One of the key battlegrounds in the class struggle at the moment is the attack on weekend rates of pay by big business. Big business and
their parliamentary friends led by Abbott frame this attack to make it seem
that weekend rates of pay are a “penalty” on hard working small businesses.
The working people in Australia are not impressed by this
argument and can see that it is yet another case of transferring a greater
share of the wealth from wages to profits.
South Australian workers lead the way
In the last SA state election campaign in March 2014,
progressive workers in their unions conducted a very visible campaign against
Nick Xenophon’s attempt to win votes for his SA team by promoting a cut to weekend rates of pay
as equating to an increase in jobs! The public response to the campaign against
cuts to weekend rates was extremely successful. In fact the ALP Premier Jay
Weatherill said words to the effect that the workers’ campaign was the ‘game
changer’ in the election outcome. Abbott and his big business masters have not
learned from this recent history. Relentlessly they continue with their line
that weekend rates of pay cost jobs and hurt small business.
Is It Small Business Or Big Business Leading The Charge Against
Weekend Rates Of Pay?
Big business is focusing on the retail industry to spearhead its
assault on weekend rate of pay in general. Most small retail businesses pay
workers under the award minimum standard (General Retail Industry Award) and
have done so for decades.
The rates of pay in the award for Saturday are 25% more than
Monday to Friday rates of pay. For Sunday the rates of pay are double time.
Small businesses have factored this in to their cost structures for decades. It
is not wages that have increased astronomically for small retail businesses,
but increases in running costs of utilities and their supplier costs.
Take bread for instance. Woolworths and Coles pay a significantly
lower unit cost for a loaf of bread than does the small cafe struggling to
survive in a shopping mall or main road shopping strip where they have to pay exorbitant
rent to a parasitic landlord like Westfield.
In fact it is big business retailers who have been leading the
charge against weekend and other shift rates of pay for over two decades.
In the late 1980s and 1990s the big department stores like Myer
and the big food retailers like Woolworths and Coles made applications to
reduce Saturday rates of pay from time and one half to time and one quarter,
the current 25% Saturday rate of pay in the award.
Then along came enterprise bargaining which these big retailers
used to whittle away weekend rates and extend ordinary hours of work, thereby
minimising higher shift pay rates.
How were they able to get away with this? Enterprise bargaining divided the
retail workers in an industry
which is characterised by thousands of inexperienced young workers, some still
at school. The introduction of enterprise bargaining coincided with an employer
class attack on preference to unionists clauses in awards and ‘outlawing’ of
the ‘closed shop’.
This situation weakened the bargaining power of all unions in
collective agreement making, not to mention the anti-strike laws in the
country. In the retail industry, the retail workers’ union, the SDA, entered
bargaining with each of the big retailers having the ability to quickly
de-unionise the industry if they chose through the withdrawal of pay roll
deductions of union dues. This would not only have crippled the SDA financially
but weakened the SDA’s right wing faction of the ALP with a history of
Industrial Grouper influence within it.
In one sense it suited the big retailers to maintain strong
membership numbers in the SDA as this indirectly helped to maintain right wing
tendencies within the ALP.
Big Retailers Have Already Attacked Saturday Rates Of Pay
However competition between the big retailers and the motivation
to maximise their profits has seen them use the enterprise bargaining process
to take away weekend rates of pay for Saturday work.
The existing Enterprise Agreements of Aldii, Coles, Bunnings and
Woolworths to name a few already have no additional rates of pay for Saturday
work between 5am or 6am and 10pm in the late evening.
These big business Enterprise Agreements also have taken away
overtime rates of pay by enabling the boss to roster a retail worker up to 48
hours in a week without the payment of overtime.
Not satisfied with this redistribution of wealth from wages to
profits, the big retailers are
now after workers’ Sunday rates of pay which
are still at the standard of double time won by workers many decades ago.
Workers United Will Defend Weekend Rates Of Pay
In 2015, retail workers have many workers in other industries
who will unite with them to defeat the general ruling big business class
offensive to transfer more wealth from wages to profits through an attack on
weekend rates, Sunday rates in particular.
This time around, the likes of Coles and Woolworths will not
just be confronted by an isolated section of the workforce in a single employer
enterprise agreement negotiation in order to try and further reduce pay. They
will be confronted by workers and their unions covering not only retail, but
hospitality, health, construction and many more.
United in struggle, workers and their unions will defeat big
business in this key battleground of the class struggle.
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