2009 What has changed in the workplace? CASE STUDY
The Rudd government won the 2007 election on a platfrom of climate change intiatives and a repeal of workchoices legislation. The Howard government was determined to push forward if re-elected to erode workers rights further in favour of employers. They wanted to make it simpler to reduce wages, sack employees and allow businesses to increase profits by reducing their wages bill.
Companies had been screaming for this for years. And Howard was their man. Unfortunately for John Howard, he and his Workchoices man Joe Hockey could not pull any more wool over the eyes of working Australians.
As Paul Keating said, “Workchoices is just the nasty bitchy piece of legislation designed to knock off the income of the low paid”.
Fast forward and the Global Financial crisis strikes hard, workers clinging to their jobs as unemployment rises by the minute. Companies, trading on this panic and banks typically the first to start, offload employees by the hundred in Australia and the thousand in the US.
Other companies follow suit. Any excuse to dump workers and yes they need to shed some costs as turnover slumps. But how they do it and the devastation it causes means that companies should be more careful and use a softer approach. Because what they do in the short term will inevitably turn around and bite them on the bum in medium term anyway.
Put simply if you cut staff and wages very soon you end up with reduced takings as there are less dollars capable of being spent in business. Retail, services, food, entertainment, restaurants all suffer. And so the spiral downwards continues.
But this is pretty easy to understand. What you may not be aware of is just how brazen some companies are in dumping staff.
They hide behind excuses, lies and red tape. They bend rules or break them when it suits and deny natural justice if they can.
What I am talking about I hear you say?
Well let me elaborate...
The company I am talking about is REAL Insurance.
REAL is a privately owned insurance company from South Africa operating under the parent, Hollard Insurance. They don't have shareholders, they are a global entity and currently they are making a big splash in the Australian market by advertising heavily and undercutting the opposition in the premium stakes.
Retail insurance is very competitive. If you keep undercutting your opposition, eventually your claims bill exceeds your premium collections and the company eventually leaves the market, raises its premiums or cuts its costs in other ways.
REAL is not making money and is desperate to sell more policies. It is hinging its hopes on attracting more customers, increasing conversion rates to astronomical levels and praying no-one claims. And if they do, making sure its really difficult to do so. Tricky stuff, when you want to grow faster than everyone else. (HIH I hear you some of you say).
At the helm is a well known operator brought in by the South Africans. A man responsible for building up APIA and once heading up AAMI, Brian Keane.
Keane has overseen the shift to heavy advertising, relaxed underwriting standards to accept more policies, and even the switching off of recorded conversations so that the more daring and hungrier incentivised sales staff can say more to sell more.
The big bonus carrot is dangled before everyone's eyes.
So when a scandal breaks within the walls of the company that surrounds the new sales guru what does REAL do?
It fakes an investigation.
Allegations were made of sexual harrassment and drug dealing. Human resources extracted signed statements from more than seven seperate sources.
The right thing to do, once due process was followed was to dismiss the culprit and any other collaberators and then rebuild and get on with it. Learning from the process.
Instead it plays another game.
It informs the accused of what is going on. The accused summons the IT department to his office and has them erase any written evidence against him over a period of a couple of days.
The accused devises a cunning plan. He picks the three youngest accusers and individually offers them promotion. If they drop their complaints. "They were just a joke" he tells them. He dangles another carrot, the youngsters comply with the offer to be fast-tracked. Maybe they did get things wrong they justify to themselves. 'The what's in it for me' attitude kicks in. So easy.
Next, they call in the remaining and expendable complainants. The investigating panel spends about three days working out what to do.
They meet with the first person. Within 20 minutes, he is fired, allegedly for sending an email with a swear word in it. Big deal. But it gets him out of the picture and makes his testimony inadmissable to the investigation. An unfair dismissal case may ensue, but that is chicken feed compared to losing their gun.
Next they call in their star witness. They promise her the world, job security, full support and a fair outcome.
They not only coax out confirmation of the signed statement, they also convince her to spill the beans including names, dates and times of even more unscrupulous behaviour that went on.
They ask again for others that may confirm these allegations. Painstakingly and without fear, but somewhat reserved, this company woman delivers up a full and complete list of those who were eyewitnesses who can confirm everything.
Thanking her for the information they promise a swift and satisfactory resolution. They ask her for what she wants. She asks only for a safe workplace for her and her colleagues to continue their work. That's it.
Three days later a meeting is called.
And the REAL insurance sting is about to begin.
The first thing they do is dismantle each signed statement by saying that each one is connected to the star witness in some way to say they are friends and that they could not accept their testimonies at all.
