After John Howard followed up on the Kennett-led destruction of state awards, with his Corporations and Work Choices legislation,[1] the floodgates were opened for mass import of cheap labour. Before that, it simply did not pay to import cheap labour to Australia, because it was too hard for employers to escape the enforcement of industry awards at State, and, to a lesser extent, Federal level. It was for this reason that Australia had, 'til then, escaped the widespread scourge of slave labour that dogs the United States.
How Kennett’s changes to industrial law eventually made it easier to import cheap labour Australia-wide
Before the Kennett government, most Victorian wage earners (and workers in other states) worked under state awards which prescribed minimum conditions and wages, including holidays, benefits and penalties for an extensive range of employment roles. In Victoria, any employee could look these up or have them explained easily by the Victorian Industrial Relations Commission, through a hotline called Wageline – where I worked. But in 1993, the Kennett Government abolished the Victorian Industrial Relations Act, replacing it with the weaker and harder to enforce, and poorly staffed, Employee Relations Act. [2]
Other Australian states imitated this initiative.
Unions scrambled to cover employees by registering new awards under Federal law, under s.51(xxxv) of the Australian constitution. These awards, however, had to be negotiated between individual organisations and their employees. Their enforcement was very limited under the Federal constitution. They were mostly inaccessible and incomprehensible for individual employees.
This right-wing revolution in Victorian industrial law under Kennett in 1993 set the scene for Workchoices under the John Howard government, (11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007). The Howard Government, entering this weakened industrial law and industrial relations situation, went on to widen the use of the corporations clause in the Australian constitution, which exempted corporations from many employer obligations. [3]
Up until then Australian employers had not had much to gain by importing immigrant workers because they had been required to employ them under the same industrial awards as native born workers. That meant that there was not the same opportunity to import cheap labour as there was, notoriously, in the United States.
Today we are in a situation where the Australian labour market has been greatly deregulated and it is now possible to employ overseas immigrants according to individually tailored employment contracts where they have little or no bargaining power or recourse for legal protection.
Coupled with the deregulation of immigration, this has created local pull factors which the Australian growth lobby has been keen both to lobby for and to exploit.
Albanese's new industrial law bill
The Albanese Government's new industrial legislation looks as if it will empower workers in the Australian system, and the second part of it, to be moved in 2023, looks even better.
The big employer associations have had quite a ride on the tails of Howard's exploitative legislation, but hopefully that is coming to an end.
Today the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry are claiming that, "A one-size fits all approach to wages undermines business flexibility and productivity, which has adverse outcomes for employees and employers."
No it doesn't. Employees do not have the personal power, time, or specialist education to negotiate their rights workplace by workplace, let alone enforce these severely attenuated rights via the arcane, confusing, expensive processes available under the Fair Work Commission. Enforcement will be a continuing problem, but hopefully the next tranch of legislation slated for 2023 will address this problem.
Industry-based awards and bargaining will start to give workers a basis on which to claw back some of the many rights they have lost. Changes empowering workers in industrial law have the capacity to affect many other things in our society, including the ability of journalists to resist editors and employers who currently hold the whip-hand in what is permitted to be published.
For some details of what the legislation contains, click here: https://candobetter.net/sheila-newman/blog/6507/fair-work-act-legislation-amendment-summary
Whilst I hate Albanese's support for the US-NATO war-machine, I am glad of this industrial legislation and hope that it passes.
Deregulation of housing market and Rise of the Internet were also factors in unaffordable housing and massive population growth
Two further processes helped to expand the trends that Jeff Kennett’s actions set in motion, leading to Howard totally reversing a century of democratic gains in industrial relations and law. These further processes were:
- Deregulation of the Australian housing market to permit overseas purchase and investment
- The rise of the internet, which was exploited by state governments, private migration agents in conjunction with employers; universities seeking students; and property financiers, conveyancers, developers and real-estate agencies, to globalise Australian employment, public institutions, universities, and property.
Steve Bracks and John Brumby, Dan Andrews, Ted Baillieu, and Matthew Guy, as premiers or opposition leaders would continue Kennett’s big population campaign, despite the different brand presentations of their politics. Dan Andrews' massive 'Big Build,' promoted as necessary for coming population growth, stands out for its financial cost to taxpayers and for the gains it will bring to land-speculators.
