Implications of Work Choices Legislation

Abstract

Implications of Work Choices Legislation Mark Woodent is widely recognized that the character of Australia's industrial relations systems and institutions have changed dramatically over the last two decades.Most obviously, wages and employment conditions are no longer so dependent on arbitrated awards and instead are much more likely to be the product of enterprise and workplace bargaining (Wooden, 2000).But despite the major changes that have occurred, the current Coalition Government has long made it clear that, in its view, the reform agenda was far from complete and that not for a hostile Senate, further change could have been expected.The opportunity to press ahead with this agenda was thus delivered at the 2004 federal election when the Coalition, unexpectedly, won control of the Senate.Following the election victory the government began developing a program of legislative reforms intended to facilitate what the Prime Minister, in a statement to parliament on 26 May 2005, described as 'the modernisation of Australia's workplace relations system'.More specifically, the stated aim was to bring about a simpler workplace relations system that provided greater primacy to the making of agreements at the workplace level.In the PM's view, such a system would result in 'high productivity, increasing real wages, choice and flexibility'.The centrepiece of that legislative reform program, the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (from hereon referred to simply as 'Work Choices'), has drawn highly vociferous responses from many quarters of Australian society.Predictably, it has attracted favourable responses from employer organizations and hostile reactions from the trade union movement.The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI, 2005:5), for example, described it as an 'historic step forward for Australia' and predicted that 'the reforms should kickstart another round of productivity growth' which ultimately will mean more jobs and higher real wages.In contrast, the position of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is that workers will be far worse off.According to ACTU President, Sharan Burrow: 'The clear goal of the Government's new workplace law is to boost the profits of big business at the expense of the basic rights and living standards of working Australians'.She went on to assert that the 'new laws will hurt the most vulnerable workers and reduce the job security and living standards of all Australian workers and their families' (ACTU, 2005).The ACTU position is also one that appears to be shared by a large number, if not the majority, of industrial relations academics in this country.For example, in a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Work Choices Bill, a Group of 151 Australian Industrial Relations, Labour Market, and Legal Academics (2005:43) claimed that the proposed legislation will 'have no direct

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