Fairness is in the air. The Australian Labor Party’s National Conference, held in April, endorsed a new industrial relations policy — Forward with Fairness — the centrepiece of which is the abolition of Australian Workplace Agreements.
Having denied for months that it had an alternative plan for Industrial Relations and soon after Joe Hockey declared that the Government’s policy was set, the Prime Minister revealed a new Fairness Test in early May .
The Government also dropped the WorkChoices name, effectively admitting that its $55 million advertising campaign had failed. However, the new test addresses just one aspect of the 2006 legislation: compensation for the loss of award conditions previously said to be protected by law.
In fact and in law, these special award conditions could be — and were — lost by employees at the stroke of a pen when they were asked or required as a condition of employment to sign an individual contract modifying or removing these conditions.
The Federal Government’s Bill provided that new agreements should compensate employees for any loss of these particular award conditions, such as overtime, but the compensation is limited, and subject to various 'let out' clauses.
Although the ALP announced support for the Bill in Parliament, it declared that it did not go far enough and moved a number of amendments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. These included seeking to protect the right of employees not to work on special holy days, Christmas Day and Good Friday, which the Government rejected in both Houses.
In the now familiar manner, the Bill went to a Senate Committee for a review which left interested parties and the Committee itself little time to consider its ramifications.
The Committee reported along predictable party lines: Government Senators supported the Bill, subject to a few technical amendments, while ALP, Democrats, Greens and Family First Senators excoriated the proposed legislation.
The Senate passed only the Government’s own largely technical amendments. It compromised with Family First’s extension on the protection of redundancy entitlement from 12 months to two years, but refused to make redundancy a protected award matter subject to the Fairness Test itself. Employees can thus lose this right at any time by being required to sign an agreement excluding it.
The legislation has serious flaws. It offers compensation for the loss of only some award conditions — the 'protected' ones. It does not compensate for the loss of