Next, they offer up an alternate set of witnesses. All of whom are unnamed and deny anything at all took place but none of whom are willing to sign anything. All too convenient.
Finally, they pull out a wad of A4 paper and off the top of it produce an email that allegedly establishes a friendship between the lead witnesses (so what) and then another that was forwarded by the star witness to her team leader showing a rude picture that was received internally. The plan, by management it seems was to get an admission from the star witness and then sack her. Case closed.
But surprisingly the witnesses explanation is accepted. She was disgusted by the email, sent it to her team leader as a register of protest and that was it.
The investgators then declare the investigation stagnant. They tell the witness to take time off and recover.
Two days later she receives notification that her job will be terminated unless she can show reason otherwise. She replies with a reasonable and sound explanation.
REAL does not bother to reply, but two weeks later offers her a pittance to resign with a deadline to accept or get nothing. She does not and she won't. She has done nothing wrong. Confusingly, they do not terminate her employment.
She engages a lawyer and her union.
6 weeks later she has not been terminated. And she has not been paid. Not even her holiday leave.
She is broke. She cannot get Centrelink benefits as she has not been fired. They think she is still working. She cannot get charity for the same reasons. The job market is tough and despite going for interviews, she cannot provide a reference becuase REAL has said they will not proivde one at all. Except for a record of service. Sadly, she was the standout performer in her team but is not allowed to get anyone to clarify this. For REAL, this is part of the strategy.
So REAL knows what they are doing. They are in REAL trouble if this story gets out or hits the right jurisdiction. It will no doubt be a costly commercial decision. But one in which they are prepared to gamble whilst at the same time build up an expensive legal bill. It seems legal bills don't come from the same budget. So they do what all corporate bullies do.
They try to starve the victim, in this case the whistleblower into accepting the pittance. That if she does accept, they will then reduce the offer further just to bully some more.
Suddenly, no-one is available, Human resources are not allowed to be involved, only internal legal counsel and a part-time senior executive. Convenient.
Just a little too big for their boots I think.
The latest development occurs when the Union, finally gaining traction manages to track down the part-time senior executive who realises that he must at least pay the outstanding wages. He says the outstanding and overdue wages will be paid into the star witnesses bank account on Wednesday night.
On Thursday morning the money is not there. The same on Friday and Saturday. The senior exec lied to the union.
That about sums it up. REAL insurance is run by liars. Bandits. Happy to allow illegal activities to take place in the workplace so long as the bottom line is unaffected in the pursuit of sales and bonuses. And maybe profits.
It's not the first time that a company has behaved like this and it surely won't be the last. But only when the real truth can get out, we will ever get to change anything. Like abhorrent corporate behaviour.
Until then, the law is just a business and the rich and powerful or at least those with the most cash win. Always.
What have we become?
Capitalism fell into a giant hole in the US looking to the government to socialise its debt. Then having the hide to complain when its staff could not access bail out funds to pay for bonuses that were to incentivise them.
You see, incentive is the call of the capitalist. It's what they rely on to motivate workers and improve efficiency and profit and productivity. Yet they still want to receive capitallist bonuses even when the share price collapses to its lowest level in 50 years. Even when they are on the brink of collapse.
And whilst the corporations still believe in this entitlement, nothing will ever change. Capitalism thrives on poor people being in the majority. It's why John Howard attempted Workchoices. It's why globalisation has actually been the great irony of capitalisms endless pursuit of growth. It will actually be its downfall. But that's a story for another day.
2008 State of the workplace
Since the Rudd Government's election in November 2007, there has much to hope for and less to celebrate. Sure, there have been the promises of big things, restoration of fairness, ease the sqeeze on budgets and so forth. But a miracle elixir has not been forthcoming.
So we wait and watch and do what Australian's do...patiently become apathetic until a groundswell of disenchantment takes over the nation's psyche. That maybe the case for the NSW state government which is under severe pressure and electing a new premier this week.
But Federally, it seems that good news is not far off. At home, interest rates are finally on the decline after 7 years going up. The economy has sufficiently cooled for the Reserve bank to apply some relief. Tax cuts were supplied from July 1 as well. So families, whilst far from being on easy street, can at least feel some hope that help is on its way.
Overseas, and the US election is in full swing and it can't come quick enough. It seemed a forgone conclusion that America would see fit to throw out the republicans when Bush is automatically retired, but a young attractive relative newcomer from Alaska seems have thrown a few spanners in the works.
Should America elect Barack Obama, it will be an historic occasion. But more importantly, it would help restore equity in a country that seems to prmote inequites almost on a daily basis. How can the richest nation on the world have a slave labour system disguised as the minimum wage system? It's a working poor and it's a disgrace. It is but one of the things Obama plans on changing should he win office come November.
