Howard’s ideological obsession aims at attacking workers

The Howard Government is determined to undermine the rights of workers, writes ANGELO GAVRIELATOS.

The Howard Government's ideological obsession aimed at attacking ordinary working Australians and unions is best illustrated by its role in the Maritime Unions of Australia (MUA) dispute and the politically motivated and driven farce, the Royal Commission into the building industry. The Howard Government's Workplace Relations Act has been found by the International Labour Organisation to breach international labour laws by restricting collective bargaining at the workplace.

Undeterred by this embarrassment, the Howard Government will introduce further dangerously unfair and retrograde plans by radically altering the nation's industrial laws.

On August 9, the new Senate, with its Coalition majority, will give the Government its industrial relations changes which have been repeatedly blocked in the Senate in recent years.

A recent article, "Abolishing the system is the real endgame" in the Sydney Morning Herald (March 3) by David Chin and Adam Hatcher, two respected barristers specialising in employment law, highlights that the push for these radical changes has its origins in the Business Council of Australia, and other notable conservative, anti worker groups, which believe in the destruction of any system for the independent setting of fair and reasonable conditions of employment. The Business Council's endgame for "reform" is nothing less than the wholesale abolition of the award system, with minimum safety-net standards of pay and conditions, to be replaced by a single, statutory minimum wage set by government on the recommendation of hand-picked economists.

The Business Council and groups such as the HR Nicholls Society have campaigned since the mid-1980s to weaken industrial arbitration systems on the basis of the fanciful façade that individual employees and their employers possess equal bargaining strength.

In summary, the Government's new laws will:

• give primacy to and aggressively spread individual agreements (Australian Workplace Agreements) putting workers in the weakest possible bargaining position
• give employers the power to force cuts in wages and conditions
• neuter the industrial relations commission
• strip award conditions
• limit or deny the right to industrial action.

According to Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello, the problem with the economy is ordinary workers. Mr Costello is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 3 saying "we really need to make Australia as competitive as possible". In the same article political commentator Alan Ramsey writes, it's "the same old mantra. It is not the Government's fault; it's the community's fault. If only Australian's would work harder for less money. Not business, of course. Profits and executive salaries are at record, even obscene, levels. The Government certainly is not demanding corporate restraint. Good heavens, no. The Howard/Costello formula: squeeze workers, particularly the unskilled."

The Government's determination to undermine the right of workers to organise reinforces the fact that the Howard Government works for the unfettered rights of employers over workers. The Government is doing the business of big business and corporations.

Angelo Gavrielatos is the Senior Vice President.

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