'Enough is enough': Craig Laundy says employers must organise like unions
Craig Laundy says the Coalition has failed to take the fight to the labour movement on industrial relations and has urged employers to organise in a manner similar to unions to combat their “backwards-looking” demands.
In a speech to the Australian Industry Group policy conference on Monday, the workplace relations minister signalled the government would propose further legal changes and called for employer support in convincing their workers to back the Coalition.
He said unions “have perfected the art of organising as a political tool”.
“They are smart operators and we have let them take over the industrial relations field unchallenged,” he said. “Enough is enough. This is a call to action from me to every one of you ... You need to organise the way the unions do.”
Laundy said employers should use their trust and friendship with their workers to explain that they face either “a more secure, positive future or one where their jobs are at risk”.
Labor’s workplace relations spokesman, Brendan O’Connor, accused Laundy of a “thinly veiled assault on the performance” of the jobs minister, Michaelia Cash, by implying she had vacated the field.
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Laundy said the Turnbull government had “made significant steps towards improving our system” but he was “determined to push ahead with reforms to do even more”.
Laundy cited Coalition bills to introduce new penalties for deliberate underpayment of wages, allow courts to disqualify union officials and add a public interest test for union mergers.
“I am also keen to make life easier for small and family businesses to navigate our complex industrial relations system,” he said.
On Friday the small business ombudsman, Kate Carnell, released a position paper calling for penalties for unfair dismissals to be halved from 26 weeks to 13 weeks’ pay and to require small businesses to repay underpaid wages but protecting them from further penalty where they have made a “genuine effort to comply”.
Laundy warned of a “dark future” if Bill Shorten became prime minister, claiming that the Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Sally McManus, would in effect become the workplace relations minister.
“The effects would be devastating for your business and for your employees,” he said.
Laundy argued that McManus’s plan for the Fair Work Commission to gain powers to rectify underpayments infringes on the constitutional separation of powers.
Laundy said the ACTU’s plan for industry-wide bargaining would “paralyse entire industries” and its aim to increase the minimum wage would “drive hundreds of thousands of small and family businesses to the wall”.
In contrast to Laundy’s call for employers to muscle up to unions, the Australian Workers Union secretary, Daniel Walton, told the conference that industrial relations had become “too aggressive” in Australia.
He cited the Australian federal police raid on the AWU headquarters to investigate a political donation and the alleged politicisation of regulators the Australian Building and Construction Commission and Registered Organisations Commission.
Walton argued that some employers were prepared to join the Coalition in “relentlessly hammering unions” rather than look for other ways to find common cause on issues such as reducing gas prices.
Walton warned that “hyping-up conflict” would “create the conditions for extremism”. He noted that the Australian Election Study has found that, since 1996, the proportion of voters identifying as on the left is up, in the centre is down and on the right is steady.
“So the polarisation we are seeing develop is mostly on the left ... Do you think it’s a coincidence that this shift has happened at the same time that insecure work has expanded?”
Walton – who leads the historically moderate AWU – urged employers to “deal with a reasonable, relatively centrist union movement”. The alternative was “a far more disruptive, brutal, winner-takes-all version of industrial relations”, he said.
“We believe Australia’s national interest is best pursued through cooperation between labour and management,” he said. “But how long does that centrist, cooperative view of industrial relations last if the total war between business and the traditional union movement continues?”