Was Kennett aware of his contribution to setting in motion Australia’s unfortunate population tsunami? He was a great population growth spruiker and had served formally as Minister for Housing, Immigration and Ethnic Affairs in 1981 under the Hamer government. He has made many public declarations on his perception that very high immigration is desirable.[4]
You can read more about the recent history of labour law and population trends in Australia, in an earlier article, here: https://candobetter.net/node/4612
NOTES
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorkChoices: “Relying on the corporations power of Section 51(xx) of the Constitution, the Howard Government extended the coverage of the federal industrial relations system to an estimated 85% of Australian employees. All employees of "constitutional corporations" (i.e. trading, financial, and foreign corporations) became covered by the WorkChoices system. Other constitutional powers used by the Federal Government to extend the scope of the legislation included the territories power to cover the Australian territories, including the external territories of the Christmas and Cocos Islands, the external affairs power, the interstate and overseas trade and commerce power, and the powers of the Commonwealth to legislate for its own employees. Victoria voluntarily had referred its industrial relations powers to the Commonwealth in 1996, under Section 51(xxxvii) of the Constitution.”
[2] My reference is personal experience in the Victorian Department of Labor at the time, and, Richard Tracey, “Standing Fast, Federal Regulation of Industrial Relations in Victoria,” H.R. Nicholls Society, http://archive.hrnicholls.com.au/archives/vol14/vol14-3.php]
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorkChoices: “Relying on the corporations power of Section 51(xx) of the Constitution, the Howard Government extended the coverage of the federal industrial relations system to an estimated 85% of Australian employees. All employees of "constitutional corporations" (i.e. trading, financial, and foreign corporations) became covered by the WorkChoices system. Other constitutional powers used by the Federal Government to extend the scope of the legislation included the territories power to cover the Australian territories, including the external territories of the Christmas and Cocos Islands, the external affairs power, the interstate and overseas trade and commerce power, and the powers of the Commonwealth to legislate for its own employees. Victoria voluntarily had referred its industrial relations powers to the Commonwealth in 1996, under Section 51(xxxvii) of the Constitution.”
[4] The Age, 16 March, 1999, "Kennett calls for big rise in migrant intake", Cited in Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence, Chapter 6, http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/swin:7395 (with appendices) or (without appendices) http://tinyurl.com/p4ykwup
Comments
Andriy Bondar (not verified)
Sun, 2022-11-27 10:56
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This is a garbled post
Sheila Newman
Thu, 2022-12-01 14:04
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Post ungarbled. Your comments mostly correct, Andriy, if abusive
I have ammended the article in question to indicate that it was not worth importing cheap labour until Howard brought in his Corporations and Work Choices legislation. Thank you for pointing out my mistakes. With regard to mentioning 2009, maybe I was going to say something (but got interrupted) about the high rate of mass migration into the country, which was particularly shocking as outnumbering natural increase around that time - actually from 2007.
(See, for instance, Table 4: Components of population growth: 1980–2015 at https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1617/Quick_Guides/MigrationStatistics.)
Anyway, I decided not to pursue that subject, and you are right that that year did not make sense.
With regard to the term 'industry-based awards,' I was also thinking of occupation-based awards, my point being the erosion of collective bargaining through the introduction of enterprise bargaining in Australia. Collective bargaining was the hallmark of Australia's leadership in industrial law legislation and worker and citizen empowerment, from the world's first 8 hour day (1856) through to Federation and the Australian Constitution, and onwards - up until John Howard's changes to the interpretation of the Australian Consitution, which has practically outlawed collective bargaining to all intents and purposes.
The substitution of a few sparse rights in the Fair Work Act for the historic rights acquired over many decades through the old state award systems, is nothing compared to the historic rights and power acquired through the old award systems. These systems were created between unions, government, and workers. They empowered unions and thereby workers, providing a bulwark against the tendencies for governments to side with employers and big money. Your comment that most workers go to the Fair Work Tribunal about unfair dismissals is an indication of the lack of scope for workers regarding the laws that underpin that tribunal. The situation of workers regarding other employment rights is very poorly defended by that Tribunal.There is a good paper on this here: "Collective Bargaining: Delivering for the public interest?" https://www.aierights.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Ron-McCallum-Debate-2018-discussion-paper.pdf
You write, "Whether or not foreign guest workers are allowed in Australia is a separate issue and not dealt with in the Fair Work Act 2009 or its predecessors." That is not the point. The point is that the system that Howard introduced covers something like 80% of workers and it permits them to be paid at different rates for the same work, when that was not legally possible in most industries before. This makes it profitable to import cheap workers from overseas and that is what has happened.
It is irrelevant to this argument whether you think "an appropriately monitored guest worker system can help raise poor people in developing coutnries out of poverty whilst simultaneously ensuring Australian consumers have affordable fruit/veg and so on ..." Except to say that, without enforceable, detailed awards in a unionised system with teeth, it is not possible to have an 'appropriately monitored guest-worker system.
