After more than six months of an “independent” review of the Fair Work Act, it comes as no surprise that the recommendations endorse this anti-worker and anti-unions outfit.
In fact the most significant recommendations of the review will extend restrictions on workers’ rights to take industrial action and union rights to organise.
Overhanging all is the recommendation to give Fair Work the powers “to actively encourage more productive workplaces”. In the real world of work, “increased productivity” means workers have to work harder and faster, take less time off when sick; fewer workers, longer hours, less rights, no industrial action to protect your rights and conditions, all to make bigger profits for the bosses. In the real world, “increased productivity” simply means that the bosses have more rights and freedoms to increase the exploitation of workers. It’s an attack on the working class, camouflaged behind the fig leaf of “productivity”.
The Fair Work review recommends that injured workers should no longer accrue annual leave while absent on workers’ compensation; and an opening has been created for public holiday entitlements to be undermined. Individual flexibility clauses have been expanded and could be used as back door to AWAs.
Right to take industrial action
FWA’s new recommendations impose even tighter restrictions on workers’ and union rights to take industrial action. Unions and workers will not be able to take industrial action unless and until the bosses agree to bargain. It means the bosses can delay or refuse to bargain with the union for a long period. Australian workers never had the right to strike, even though the mild ILO’s Charter declares the right of workers to withdraw their labour.
Right to Organise
The FWA review recommendations give the FWA (the bourgeois state) more power to restrict even the few small rights remaining for union organisers to enter workplaces and organise the workers.
Fair Work is a legal instrument of the capitalist state set up simply to contain (and when necessary suppress) workers’ organisations and collective struggle. Predictably, the more reactionary sections of the monopoly capital ruling class in the Business Council and Minerals Councils are not satisfied and want an open attack on the few limited bourgeois democratic rights wiped out altogether. Their hatred of unions and the organised working class has no bounds because they understand the collective power of workers that sets limits on capital’s capacity for rapacious exploitation of workers and the environment. They want the capitalist state to wipe out unions and collective organisations of workers, or at the very least, make them subservient puppets of capital.
Organise and struggle for job security and workers’ rights
Under Fair Work laws it is illegal for unions and workers to take industrial action to protect their job security during the ‘unprotected’ period. For the organised working class there’s only one response to Fair Work, the Business Council and Minerals Council. Organise and mobilise for jobs and job security, workers’ rights, decent working conditions and living standards for the community of working people!
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