Lead Story
Issue No. 57 - February/March 2011
Labour reform: go back to the future
by Professor Richard Blandy
One of Julia Gillard’s most substantial achievements under the Rudd Labor Government was a significant re-regulation of the Australian labour market.
A major issue of the 2007 Federal electoral campaign by Rudd Labor - with strong support from Australia’s trade union movement - addressed was what was seen as unfairness in Australia’s labour market brought about by labour market deregulation, culminating in the Howard Government’s Work Choices legislation.
Labor’s electoral victory led to a significant reversal of the deregulation of the labour market that had occurred under Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard over the preceding 20 years.
The anti-Work Choices campaign made much of individual workers’ vulnerability to unreasonable work demands by their employers, particularly in terms of the family and other social needs they faced.
A perceived imbalance of power between employer and employee lay at the heart of the campaign. Social justice required this balance to be addressed in favour of workers.
Rudd Labor’s answer was to reregulate workplaces so that strengthened representatives of workers (unions, in practice) and independent work tribunals could better ensure workers were treated fairly under amended workplace and industrial relations laws.
It is clearly true that individual workers are relatively powerless at work compared with their employers and that this can lead to exploitation and unfair treatment. But, in the large majority of cases, this imbalance of power does not lead to bad outcomes for workers.
The reason is that employers benefit if their employees like their conditions of work. Liked conditions lead to reduced turnover, easier recruitment, higher returns from the provision of training, greater willingness to be flexible in meeting variations in work needs, higher productivity and lower costs.
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