April 1, 2006
Page 2 of 2
WHEN you're given a new toy, it's hard to resist giving it a try straightaway. And so it was with Australia's employers, as they unwrapped the Government's shiny new industrial relations laws at the start of the week, and decided to see just what they could do.
They discovered they could do plenty. In various workplaces, faithful old retainers were herded together, sacked and then rehired as contractors. The timing, said various employers, was "coincidental".
Those who have been following the case of Craig Pareezer know all about this word "contractor". It means you can be at the company's beck and call - wearing its uniform, driving its truck, with a company phone nestled in your pocket - but if anything goes wrong, suddenly it doesn't know you.
The main thing being "contracted", in other words, is your rights.
In the case of Pareezer, Coca-Cola refused to even help with medical expenses after the young man was shot in the head, chest, stomach, leg and hand during a robbery attempt while he was refilling one of Coke's machines. The shots blew off half of his tongue, pierced his lung and went through his right hand - injuries for which he is still being treated.
At the time, he was effectively Coke's employee, just not on paper. And so it was a case of "Craig who?" as the company battled him through the courts over compensation. After enduring some particularly brutal publicity over the past fortnight, including a plea for compassion from the Premier, Coke has finally settled with Mr Pareezer - nine years after the original incident.
Others are yet to have their rights "contracted" in this way; they've merely been asked to be more "flexible". Indeed, the Government keeps insisting on the need for a more "flexible workforce" - a phrase that summons up the image of 2000 steelworkers doing tai chi and the odd yoga downward dog. It's hard to know why the Australian economy has been doing so well, beating much of the world in terms of economic growth, considering the sclerotic nature of our workforce.
"Flexible", of course, is just code for "a willingness to be treated like any other commodity - able to work anytime, anywhere, at the same rate, without penalties or loadings".
In first-year economics, labour is just another input cost, just like the raw materials. The coal you pour into the burners doesn't cost more on Saturdays and Sundays, so why should the workers who do the pouring? That's the theory, and you can find it expressed on the website of the H.R. Nicholls Society, as much as you can see it illustrated in the pages of Charles Dickens's Hard Times.
The only snag is that employees are different to lumps of coal. For a start, they have a role outside the production process - as citizens, parents and consumers, among other things. This might seem like stating the bleeding obvious, but there are times when stating the bleeding obvious can seem like an act of radical dissent.
Unlike lumps of coal, employees create the society in which business operates. That's why penalty rates are a good compromise: they don't force businesses to close down on weekends; but they do gently encourage work to be concentrated, where possible, on weekdays.
This allows for two days in which citizens can join together to build social capital - whether that takes the form of attending church, partaking in a boozy barbecue, or driving the children to soccer. All are hard to achieve when there is no shared pattern to our times of rest and work.
The Government keeps insisting penalty rates should be a matter of individual choice. But weekends, by their very nature, are the proper subject of communal decision making. There's no point in me driving my children down to weekend soccer if there's no one there for them to play against.
It's not a problem faced by lumps of coal. Lumps of coal don't care too much about when they are thrown into the burner. Lumps of coal are not asked to play a role outside the economy.
The tradition of Australian industrial relations was famously set in 1907 in the Harvester judgement of Justice H.B. Higgins. He insisted that workers were more than an input cost; that a fair wage had to take account of a worker's ability to function in those other roles, such as citizen, parent or, as Higgins put it, "a human being in a civilised community".
A dusty court judgement, from a century ago. Funny how, in 2006, it suddenly has the ring of a rallying cry.
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