THE DIGNITY OF WORK is something mentioned in his campaign speeches and it shows how people need to have a job to feel better, be motivated and provide an example for others who may be struggling around them.
Both Australia and America live in times of unknown wealth. It is shameful that others can be left to struggle, be shortchanged for their efforts by government design and left behind by the community. No, we are not advocating communism, that was a system bogged down by too may inefficiencies and corruptions to ever be successful. But by thinking that being fair and communism are the same, then being well off and filty rich are too. They are not.
We are faced with the most interesting and challenging times in history, right at the present. But the right government, with the right leadership should ensure that EVERYONE BE BETTER OFF.
MyGreenway Comment - Union bashing
John Howard continues to intimidate the voting public, the majority of whom are average workers with the notion that Unions are bad. Trade Unions are organisations that were created a hundred years ago to combat cruel exploitative bosses who paid workers very little for their labour and skills. Through collecting the like skills of working people, organisers created a "union" whereby workers could collectively bargain for a set of minimum conditions. By combining their might, they could improve their worth.
To this day, the union's motto has been "A fair day's work for a fair day's pay".
Over the next century, unions have been able to allow business to function but be challenged too. We are certainly all more wealthier than we were a hundred years ago. Unions have worked with employers to gain rising wages, holidays, sick leave, the 40 hour week, maternity and paternity leave and a whole range of other conditions that has allowed working people to enjoy their lives and to more or less of an extent be allowed to prosper.
The Liberals have painted a picture that Unions are ALL bad and damaging to business. Like any organisation that gets too big or too powerful, they can overstep the mark. If a union gets too powerful it can if it tries, provide too many benefits that makes workers counter productive. Our wharves were one example where reforms were needed.
However, it has been Labor governments under Hawke and Keating that realised this and in the spirit of goodwill, reduced the power of unions by making membership non-compulsory. They created a system of collective bargaining in Australia that was successful and removed the notion that CPI (Inflation linked) wage rises were an entitlement of workers. Wage rises would have to be linked to productivity increases and as such from the late 80's Australian workers have all had to become more productive and competitive. In turn, business has become more efficient and more profitable.
Enter the Liberals and the constant scaremongering at Unions. Workchoices was disguised as a way to increase jobs in the economy, but it comes at a price. By eroding working conditions it makes the price of labour per head cheaper, thereby allowing the employer to puchase more labour for the same price.
However, if you pay workers less across the board, in the long term, they will have less money to spend causing the economy to shrink. Only the access to credit will blur this fact as workers or consumers will need to get access to more credit in turn to be able to pay for the same set of goods and services. Ouch! That means even higher debt for working Australians.
It is not a competitive and creative policy. It will contract the economy. It will only allow a smaller proportion of the economy, bosses and shareholders will soon receive higher incomes or profits.
Quite simply by its nature, Workchoices, it could be argued is un-Australian. It's unfair and takes from the weaker and poorer and gives to the stronger and wealthier. When did this become the Australian way?
So Tony Abbott, makes you feel guilty for being a member of a Union. Get over yourself mate!
The John Howard plan is to make you not vote for Labor because 70% of the future front bench will be ex-Unionists. So what.
If you vote Liberal, 100% of the front bench will be Liberal. That's 100% of ministers and backbenchers who voted for a policy that lowers the wage of working Australians in the long term.
What would you prefer?
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Asbestos crusader Bernie Banton backs Unions - "They helped us get compensation from James Hardie"
SMH,18th October, 2007
Asbestos disease sufferer and activist Bernie Banton has attacked federal Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey's comments that the role of unions in the Australian workplace is over.
Mr Banton was a high profile campaigner for asbestos disease sufferers in the union-backed case against the James Hardie company. He said Mr Hockey's comment today was wrong and that, without the unions, asbestos victims would never have received justice.
"I take total exception to that,'' Mr Banton told ABC Radio. "Where was Joe Hockey when we were fighting against James Hardie? He was nowhere to be seen. "Without their support and their absolute total commitment to getting that deal done, we wouldn't have a deal for all those thousands of future victims.
"Without the union movement, we would have been getting absolutely diddly-squat for all those victims."
Mr Banton said another 53,000 people were going to be affected by asbestos-related disease by 2020, and 13,000 of those people would die due to mesothelioma. "He says that unions are irrelevant? I think Joe Hockey is irrelevant, totally irrelevant to this election,'' he said.
Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said he was surprised by Mr Hockey's extreme comments. He said the James Hardie case showed the important role unions still played in workers lives.
"The're part and parcel of the fabric of Australian life,'' he said. "I'm surprised Mr Hockey would take such an extreme position.''
