Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I'll go through another case study, and then I have a few questions on prospective employees, and then obviously I will cede the call to Senator Pocock for what time she needs.

In relation to—and again, this is not a hypothetical; these are actual cases—the Prouds retail employees enterprise agreement, in May 2019, 86 per cent of voting employees voted to support the agreement, but the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the SDA, argued that the agreement should deal with outlets that employ more than 15 employees per week, despite the fact that Prouds never employs more than 15 employees in any one of its stores on a regular basis. It took 16 long months from the date of lodgement with the Fair Work Commission to have that agreement finally approved. The issue the business had with that was that it took them away from creating jobs and left employees worse off while arguing about completely hypothetical situations. Again, similar to the Officeworks case, they had to provide undertakings to the commission in relation to a cold work allowance and a liquor licence, despite that having nothing to do with their business.

We've now confirmed—Officeworks will be very happy to know—that that's been ruled out. That is very good. But this is now another agreement and it is in relation to very similar outlets that employ more than 15 employees per week despite the fact that Prouds never employs more than 15 employees in any one of its stores on a regular basis—16 months longer; at that time the business literally says it stopped them from creating jobs and left employees worse off. The whole point there was that they actually had to argue about completely hypothetical situations that did not exist. When we look at clause 28 on page 5 of the supplementary explanatory memorandum, again, does the Prouds retail case now fit within that?