Page 3778 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 October 2005
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out. An employer does not need to try to match existing entitlements. We can say goodbye to four weeks annual leave; we can say goodbye to this last remaining attempt to make AWAs fair.
Let me spell it out for the benefit of the opposition. Redundancy pay, gone; allowances, gone; loading, gone. These changes are not pro-business; they in fact require employers to establish hostile working environments. Heaven forbid if you are the only shop on the block that still pays Saturday loading; you will be priced out of the market. And heaven forbid an employer who wants to retain a safe workplace.
Already an eminent health and public policy academic has suggested the IR proposals pose a major threat to workplace safety. Dr Toni Schofield, a senior lecturer in health sciences at the University of Sydney, has described the changes as a profoundly irrational set of developments. She suggests that the changes could result in Dickensian working conditions.
This is due largely to the reforms radically cutting back union rights to participate in the workplace. OH&S laws which have been in place since the 1800s have recognised that union involvement is the most effective way of protecting workplace safety. She suggests that small and medium businesses are responsible for the most workplace injuries and it is these businesses that are freed up under the reforms. Dr Schofield has no doubt the changes will result in increased workplace injuries and fatalities. Further, she suspects that any gain in productivity brought about by the changes will be offset by the increased costs from workplace injuries.
As I have stated already in this Assembly, there were 103 deaths in 2004 in New South Wales alone in the heavy vehicle industry. Even those in the opposition who have vehemently opposed industrial manslaughter legislation would support the contention that this figure is unacceptable in this day and age: that is 103 families who have been directly impacted by workplace fatality; that is countless friends who have had to mourn the loss of life that need not have been lost.
Under WorkChoices, meal and rest breaks are up for negotiation. In industries like transport, construction and manufacturing, meal breaks are an integral part of workplace safety. Meal breaks allow for time away from the job to recoup, to energise. Particularly in relation to transport, public safety relies on those employees being able to rest and repair. In the ACT, 20,900 workers in the transport, construction and manufacturing industries rely on breaks to ensure that they and their colleagues are fit to complete the day’s duties. Those 20,900 ACT workers in these industries could find their breaks gone, negotiated away in a take-it-or-leave-it AWA. It is a disgrace that, in a country that acknowledges workplace fatality as abhorrent, this government would encourage the purging of necessary meal and rest breaks.
But the federal government is not content with doing away with entitlements. No, they have been rubbing their hands together with glee over the proposed changes to unfair dismissal legislation. These proposals include abolishing unfair dismissal laws for employees and businesses of fewer than 100. The vast majority of the ACT’s 100,000 private sector workers are employed by such businesses. Even those in businesses of more than 100 will not have access to the laws until they have been employed permanently for six months.
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