Morality and the IR Reforms

I always think it's interesting when institutions who claim a market share of morality and 'family values' get involved in public debate, as has happened recently with the Christian Churches (and the Diggers' Lobby and the self-appointed saviour of the nuclear family) over the pending Industrial Relations reforms. Institutions like these, while working pretty constantly in the justice arena (in the case of the major churches, anyway) generally only get a reasonable media run on the most personal issues, like abortion, or charity, or, like, God and stuff.

The immense media response to the Churches proclamations that the reforms are immoral (see here for the Uniting Church's particularly strong anti-Government reform statement), not intuitively a huge moral issue, is a little puzzling. Why does the media want a moral opinion on what would normally be treated as an economic reform?

It occurs to me that this level of media attention is a direct and proportionate response to the Government's rhetoric. Deliberately, intuitively, Howard has positioned the reforms as an issue of freedom, choice and the common good - on the playing field of Western (Judeo-Christian influenced, whether we like it or not) values - in order to justify why he is promoting individual bargaining over collective, to explain why he doesn't want unions 'interfering', claiming that we are all equal before the law and according to his argument have equal power. In doing so, he has opened himself up to criticism based on morals and values.

While this was coming solely from the union movement, he could dismiss it as grandstanding, but when the Churches and members of parliament become involved, the whole thing backfires on him. Suddenly, union claims that penalty rates are necessary to ensure adequate compensation for lost leisure time, easy to dismiss as extending from sectional interests cos he's already cast unions as irrelevant, become recast as big-picture moral claims - that people need to connect with society, that the Sabbath should be respected as a day of rest and relaxation for the whole community, that common holidays are there to enable public and community interconnection and foster national pride, and that religious traditions should be respected. All things attached to White traditions that Howard has used time and time again to invoke electoral fear against people of other traditions and faiths, to glorify frugal budgetary spending and corollary cutting of basic services, to create electorally-exploitable barriers and divisions, to justify fostering our relationship with America instead of expanding into the non-White region, the list goes on and on and...

The people have shown that they respond to moral guidance that accords with their own interests. But with these reforms, it's just not clear why they won't kill the hip pocket and the family time, and make it less fair, for non-professional, non-managerial workers. So, I reckon, if the Government claims that its reforms are 'for society', the people want to know what moral bodies think. It's backfired gloriously.

Poor, silly Billy runs out of puff

Some things to think about from the Government’s new workplace relations package:

EXAMPLE

Billy is an unemployed job seeker who is offered a full-time job as a shop assistant by Costas who owns a clothing retail store in Canberra. The clothing store is covered by a federal award. The job offered to Billy is contingent on him accepting an AWA. The AWA Billy is offered provides him with the relevant minimum award classification wage and explicitly removes other award conditions.
As Billy is making an agreement under WorkChoices the AWA being offered to him must at least meet the Fair Pay and Conditions Standard.The AWA Billy is offered explicitly removes award conditions for public holidays, rest breaks, bonuses, annual leave loadings, allowances, penalty rates and shift/overtime loadings. Billy has a bargaining agent assisting him in considering the AWA. He understands the details of what is in the AWA and the protections that the Fair
Pay and Conditions Standard will give him including annual leave,
personal/carer's leave, parental leave and maximum ordinary hours of work. Because Billy wants to get a foothold in the job market, he agrees to the AWA and accepts the job offer.

Poor Billy. As Liam has noted, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. It becomes disgusting when you investigate half-truths circulated by the Government about the reforms – in this case, the myth that you are protected by law from being forced into signing an AWA, that it is a choice.

As can be deduced from poor Billy’s fate, the High court has ruled that making an AWA a condition of employment does not constitute ‘duress’ under the Act Never mind that in a depressed regional jobmarket where Billy’s skills as a wigmaker are redundant or non-existent, Billy may be forced by economic necessity to sign over his rights for a song. This apparently isn’t duress, which in the spirit of the Act is instead understood mainly in commercial terms as though the labour contract were a commercial contract, as though the employment relationship were the same as any other contractual relationship, as though the labour market were like any other market, as though selling your labour were the same as selling paperclips, as though, like a commercial entity, Billy didn’t need to eat or maintain non-commercially-essential personal relationships, and if his product, his labour, was substandard he should be allowed to fold, ensuring a healthy competitive market and a sloughing off of the dead weight of society.

So much for a society that refuses to separate labour from people, and that fights to protect the vulnerable. The Government’s promises that nobody can be forced to sign an AWA under law ring very hollow. Billy can’t even access the only remedy available to him, litigation through the court system, unless he has already signed the AWA. If he is merely in the process of being forced to sign it, there are no protections and no penalties, no friends to help him other than the union which frankly can’t do anything. The erroneously-named Employment Advocate does not have the power to investigate or bring the case until Billy himself realises he’s been hard done by. Even if Billy could prove that he had signed the damned thing under the weird and strict definition of ‘duress’, he would have to fork out his money to get penalties applied to the organisation, and he wouldn’t get ordered costs either. It would be a Pyrrhic principle fight, which he would probably lose anyway.