When one-third of casuals work full-time hours, almost 60% have been with their employer for more than a year, and more than half cannot choose the days they work, is the “flexibility” of a casual job really for the benefit of employees? Professor David Peetz reports.
Bad Gig: industrial relations “reform” bill delivers flexibility … for employers – Michael West
The federal government’s industrial relations “reform” bill offers a new definition of “casual” employment that creates more problems than it solves. It effectively defines a casual job as anything described that way by the employer at the time a job commences, so long as the employer initially makes “no firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work”. Anyone defined as such loses any entitlement to leave they might otherwise have got through two recent Federal Court decisions. Fair enough, you might think. Casual jobs are meant to be flexible. There can’t be an ongoing commitment.
The truth about much ‘casual’ work: it’s really about permanent insecurity
In fact, Sally McManus, the national secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), has applied the blowtorch to the government – in the hottest of acetylene fashions, yet in her characteristic calm, measured delivery – in claiming that all of the hard work of the previous five months of industrial relations reform negotiations has been undone.
Unflappable unions remain focused versus IR reform bills – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Porter’s attack on workers will do something else as well. It is workers and households that have been the heroes of the recovery. While business has hidden in its bunker, Australians have endured lockdown, complied with often draconian restrictions on their freedom, then emerged to get back to work and start spending in exactly the way the government has urged them to. Their reward for that? Workchoices 2.0, designed to undermine their wages and further tilt the industrial relations playing field in favour of employers. It’s vicious, ideological and idiotically self-defeating.
Christian Porter’s new wage growth attack defies Reserve Bank advice
