Yesterday's "reasonable hours" decision is only the end of the beginning of what should prove to be an exhaustive process by the labor movement to introduce European style working hour restrictions to Australia.
The European model caps the number of hours a person is legally allowed to work for employers in a belief that if everyone works fewer hours more people will have jobs thus reducing unemployment. Unfortunately European countries with greatest adherence to this model seem to suffer from comparatively high unemployment. Somewhere theory and practice has not married.
This first ACTU application was a tentative step seeking to walk Australians in this regulated direction. Rather than apply to cap hours the ACTU sought to significantly increase costs by requiring additional paid leave when employees worked more than 60 hours a week over given periods. It was a convoluted attempt to create two tiers of overtime rates for full time employees and has been rejected by the AIRC. Given the effort put into the case the ACTU may be disappointed.
For more than 3 years the labor movement has been conducting atmospheric campaigns to convince Australians that we are exploitatively overworked. Using union sponsored academic research, high quality media campaigns have impressed on Australians how their families and lives have been damaged by working too hard and too long. This media managed softener was supposed to lay the political and community ground for the AIRC application.
The AIRC accepted that full time employees are working about 2 hours longer each week than ten years ago but made the point that "the interaction between work and personal and family circumstances of employees is already recognised in a significant way in the award safety net". The AIRC thinks that the existing regulation is family orientated.
The AIRC decision however modifies a legal technicality. The old wage slave model of employment is alive in the award system where employers have a legal right to require employees to work overtime. But this is largely unenforceable because the capacity to discipline or sack an employee for not working overtime is highly restricted. In fact industrial disputes often erupt when employers attempt to reduce employee overtime.
The AIRC decision inserts an award clause giving employees the legal right to refuse "unreasonable" overtime on the basis of safety, family and other issues. This reduces the legalities of wage slavery and probably causes the award system to more closely match the reasonable behaviours of reasonable people that dominate requests by both employers and employees for overtime.
However this issue will not vanish because the labor movement desperately needs to have the award system perceived as a significant determiner of the social fabric of Australia. Where once award regulation banned work on Sunday in support of church, footy and the Sunday roast, the labor movement is trying to create award relevance for a caffe latte society. Their task is difficult but more media massaging and further award and EBA attempts to regulate maxim work hours should be expected.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment