federal government initially rejected the idea.

“We got together a coalition of economists and academics who argued our point – that the only way through this pandemic was to commit to a historic level of government support for workers in the form of a wage subsidy to keep them in their jobs during lockdown and downturns,” said Sally McManus.

“Over 3.5 million workers and sole traders have kept an income and kept their jobs because of JobKeeper.

“I hate to think what this year would have been like without JobKeeper, without paid pandemic leave, without the protections of our safety net of awards and workplace rights.”

Morrison’s new IR bill will weaken worker protections

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The federal government’s new IR “omnibus” bill, along with attacks on industry superannuation, will weaken the safety net that has served Australia so well during the pandemic.

After a token effort at consultation, the federal government has resorted to type with the introduction of its highly partisan industrial relations omnibus bill, say experts.

In June 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the formation of five working groups of employers, unions and government bureaucrats to review IR reform. The groups met over several months.

The product of these groups is a new IR bill that reflects the five themes of the working parties.

According to David Peetz, Professor of Employment Relations at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University, the outcome of these “consultations” is a big win for employers.

“Like most industrial relations reforms it is principally about affecting who gains income and power in the workplace.

“The bulk of the bill ‘favours employers over employees’,” he wrote on The Conversation website.

In The Guardian, Paul Karp commented: “The bill creates a path for employers to cut pay due to the impact of Covid-19 on their business, wipes out backpay claims for misclassified casuals, and proposes new flexibility for part-time workers to pick up shifts without overtime rates.”

The five key themes in the bill

Award flexibilities

Employers initially argued for removing penalty rates, overtime pay, and other payments.

Peetz says that “haunted by the loss of the 2007 WorkChoices election” the government watered this down slightly to a focus on “award flexibilities”.

“The bill enables hours for part-time employees to be increased without any overtime premium. Part-time employees take on the hours’ flexibility that casuals currently have, but at lower pay rates.

“The bill also allows employers to give ‘flexible work directions’ to employees to perform new types of work, or at new locations.”

Casual employment

Employers wanted to overturn two Federal Court decisions that gave a legal entitlement to annual leave to many long-term employees.

They also wanted a definition of casuals that avoided any possibility of a leave entitlement, and retrospective voiding of any previous entitlement.

Karp says this latter measure “could wipe out claims worth up to $39 billion”.

Peetz says: “The bill meets employer demands. It enables employers to define any employee as a casual, with no leave entitlements or job security, at the time employment commences, provided certain conditions were met. This is more about power than genuine flexibility in work.”

Enterprise bargaining

Some employers had called for the “better off overall test” (BOOT) to be abolished. The BOOT means an agreement has to make any worker better off compared to under their award.

Peetz says: “The main complexity in the enterprise bargaining system is the barriers put to unions seeking agreements. The bill addresses none of these, instead aiming to make non-union agreements easier to make.”

Unions and Labor argue that suspending the BOOT will result in cuts to take-home pay for one in four workers covered by enterprise agreements.

Wage theft

The bill criminalises serious wage theft – where an employer dishonestly engages in a deliberate and systematic pattern of underpaying one or more employees. The bill sets out penalties of four years in prison and up to $1.1 million for an individual and up to $5.6 million for a corporation.

Peetz says: “The biggest problem is not that the maximum penalty is too low. Already the maximum is rarely used, and many offences are ignored. Not many are caught, and punishments are light. If you think you won’t be caught, let alone punished, you’ll keep on doing what you’re doing.”

Greenfields agreements

Greenfields agreements are agreements that cover a new project, usually in construction, but can also cover workplaces like a new hospital.

Peetz says: “For up to eight years, any employees recruited to a new “major” project initially approved by a chosen union will be unable to negotiate better conditions through industrial action. A major project is anything worth above $250 million that the minister declares to be “major”.

Unions argue locking workers into lengthy pay deals prevents them exercising the right to strike for better pay, and that the threshold has been set so low it will apply to projects like hospitals, not just giant oil and gas projects.

