I was going to go and watch in Parliament as I do the ‘Fair’ Work Act debates but could not bear seeing MPs watering down further the protections for workers. Nor to live in the new by-partisan spin world that ‘WorkChoices is dead! ‘ (in name only).
We will see later what good/bad news for workers came out of the amendments passed today.
But on only one public contest of job security – in the most severe economic crisis for years – for a union activist from SA seeing the politics of unfair dismissal was heartbreaking. Since 1972 the SA unfair dismissal remedy was for an individual. It was an individual right to test before a tribunal with little cost or legalities the fairness or otherwise of your dismissal – with no link to the size of business. So it was dispairing to see MPs bid to see how many more workers could be denied some protection.
The ALP Fair Work bill already flouted this principle and excluded millions of precarious workers with the under 15 rule. So PM Rudd’s tears tonight on TV and the DPM in Parliament for the 700,000 more from Senators Xenophon and Fielding and more from Turnbull to be denied a basic right was not really the full truth.
And the deal of 15 full-time equivalents means many more employees will be able to be harshly sacked and in cases employers able to rule with the fear of the sack knowing no individual could test any harshness,
And i repeat. The politics is based on the big lie. Peter Reith and his press secretary invented the big political lie that the unfair dismissal system was somehow job destroying. The right-wing endlessly repeated this and the media the refrain and again in parliament.
But nevertheless the 1984- political discourse of all MPs plays out the deceptions of the so-called dangers to small business.
No mention was made at all by MPs about the employees being harshly sacked during a recession! Such is the politics of IR!
Tonight MPs have walked away from providing fair protection and minimum redundancy notice and payment for millions of precarious workers, mainly youth and women and NESB. The plight of the precarious worker has been long recognised but MPs throw them to the wolves, to cite the PM.
Overall, the politics of the corporate interests have dominated.
At the very same time MPs assure CEOs their big redundancy payouts remain (even though getting bad press that the millions are obscene), with some minor reform for shareholder approval in the wind.
(The Greens by and large stood by their principles for looking after working families.)
Tonight is another chapter closed for the Your Rights at Work campaign -
– an unsatisfactory legislative result.
But workers and their unions will now adjust to the new so-called ‘Fair’ Work regime into effect in some parts on July 1 and the rest January 2010.
One response is from the ETU in Victoria.
http://www.etu.asn.au/newsandevents/news/fair-work-for-whom
yraw vote for
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