Nostradamus he ain’t

If the ALP adopts an industrial policy similar to that recommended by the ACTU last year and wins this year’s election, workers will have the right to ask for a collective agreement if they want one.

This would be the biggest change: employees would have the right to ask for an agreement that is already the most popular type of instrument in the current boom settings - one that is clearly no threat to the economy’s overall health.

The other major change would be the abolition of Australian Workplace Agreements - an instrument introduced during the Howard Government’s first term and arguably one of the biggest free-kicks given to employers during the PM’s interminable reign.

Last year’s IR changes enabled new contracts to meet just five basic conditions for them to be declared legal (as opposed to before the changes where a contract had to at least equal a raft of conditions in the relevant award).

Thus, according to the ABS’s Employee Earnings and Hours Survey, individual contracts pay workers less on average compared to those on collective agreements, and make them work longer on average for the privilege.

These results - also released in February this year - explain why Howard’s effort to elevate individual contracts to messianic levels has relied on dubious arguments about productivity, as opposed to the benefits for employees.

Howard claimed that abolishing individual contracts would “rob the economy of much-needed flexibility”. This is despite the fact barely half a million of these agreements are spread throughout the economy - somewhere near 5 per cent of the labour force.

Their (lack of) prevalence simply doesn’t equate with the hallowed position given to them by the Government and its supporters.

Even in the small pockets where they do exist, there is no evidence to suggest they increase productivity faster than collective agreements.

The coal mining industry (the industry’s most highly unionised sector with nearly 60 per cent of workers as union members) has grown at a similar rate to that of the industry overall in recent years. No-one is bemoaning its inability to make the best of the current overseas demand for resources.

Indeed, this demand has been the key driver of current jobs growth, not legislative change. Howard’s claim that his laws have created a quarter of a million jobs in and of themselves in the last 12 months is absurd.

So is his rhetoric that the “greatest gift of a strong economy is a job” - no matter how poor the conditions. It is Dickensian relativism of the most ridiculous kind.