The Guardian 28 November, 2007
AWAs under scrutiny in Western Australia
Richard Titelius
Earlier this month the West Australian government’s Fair Employment Advocate Helen Creed released a report assessing the fairness and ability to protect the rights of individual workers of Australian Workplace Agreements.
The West Australian newspaper labelled the report as "half baked propaganda" (November 9). Federal Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey also said the report was "deliberately misleading", claiming it had only assessed 33 individual non-union AWAs. It had however, made reference to many more AWAs which any cursory reading of the report would have revealed and it includes many comprehensive tables, charts and graphs.
These figures reveal for instance that in the past two years the majority of registered AWAs were in the mining, retail trade, accommodation and food services and the construction industry.
In May 2006, the then Office of Employment Advocate advised the Senate Estimates Committee that 16 percent of AWAs filed in the first month of Work Choices expressly excluded all so-called "protected" award conditions and that 22 percent did not provide for any pay rises during the life of the agreement. Further analysis suggests that 45 percent of AWAs had all protected award conditions removed.
The "Fairness Test" was introduced by the Howard government in May 2007, "to ensure that employees are fairly compensated for trading away certain entitlements in an AWA" (namely penalty rates, shift and overtime allowances, annual leave loadings, public holidays and others).
The Fairness Test turned out to be window dressing as far as scrutinising AWAs for fairness and equity was concerned. It failed to address a number of issues including lack of no retrospectivity for employees on existing AWAs. It continues to allow supposedly "protected" conditions to be removed or modified and does not take into account unprotected award conditions such as redundancy pay, paid maternity leave and workers having a say in rostering.
The report cited a number of individual cases that demonstrate the arbitrariness and capriciousness with which some employers believe they can now operate under. The full-time labourer who had just finished an 80-hour week, was dismissed after asking for the following day off; the AWA at Video Ezy which advises workers that they must meet all the expenses for attending compulsory seminars, and the labour hire company which says in a clause that public holidays are recognised but that if they want to use them then the days will be deducted as unpaid leave.
Karl Marx would have noted the stripping of surplus value from the sweat of the workers was made easier by the operation of WorkChoices and the associated apparatus to prop up the interests of capital.
The WA Fair Employment Advocate Report is 52 pages long and available online at fairemployment.wa.gov.au