What the ACTU says about the bill

“We will not accept workers being worse off – cuts to pay or the taking away of rights. And finally, the changes have to make a start in tackling the biggest problem facing working people as exposed by the pandemic: the unacceptably high number of casual, insecure jobs.

Federal government ‘pokes another hole in super’

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The Morrison government has flagged the prospect of ‘opt-in super’ when the whole point of superannuation is that it is compulsory.

The Morrison government continues to bob and weave as it tries to renege on its election promise to increase the super guarantee to 12 per cent.

The super guarantee is scheduled to rise from 9.5 per cent to 10 per cent this year, and then to 12 per cent by 2025. These increases are already legislated and in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election the Liberal government promised to implement them.

Last year the government indicated that the increases were unaffordable and would hurt wages and jobs. A prominent group of Liberal MPs called for the cancellation of the increases completely.

Now the government is pro-posing that the additions above 10 per cent be optional. Under this “option”, workers could choose to take additional payments as extra wages rather than as a superannuation contribution.

Critics from the superannuation sector, the union movement, economic commentators – and two former prime ministers – have savaged the government’s proposals.

Paul Keating, the architect of industry super, said the opt-in, opt-out approach would require the government to “legislate to compel employers to pay the 2.5 per cent as wages, because the enterprise bargaining system cannot pay them, as the last eight years (of little wages growth) have demonstrated”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Industry Super Australia Deputy Chief Executive, Matthew Linden, said the federal government should follow through on the legislated rise rather than “exploring underhanded ways to renege on it”.

“Removing the guarantee in the super guarantee to make it ‘optional’ is a recipe for higher taxes, lower lifetime incomes, and a red-tape nightmare for business,” Mr Linden said. “This isn’t choice – it’s a sneaky tax grab that will leave people worse off and rip up one of the system’s founding principles.”

The government is being disingenuous

In The Guardian, economics commentator Greg Jericho brand-ed the government’s proposals 
as “disingenuous”.

“If this government truly wanted to increase wages it would not institute a policy to reduce public servants’ wage growth. It would also not seek to reduce the bargaining power of workers as it has continually sought to do,” he said.

“If you want to fix wages growth, fix wages growth. And if you want to improve retirement incomes, don’t instead seek to destroy superannuation because you hate industry funds.”

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was also highly critical of the proposal, describing it as a Liberal Party “ideological obsession”.

“(Superannuation) delivers a private benefit for individuals, who are helped to invest for decent retirement, and a public benefit by reducing pressure on the aged pension, creating a strategic pool of investment funds and stabilising the economy against international shocks,” he said.

ACTU Secretary, Sally McManus, said any delay to the compulsory superannuation guarantee rise would not lead to higher wages.

“At a time of great uncertainty and after hundreds of thousands of people emptied their super accounts under the early access scheme, the government should be focused on helping workers rebuild their super balances for a dignified retirement,” she said.

“We cannot allow the pandemic to be the opportunity the government uses to attack the very social institutions and safety nets that we should be treasuring.”

Opt-in, opt-out will hit workers with higher taxes

The federal government’s secret plan to tear up compulsory super by making the increase to 12 per cent optional would be a $20,000 tax grab on the average Australian family, which could also leave them with up to $200,000 less super by retirement, says Industry Super Australia (ISA).

Wages are taxed at a higher rate than super contributions, leaving little for workers once the tax office takes its cut. An ISA analysis shows that up to two-thirds of an increase could be lost in higher taxes and reductions in other government support payments.

“Figures from the government’s own Retirement Income Review reveal such a plan would leave all income groups worse off – with lower lifetime disposable incomes. It would also be an administrative nightmare to manage an opt-out system – wrapping small business in yet another layer of red tape,” said the superannuation peak body.

“Any Budget boost would be short-lived, as the super savings grab would lead to a far higher pension bill for future generations.”