Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Cremated—I take the interjection. What they are looking for is a resurrection. They want to see that so-called flexibility reintroduced.

I would like to talk a little bit about that flexibility, because we heard a lot about that and a lot about what was good for businesses from the Howard government. You are right, Mr Deputy Speaker: in those days my electorate was another electorate, Werriwa. It was very much a working class area, with a lot of underprivileged people and a lot of Housing Commission homes. I spent a lot of time with people out there when this came through—the innovations of the new flexible agreements being entered into. I called at the various workers' homes, and they would tell me that they were given an agreement to sign. The agreement was not, 'Look, we are going to sit down and have this negotiation,' and, 'We want you to come back and discuss it'—not even as an ambit claim. This was, 'You either take it or leave it.' If you did not take the agreement then you opted out of being allocated the overtime shifts. Every agreement I saw, and I assure the House that I saw many, was struck on minimum wages. We are not talking about some inflated sort of wage structure and people running around in suits and ties; we are talking about people who were on bare minimum wages. They were being offered, 'You either sign the agreement or you don't pick up any of the overtime shifts and you don't get the shift allowance.' And those shifts were really what made it worth their while being there.

As I say, I attended many of those houses and spoke to people—many of them were in tears. They felt that they had no other option than to sign the agreement. As one young bloke freely told me, 'I can't read the agreement; I can't read. But if I don't sign it, I don't have a job.' He actually asked for representation and that was denied him. I still see this young bloke around after many years now. This was just something so profound to think that a person could not even read the agreement but was expected to sign it. That was part of this 'flexibility'.

I did have the opportunity to speak with a couple of people on the board of that company—a couple of them were very well-known figures in Olympic circles. I asked them, 'Why did you do this to your employees?' They thought about it and said quite honestly—they had no axe to grind, I suppose—'Because the law allows us to do it.' They thought: 'If the law says that we can do this and we can effectively pay people below the wage rate if they sign the contract—if that is what you in the parliament and the government agreed to—well, why can't we do it? It's good for our shareholders.' They did not mince words on that; they did it because they were allowed to do it.

If the government is putting this bill before us today in the hope of creating some form of mutual admiration society between individual workers and companies as a basis for negotiations for the future, then that is just disingenuous, because they know it is not going to be the case. In the changes they are making through this bill, they have removed many of the protections that would protect a worker from negotiating away remuneration for non-remunerative conditions. They have removed those protections. There is no disadvantage test to that extent. If people could be forced to sign a contract—and as night follows day, I witnessed this occur—why couldn't you force a person to give up conditions by saying, 'Unless you sign this you don't get your overtime shift and you don't get other forms of remunerative benefits'?

Instead of having a protection built into the system, you simply need to get the employee to sign a statement that says, 'Trading-in these monetary conditions left me no worse off.' If you get them to sign the agreement in the first place, it would not be hard to force them to sign that statement either, I would have thought. At that point, I say that this is absolutely disingenuous.

This bill allows that no annual leave will accrue while employees are on workers compensation, and to that extent it is going a little further than Work Choices. But one of the big things are the requirements about a greenfield site. These requirements will allow employers to pick and choose who they want to negotiate with. It will allow employers not to negotiate, if they wish, for some reason or other, whether it is with a recalcitrant union or not. It also allows employers, after three months, unilaterally to go to the Fair Work Commission to have an agreement approved without the support of employees or the industrial parties.

This is something that breaks very new ground in that respect, and I am concerned there is such a lack of protection built in to ensure that the genuine interest of employees is being looked after. This is a cruel measure that should be expected from this government that has shown that it has a very significant dislike of trade unions, and that also is prepared to put as much pressure as it can on workers' wages and conditions to contain any wages growth, but all it is doing is trying to put the whip in the hands of employers.

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