WorkChoices' Dark Future

WorkChoices is an ideological bill designed to destroy the union movement and allow employers to manage in the interests of their business without the statutory obligation to consider the interests of their employees. Its impact, though, will not be felt by ordinary Australians until after the next election.

Hidden in the 700 pages of the WorkChoices Bill, the 800 pages of the revised Industrial Relations Act, the 566 pages of explanatory memoranda and the almost 1000 pages of regulation is a time bomb.

That time-bomb is set to go off after the next election, long after the High Court has ruled on whether the Bill breaks the constitution and long after the voting population has forgotten the campaigns currently being mounted by unions and State governments. That time-bomb is the replacing of all, that's right – ALL, existing awards by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC).

Unions will have no input into those awards. Those awards will NOT vary any of the minimum wages, or leave conditions offered in the Fair Pay and Conditions Standard. Perhaps most significantly, those awards will not include any of the Preserved Entitlements that remain in the existing Awards. The Preserved Entitlements include annual, sick, carer's, parental, and long-service leave, notice of termination and superannuation.

Sudden disappearance

Thus, we are likely to see the sudden disappearance of the entitlements that Australian unions have fought for over the last century, which all Australian workers currently enjoy, shortly after the next election.

They can disappear without discussion because the AIRC is an appointed body – it takes its authority from the new legislation. They can disappear without recourse because Union involvement in workplace negotiations is only possible with the approval of the AIRC in individual disputes after going through what is known as the Standard Dispute Resolution Procedures. Collective or "pattern" bargaining by employees is illegal under WorkChoices.

Legal fictions

The way this has been legally engineered is to convert all existing awards into Notional Agreements Preserving State Awards (NASPAs.) This act takes the agreements out of the realm of the state industrial relations tribunals and moves them under the auspices of the Office of the Employment Advocate. These agreements are not collective, they are individual. They are an agreement between an individual employer and an individual employee. These agreements can be replaced by an Australian Workplace agreement simply by lodging the agreement with the Office of the Employment Advocate with a covering note asserting that it complies with the law.

While the terms and conditions of the NASPAs are those of the Award they were drawn from, all union and training conditions have been removed from them as "non-allowable matters". The Preserved Entitlements will only remain only until the award is replaced by the AIRC. Those entitlements are then deemed to be outside the award structure.

Super's next

The inclusion of superannuation in this category is significant. In the same three years new superannuation legislation will be passed, removing the rights of Unions to manage the superannuation payments on behalf of their members. Existing superannuation conditions will then be struck from the awards using this Preserved Entitlements clause.

The role of unions in negotiation workplace conditions is now virtually outlawed. Their role in resolving industrial disputes is now severely curtailed, and with the new super legislation their ability to represent their members' interests financially will be removed as well.

Set your alarms

This government is in the process of handing complete control of Australian labour to international capital.

By the time these triggers come into effect, the next election will be over, and the ideological battles in the High Court a distant memory. Economic conditions are likely to worsen as the global economy reels from the resource shock and mounting environmental catastrophes.

We will wake up from our election-night hangovers with no rights to bargain collectively for our conditions, no legal protection for them and no control over our long term retirement funds. Our lives from cradle to grave will be literally in the hands of the corporations that employ us.

What is really shocking, this is already the law of the land.