Mr Hockey, whose Liberal Party has launched scathing election advertisements highlighting the 70 per cent of Labor frontbenchers with a union background, said it was incredible Labor intended to govern with such a high union representation. "The role of unions is essentially over," Mr Hockey told ABC Radio today.
This is because the Howard government has made it it's mission to destroy the trade union movement in it s 11 years in office - MyGreenway editor
"That's because we have a system with a strong, independent umpire that is providing protections for workers. "Because the unions do not cover 80 per cent of the workers out there, we find that people are turning to the Workplace Authority and the Workplace Ombudsman to obtain information and to get protection."
Mr Hockey said workers who were not union members could turn to the Workplace Ombudsman for advice, but the Labor Party wanted to dismantle that office. He said Australians viewed unions as irrelevant and were choosing not to join them, a trend that started under former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.
"I don't think anyone would have thought that in 2007 it would be credible for Kevin Rudd to go to an election with 70 per cent of his frontbench made up of former union officials, and that would be a dramatic increase in the number of union officials that, say, Bob Hawke had," he said.
"Under Bob Hawke, at one stage, they were 50 per cent of the workforce and gradually they've been falling, most dramatically, even under [former Labor prime minister Paul] Keating. "They're just down to 20 per cent - one in five workers are choosing to join the unions.
"Unions have an important safety net role in some industries but, overall, Australians are choosing not to join the unions because they see them as irrelevant to their lives."
The ACTU has hit back at a Liberal Party campaign highlighting the union affiliations of Labor's frontbench team, saying it is insulting to working families. ACTU president Sharan Burrow said a television advertisement released yesterday by the Liberals was wrong to suggest unions were anti-business.
The ad was also insulting to the millions of Australians whose job security and living standards were protected by unions. "The job of all unions is to protect secure, well-paid employment for Australian working families," she said.
"To achieve this we need profitable businesses that value their workers.
"The idea that unions would somehow want to undermine business is, frankly, absurd."
Ms Burrow said that, under a Labor government, unions would want to work with employers to grow the economy and increase the opportunities for Australian workers. This new ad from the Liberal Party is another attempt by John Howard and Peter Costello to distract attention from the real issues facing working people in this election," she said.
Labor yesterday responded to the Liberal advertisement with its own advertisement on YouTube. In it, Mr Rudd dismisses the Liberal advertisement as another scare tactic designed to detract attention from the WorkChoices industrial laws.
Hockey desperate with difficult portfolio - Selling workchoices
KEVIN RUDD claims the Howard Government is prepared to say anything, do anything or spend anything in its desperate struggle to stay in office. In his wild defence of Work Choices, Joe Hockey is single-handedly justifying that allegation.
Admittedly, Hockey was handed an unenviable job, required to defend the indefensible. That the original version of Work Choices was unfair has been tacitly admitted by the Government, first by its repeated refusal to promise that no worker would be worse off and then by its belated introduction of a "fairness test" over the protests of the employer groups.
The need for such a test is demonstrated by the fact the newly constituted Workplace Authority has queried or failed such a high proportion of the Australian Workplace Agreements employers submitted for approval.
Hockey's problem is that the Government hasn't been able to bring itself to speak the unvarnished truth: Yes, Work Choices was unfair, but it is not as unfair as it was now we've backed down and modified it so heavily.
Rather, Hockey has been required to maintain the pretence that Work Choices is and always has been beyond criticism, against a plethora of academic studies - many of them sponsored by Labor state governments - pointing out the many low-income workers disadvantaged by the original scheme. (The modified scheme has come too late to be reflected in the studies' findings.)
In our adversarial two-party democracy, Hockey is, of course, entitled to vigorously defend his side against its critics. And no doubt each of those studies contains statements of fact or interpretation with which he could legitimately take issue.
But Hockey's defence has hardly been at the level of contesting facts and figures. Rather, he has too easily resorted to bluster and abusiveness, seeking to dismiss the studies' findings by attacking the character of their authors.
If they've ever had any association with the unions - which, unsurprisingly, the great majority of labour-market economists and industrial relations academics have - their findings are instantly dismissed as biased and without credibility.
In persisting with this crude and unintelligent tactic last week, however, Hockey blundered over the top. In response to a study by academics at Sydney University's Workplace Research Centre which found that workers on AWAs tended to be paid significantly less than workers on collective agreements - wow, what a shocker - he let fly. It was "the same old flawed research from the same old union academics". It had been prepared by "former trade union officials who are parading as academics". (This last was factually wrong.)
