Workplace bill will add unwanted complexity
IWANT, and the business community wants, higher wages and better living standards for all Australians. That’s good for businesses and good for families. Australians are doing it tough at the moment. They’re struggling with costof-living pressures and making ends meet. Across the country, Australians need more money in their pockets and they need their wages to go further.
But the government’s workplace relations bill, which proposes the most sweeping changes in 20 years to the way Australians work, won’t solve these problems.
The way the bill is currently written will actually make things worse, particularly for small businesses.
The consequences are real and damaging. If passed, they will strangle small businesses in red tape, snuffing out their ambition to grow.
They will put out a welcome mat for unions in family-owned businesses and they will require mum and dad business owners to have the skills and knowledge of HR experts or pay for their services.
And importantly, these changes will not deliver much-needed wage rises. At the moment, small businesses just get on with it.
We have a complex system of awards that sets out a safety net for minimum pay and conditions. Small businesses can pay above that safetynet if they sit down with their teams and figure out what works best for them through an agreement. The government’s plan could change all of this.
Plans before the Parliament now would create a new system of multiemployer bargaining where different businesses would be required to negotiate together with a union or multiple unions, irrespective of whether or not they are fundamentally different businesses.
They’d be swept up in this system because the new rules give unions the power to drag businesses into these agreements if they have a “common interest”. The problem is, no one seems to know what a common interest is, it could be that they’re all in the same industry, located in the same shopping centre or have the same set of rules and regulations.
Multi-employer bargaining will see businesses with as few as 15 casual employees – that’s a busy coffee shop in Parramatta – forced to have their rosters, rates of pay and conditions dictated by a union with members working in another business on the other side of the city.
Hundreds of small businesses could be swept up in a system dominated by unions and lawyers who’ll be left to fight over who should be included in an agreement in a drawn out and complicated process.
Unions with any members in a workplace, or even potential members, could use the new laws to force multiple businesses to bargain together.
Each business will have to share information with its competitors and, if they can’t agree, strikes could shut down every business at the table.
None of this is fair. Small business is a crucial engine for our economy.
These hardworking businesses don’t need any roadblocks in their way that will limit their capacity to grow, to expand, to pay people more, look after their teams and hire more workers.
This bill must be fixed because, in its current form, the only people getting a pay rise are lawyers and union officials.