by Piers Akerman
I owe an apology to Albanians who questioned my comparison on Tuesday of Australia under Kim Beazley's (non)industrial relations reforms and Albania without qualifying the reference.
Though Albania is listed as still recovering from "46 years of xenophobic communist rule" (source: CIA World Factbook) and many deficiencies remain, it has tried to advance since first holding multi-party elections in 1991.
Beazley's spineless capitulation to threats from trade union bosses would see Australia regress to Albania's pre-reform standards.
I should have made it clear that my reference was to Enver Hoxha's disastrous Marxist-Leninist regime.
But it is no wonder Albanians listening to Big Brother Beazley promise to restore the trade union movement to its past inglorious position of power were reminded of the decades of horror they suffered under Hoxha's deluded central planning program and the sharp contrast
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between those mean years and the full employment and generous wages enjoyed today in Australia.
Under Beazley's craven, union-coerced trade-off for his survival, employees who have negotiated Australian Workplace Agreements with their employers, and who are enjoying better wages and conditions than the small minority of private sector workers still captive to the trade union movement's antiquated industrial
relations fiefdom, would be forced to give up their gains and hopes of a continuing prosperous future.
Decisions about their wages and conditions which they have negotiated would be determined by the trade union bosses they thought they had escaped, and they will again be forced to pay union dues -- whether they want to or not.
The trade unions need to keep their coffers full so they can repay the ALP with campaign funds.
And, though the blustering blowhard claims his proposal would permit the union movement to restore "lost" working conditions, what does he have in mind for all the trade union-negotiated and trade union-endorsed agreements which have stripped employees of rafts of award conditions?
Agreements, for example that signed by the notorious Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union which covers nearly 800 workers at Kimberly-Clark's plant near Millicent in South Australia.
It provides an annualised package that takes in a multitude of former award conditions including payments previously paid for overtime, shift penalties, shift allowances, leave loadings, disability allowances, meal allowances and so on.
According to the union agreement, employees may "work a maximum of seven consecutive 12-hour shifts" at the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week plant, with just one day a year off guaranteed for most workers -- Christmas Day, when the plant is closed for maintenance.
Then there is the agreement
between the Melbourne & Olympic Parks Trust and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (which represents actors, jugglers and reporters), and the Australian Workers' Union (the powerbase of Labor's prime minister-in-waiting Bill Shorten), which strips all penalty payments and loadings for overtime and public holidays, except for employees rostered between 1am and 6am.
Shorten's union has been particularly busy, but not alone among unions, in agreeing to dump all paid public holidays in numerous agreements covering workers from Transfield Worley on Western Australia's North-West Shelf to AGL Retail and IT in Victoria and the Department of Urban Services.
That's right. Despite the ALP's noisy campaign, these workers enjoy no additional payments for work on public holidays other than an increase in their flat hourly rate of pay.
Beazley's crocodile tears and the hypocritical claims of the Canberra commentariat, almost all of whom are on AWAs which include benefits the average employee could only dream of, may excite die-hard, rusted-on Labor voters but they are as phoney as the cardboard 2c pieces ALP members waggled moronically during Question Time on Tuesday.
Worse, handing back the industrial whip hand to the irresponsible union movement, as Beazley wishes to do, would guarantee a flight of capital and a flight of jobs from Australia as has not been seen in living memory.
The precedents for such trade union destruction of jobs is evident in France and Germany, where green and socialist government policies have ensured the wholesale destruction of towns and villages as entire factories have been forced to close, unable to meet the unreal demands of trade union chiefs.
Australians who remember Labor's last term in office, when unemployment rates soared during the recession "we had to have" will not be fooled by claims of a new-found responsible approach to labor relations.
The ALP is as beholden to the trade union movement now as it was when former prime minister Bob Hawke came to office 23 years ago, and Beazley is even more in debt because he had nowhere to go when the union bosses presented their ultimatum.
The punters know the bottom line. The signatures on their pay cheques are those of their employers. The signature on Beazley's pay cheque comes from the union movement.
Employers create jobs, not the trade union chiefs. The blowhard has become the bootlicker, kneeling at the feet of the union bosses.
akermanp@dailytelegraph.com.au
Thank you Johno :D
I think that people forget employment is an investment class with risks. If the investor feels the risks outweigh the possibility of profit .. investment goes elsewhere.
An example that parallels the issue is public liability insurance and the freefall in participation in weekend sport beneath elite level.
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