Australian farmers have been forced to compete in a globalised, unlevel playing field, which does not reflect the cost of production in this country, which requires a huge amount of fertiliser, irrigation, and mechanisation (and environmental damage). This leaves no margin at all for paying pickers and packers properly. The notion of affordable fruit and vegetables is meaningless in the context of the cost of long-distance travel, vast overseas imports, oversupply in all seasons, and enormous spoilage.
In industrial case-law 'industry' traditionally refers implicitly to large numbers of people who get their hands dirty doing something relatively unskilled. Industrial law is mired in class division, which is, of course, a reflection of power. That is one of the chief things supposed to separate Liberal from Labor in this country, but Labor did seem to allow things to drift after Howard's essential destruction of worker and citizen-rights, with the Fair Work Act not much better It is therefore surprising that Albanese seems to be taking a more traditional Labor tack. I can only hope that this will bear out.
The history of Australian industrial laws as a protection against slavery is that Australian workers at the turn of the century, having ended transportation of forced ‘white’ labour (convicts and indentured labour) noting the kidnapping of Pacific Islanders, also rejected ‘non-white’ slavery through the White Australia policy, which was a trade-off for allowing manufacturers to import foreign goods. Australian employers were kidnapping Islanders as slaves and would have imported African slaves if allowed. An ammendment to the Masters and Servants Act August 1847 forbade the transportation of ‘Natives of any Savage or uncivilized tribe inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific Ocean’. Masters and Servants Act 1847 (NSW) No 9a. No.IX., 16 August 1847. Six weeks later a Legislative Council motion disapproved the prospect of introducing Pacific Island workers into the colony, because it “May, if not checked, degenerate into a traffic in slaves.” https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/july/1561989600/alex-mckinnon/blackbirds-australia-s-hidden-slave-trade-history. Whitlam decoupled the notion of cheap imported labour from skin colour, but continued to protect Australian and State Awards. Howard managed to reverse theses and the protection they carried against
Andriy Bondar (not verified)
Tue, 2022-11-29 11:27
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Newman doesn't get it
Sheila Newman
Thu, 2022-12-01 13:56
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Andriy Bondar's intemperance does not help Ukraine
Andriy Bondar, I have corrected the mistakes you pointed out in my industrial law article, but you have failed to point to any specific mistake I might have made in reporting on Ukraine. Instead, you continue to pretend that this site is pro-Putin rather than anti-war and anti-censorship, and make inflammatory comments with the excuse that you were born in Ukraine. That kind of behaviour is hardly a good advertisement for Ukraine.
This war is mostly, like all wars, a huge money-laundering operation for criminals operating within criminal states, with the support of completely captive mass media. Already more than 60 billion USD has gone into the black smoking pit of Ukraine, and out the other end into various private bank accounts.
The most relevant article that I have produced about Nazism in contemporary Ukraine is from a Jewish site that tracks the creation of Nazi monuments around the world, including GPS links to the actual monuments, with dates and histories, at https://candobetter.net/anonymous/blog/6321/nazi-monuments-ukraine-mushroomed-2014-time-us-interference. How about you look at the links and argue with those facts? This article is a partial copy from a Jewish site Lev Golinkin, "Nazi collaborator monuments in Ukraine,"The Nazi collaborator monument project, https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/ I copied parts of it because it is a subscription-only site, which has only temporarily made this information on Ukraine available. This article shows an explosion of monuments since 2014, which was the time when multiple US political figures were present in Ukraine, intervening in elections there. Several were recorded fraternising with Neonazis, and the current President of the United States and his son have interfered with the Ukrainian judiciary by having Poreshenko remove a public prosecutor because he was going after a wealthy criminal who was mixed up in a Biden-Ukraine commercial exploitation. And that criminal was the one who financed the television series that made Zilensky famous and his political campaign.
I do not know how many Ukrainians supported Ukrainian Nazis leading up to the war. There was plenty of resistance from the Donbass region and from people all over Ukraine who did not want the Euro-Maidan, but most people stopped resisting because the Nazi revenge on them was so terrifying. That reign of terror obviously continues. The United States, which is behind the war in Ukraine, has a history of using political extremists to change regimes and to fight their battles on the ground. There is probably not much difference between ISIS and Ukraine's neo-nazis.
Poreshenko admitted that he never intended to negotiate the Minsk Agreements in good faith - but just to buy time to get US support to make war on Russia. Ukrainians should be thankful for this??? What craziness! What psychopathy. He could have avoided war. Ukraine could have been a peaceful country.
As for what Ukrainians in Ukraine think about this - how would we know? You get shot in Ukraine if you criticise the war.
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