Even Peter Costello opted for abuse rather than argument. The study was "contaminated" because Unions NSW had contributed to its cost. It had been prepared by "union hacks".
Now, as I've argued myself, it is perfectly reasonable to contend that research paid for by vested interests can't be regarded as "independent". But Hockey and his fellow ministers use that argument only when it suits them - that is, only when the research findings don't suit them.
Ministers have been happy to embrace the questionable findings of the econometric modelling on the economic cost of reregulating the labour market commissioned by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for those Business Coalition TV ads.
John Howard even referred to the modeller as "one of the most respected independent economists in Canberra".
But in the case of last week's report from the Workplace Research Centre, there was an additional consideration that leaves Hockey and Costello looking foolish.
This wasn't just another quickie, union-funded hatchet job on Work Choices, as they implied. It was a major, peer-reviewed research program that, against the stiffest competition and close scrutiny, had won funding as an Australian Research Council "linkage project".
Linkage projects are specifically designed to encourage collaborations between university and industry. In other words, half the project's funding is coming from the Federal Government, with the very terms of the scheme requiring the academics to find the other half from one vested interest or another.
Last October, the Education Minister, Julie Bishop, said: "When an independent organisation invests in an ARC-supported research program, it can be confident that it is committing its hard-earned dollars not only to a worthwhile project, but to a project undertaken by some of Australia's best researchers." Oh.
It must offend every academic in the land to see Government ministers idly traducing the reputation of the winners of a much-coveted research council grant. Little wonder the academics involved have threatened to call in their lawyers.
But that's not all. The Australia@Work research project Hockey and Costello so unthinkingly trashed is a big deal. It's a valuable and all-too-rare longitudinal study, tracking the work experience of more than 8000 workers for five years, at an estimated total cost of $2.4 million.
Hockey has repeatedly accused his union opponents of lying, but his own standards of truthfulness leave much to be desired. He routinely misrepresents the findings of a particular Bureau of Statistics survey and his department's recent report Agreement Making in Australia was a shameful document, calculated to mislead the public and the Parliament.
Frankly, Hockey is out of control, allowing his clumsy tongue to run well ahead of his brain. He needs to calm down and behave more like a leader commanding public respect.
I hardly think looking desperate enough to say anything and abuse anyone is a smart way for the Howard Government to regain the electorate's confidence.
Ross Gittins is the Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor.
WorkChoices - Why does it polarise?
It was the one thing John Howard did after the GST. He could never do it without full control of both houses of parliament, The House of Representatives and The Senate. When he gained this unprecedented power, Howard gave us the law we simply had to have.
You see, Liberal government's have a fondness for, and a cozy relationship with, business. It is these business people who derive profits and create jobs for the rest of us. As such, the Liberals will do just about anything to reward this remarkable innovative ability.
Just as many commentators do who push this barrow with relentless capacity. Think shock-jocks and bone-headed print journalists who always rubbish one political party and praise the other.
So much so that when profits start to dwindle, businesses cry poor. The Liberal government, not wanting to upset their support base have to bow to pressure. The one area where they could manage some change that would appease the crying businesses was in the area of wages and conditions, to work out how to lower wages and remove conditions, hence WorkChoices was born.
There is a funny thing about businesses though. Business owners ALWAYS cry poor. It's what they do. You see the mentality is that they are taking all the risk and they are last to reap the rewards. The rent must be paid, the stock, the utitities and the employees, all before the boss gets his/ her cut. And those employees, they are so lazy and ungrateful...
Coming from a family of bosses, this is all I ever heard, ever got. I was always told to be a boss. But no; I did not want to sell stuff I did not like or believe in, run a business where I had to sack people all the time. I wanted to have a job I was proud of - in a business I would treat like it was my own.
Only one thing happened, when I did find a job I could be proud of, I worked hard to secure A-grade customers. Once I got them I would service and nourish the relationships so that they would become repeat customers; I would advise my boss of all changes necessary to move the company into the A-League, such as product development, new revenue streams, policy directions etc. So when this was all taken aboard and the new direction taken, I was so proud...And so redundant. I was dumped 12 hours later.
Taking it on the chin, I said, "No problem, that's business, let's discuss a settlement for redundancy and I will go". They laughed, "Redundancy, we don't need to pay a redundancy, WorkChoices took care of that". And it did.
So you work your guts out for your boss. You bring in enough revenue to cover me, the rent and the staff and when I worked out a way to make even more money for less effort I am dumped without a dime. WORKCHOICES!
So in the lead up to Election 2007, when Kevin Rudd may just take enough seats in the lower house to form government, here are some other choices we hope we don't get to see in Liberal policy as they attempt to claw back some swinging voters.
We hope you enjoy!
