Chris White Online

The disastrous impact on workers in this global capitalist financial crisis requires changes to the Fair Work Bill now before the Senate to better protect workers’ rights.
The government did not know about or develop this proposed labour law, the Fair Work Bill (FWB) as a response to this most severe global capitalist financial crisis since [...]

Why shouldn’t there be a right to strike to save the environment in the Fair Work Bill? Why should workers and their unions be penalised when involved in bargaining on environmental protection claims?
Why should workers be not legally allowed to attend legitimate protests such as community rallies against corporate and government failure to address [...]

The Fair Work Bill is not a fair collective bargaining system when the repressive WorkChoices outlawing on the right to strike for pattern or industry bargaining remain. Outlawing pattern and industry bargaining is still unfair. It does not meet any form of ‘keynesian demand management’ necessary to stimulate the econmy, but the reverse.
The incessant media [...]

The Fair Work Bill is not a fair collective bargaining system when the repressive WorkChoices restrictions on the right to strike remain.
Repression of the right to strike remains
If ever the accusation is true that the FWB is ‘Workchoices lite’ it is in the regime repressing industrial action.
The COIL process was watertight in Canberra with no [...]

Right of Entry does not give the freedom to be able to organise.Employees say that a difficulty is not being able to have their union organiser have right of entry.
But the WorkChoices limitations stricter than earlier awards and what was in agreements remains in that the organiser must still have a valid permit to obtain [...]

The Fair Work bill is the end of arbitration as we know it, and I argue this should not be.
Fair Work Australia is the name of the industrial umpire into 2010 and sees the demise of the arbitration system.
Much has been written in the labour law and industrial relations literature on arbitration. Isaac J [...]

A clear example where WorkChoices is not repealed by the Fair Work bill is the centralised national take-over of the State’s industrial relations systems covering all trading corporations.
There was no choice for businesses or unions to be able to use or remain in the State jurisdictions. Many companies had good reasons in their own interests [...]

The Fair Work Bill based on the Corporations power is the dominance of corporate law over labour law.
The High Court in the ‘WorkChoices’ decision held the Australian Constitution’s Corporations power allowed the Howard government legally the power to reduce the role of unions and to effectively extinguish workers rights and the IR systems created by [...]

I argue that the Fair Work Bill downgrades legally the status of unions.Professor Harry Glasbeek argued (2008):
‘During the long reign of compulsory conciliation and arbitration, trade unions had become legitimate political participants. They had won the right to represent workers in an industry or occupation before a formally and functionally independent tribunal (the AIRC and [...]