The rhetoric may have changed but the central thesis has not
The Labor Party’s Secure Australian Jobs Plan does help to fill its policy free void and maintains a place for it in an area of debate where it usually dominates the Coalition. It has also swapped the sweeping class warfare rhetoric of the last election for a simpler message.
But when the key eight elements that Opposition leader Anthony Albanese proposed in the Jobs Plan are dissected, they all bring us back to the one central underlying goal – Labor wants the minimum standards in all workplaces to be generic and it abhors anything that is not an old-fashioned permanent job. Is this what a modern and diverse electorate wants or what a post-recession economy needs?
Explicitly inserting “Job security” as an express object of the Fair Work Act potentially winds back the progress that has been made on freeing up the process for employers to restructure their workplaces when their viability is threatened.
It also ignores the reality that the delicate balance between giving employers the ability to respond to economic challenges but making sure employees are compensated properly if they lose a job has been carefully managed by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) under the current legislation. A “job security” objective could severely disrupt this and see Australia move down the European path of people being employed in dead-end jobs while the economy stagnates.
Giving gig economy workers rights through the FWC (and presumably the Fair Work Act) brings the risk that the gig economy becomes unviable as an open industry and is driven underground – in effect Labor is pushing a square peg into a round hole.
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Protection and regulation of gig economy workers are a good thing, but they should have their own model of regulation and should not be forced into a generic employment model that makes their work unviable.
Labor has promised a “proper” definition of casual work in the Fair Work Act, ignoring the fact that the Coalition’s Omnibus Bill does this by requiring employers and employees to commit to defining the engagement at the start of the employment.
The Omnibus Bill also prevents the “double dipping” problem where an employer pays an employee an agreed 25% loading on their base pay instead of providing personal and annual leave, only for the same employee to make a later claim for these entitlements anyway. Labor’s policy does not propose what its alternative definition of “casual” will be and is silent on “double dipping”.
Labor’s promise to crackdown on cowboy labour hire firms to guarantee “same job, same pay” is the most dangerous aspect of Labor’s push for generic workplaces. If every employee is paid in the same way (including all the rigid rules about how and when work can be performed), large businesses will have large workforces that are unable to deal with economic challenges. When there is a downturn, this means lots of redundancies – hardly consistent with Labor’s stated ideal of job security.
The notion of a cap on back-to-back short-term contracts for the same role is something that reflects the reality of decisions that the FWC is making now. [It’s also an element of the policy that the Coalition could embrace if it wanted to get on the front foot.]
The promise to make public sector jobs more secure by ending inappropriate temporary contracts has shades of the strategy adopted by Queensland Labor where giving public sector employees the message that their jobs will be protected translates to votes from those same employees.
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The strategy might work in state politics where the proportion of public sector employees as a total share of the economy is higher but is unlikely to translate at a federal level. Labor is right to call out that temporary contracts in government can be expensive and counter-productive, but it fails to ask the question: Why are these temporary contracts used?
The answer is that public sector enterprise agreements make it extremely difficult to effectively manage a large workforce so temporary contracts help address that problem. The solution to this problem is to make public sector enterprise agreements reflect the need of government as an employer. The problem is that the public sector unions will not let this happen.
The promise to amend government contracts to require companies and organisations to offer secure work for their employees is an unfortunate continuation of the practice of governments across the political spectrum to use their procurement dollars to drive workplace relations outcomes. As with the Coalition’s Building Code, the risk with this policy is the only outcome is that government procurement becomes more expensive.
There is no doubt that these policies are cleverly targeted, abandoning the scary big picture promises of the Shorten opposition and picking up the key fears that the pandemic and Omnibus Bill have created for employees. The problem is that it is built on the impossible notion that every employee will be “better off” in highly regulated workplaces. The reality in the workplace is far different.
Duncan Fletcher, Partner, Kingston Reid
