Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to support Labor's Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Take Home Pay) Bill 2017, which was tabled by the Leader of the Opposition on Monday. It is a bill that seeks to amend the Fair Work Act, to stop the decision by the Fair Work Commission to cut penalty rates from taking effect. This bill will ensure that modern awards cannot be varied to reduce the take-home pay of an employee.

The decision to cut penalty rates will affect the hospitality, retail and fast-food industries, and is expected to affect some 700,000 Australians—a large number of them in my electorate of Calwell. These are some of the most vulnerable workers. Many are young people, mostly students, working to support their education and, of course, women who are juggling family and work.

These workers are vulnerable because necessity requires them to take whatever job they can in a job market where mass casualisation and underemployment has already given the employers the upper hand to play the game in their favour. The cost of living has risen, wage growth is at an historic low and life is really tough for the lowest-paid workers, so how can the Turnbull government remain so unmoved and so unwilling to support them? Instead, my constituents are being shafted for company tax cuts to corporations that, quite frankly, are not short of a quid.

There is dignity in work, and that dignity extends to people being paid a fair wage for a fair day's work—in particular, when that labour is given on Sundays. Penalty rates and overtime are iconic features of Australian wages. In fact, an entire postwar generation of migrants who built this country worked shift work and weekends in order to get ahead, save, become self-sufficient and build their lives in Australia. In that same way, newly-arrived migrants today in my electorate especially continue to rely on penalty rates as a way of helping them get ahead.

Australian workers fought the battle for their pay and working conditions many times over and the Australian Labor Party and the union movement have stood alongside them always, and will continue to do so. If this government really believes that the abolition of penalty rates will lead to more jobs then my constituents had better start looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow because it does not necessarily follow that business will create more jobs once penalty rates are cut, despite what the Turnbull government and the Business Council say. There are too many examples of exploitation and underpayment scams by employers—7-Eleven, Domino's and Caltex, to name a few—for Australian workers to place their faith in employers using the penalty rate cuts to create more jobs.

We know that it is an employer's market, not an employee's market. The race to the bottom on wages happens because there will always be someone else's vulnerability and desperation to take advantage of and exploit. Allan Fels, chair of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce, said that this exploitation proves that existing laws are not tough enough. So my constituents have every right to be very afraid about their prospects of a fair go and opportunity.

So, whilst this government is still in place I call on it to drop its one-sided support of business and instead walk in the shoes of some of our lowest-paid workers. (Time expired)