www.workinglife.org.au
Photo: ACTU/Mark Phillips
Issue 19, March 2015
STAND UP! FIGHT BACK! #MARCH4 National Day of Action More photos
Pages 6-7
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March 2015
International Women’s Day 2015
Closing the gender gap (and it’s not just about pay) by JACKIE WOODS THIS year’s International Women’s Day on 8 March came around against the depressing backdrop that the gender pay gap is at its worst in 20 years. The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in some industries, women are earning the same as men earned a decade ago. Across all industries the gender pay gap is nearly 19%, putting women workers hundreds of dollars a week behind men. Unions have led the charge to close the gender gap at work, running successful campaigns for pay equity and challenging workplace discrimination against pregnant women and mothers. 3. Recognise our achievements, But it’s not just pay where women are not just our clothes getting the rough end of the stick. Here are Did you know a quarter of professional five ways we can close the gender gap: jockeys are women, including many Group 1 winners? No, and you wouldn’t know 1. A fairer share of the housework from ads for the Golden Slipper either, (where a fairer share means less) where we’re unclear if the ‘new breed’ are Women do twice as much housework the horses or the frocked up women. as their male partners. Data from the Women’s achievements are too often Household, Income and Labour Dynamics shamefully overlooked by a focus on their in Australia survey released last year found clothes and appearance, a double standard that women complete about 16 hours of exposed by honorary sister Karl Stefanovic housework a week, more than double that who wore the same suit on air for a year — done by men. unnoticed — in a disturbingly successful They also spend more time caring for experiment on sexism. children and running domestic errands. The gender gap on housework is improving 4. Stop penalising us for having but there’s still a long way to go. babies . . . A Human Rights Commission 2. Let him collect for the going inquiry found alarming rates of work away present discrimination against pregnant women And while we’re on the thorny topic of and new mothers. One-in-two mothers domestic duties, when was the last time a reported experiencing discrimination at man in your office organised the cake and work at some point during pregnancy, parental leave or return to work. card for a colleague’s birthday? Women reported negative attitudes Or cleaned up after a meeting? Or went and comments from employers, refusal to the trouble of arranging a farewell.
to accommodate medical requirements, reduced pay and hours and missing out on advancement opportunities. The finding comes as a shock, until you remember the attitude of some employers. Take accountant Brett Kelly who runs the firm Kelly + Partners. He spoke glowingly recently about two senior staff who planned their pregnancies around each other for the convenience of clients “out of consideration and professionalism.” 5. . . . and stop making childcare a ‘women’s issue’ When was the last time you saw a father interviewed on TV about the difficulty finding quality affordable childcare so he could go back to work? Looking after children is a family and community issue. It’s a workplace issue. It’s both a women’s and a men’s issue. Of course there are many male primary carers, but too often childcare and the balancing of work and family are framed as women’s problems, undermining women’s role in work and public life and diminishing men’s role as parents.
GET IN TOUCH
Want to know more or get involved? Contact our newsdesk by email at editor@workinglife.org.au or phone (03) 9664 7266. Or get in touch by Facebook (facebook.com/ThisWorkingLife) or Twitter (twitter/thisworkinglife). Editor: Mark Phillips. Responsibility for election comment is taken by Dave Oliver, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, 365 Queen Street, Melbourne 3000.
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March 2015
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At Work
For local TV crews, the World Cup is just not cricket by MARK PHILLIPS THE eyes of the sporting world were on the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 14 February when ancient enemies Australia and England met to open the cricket World Cup. A global audience of hundreds of millions tuned in for the highly-anticipated opening match of the tournament, while the next day’s clash between India and Pakistan in Adelaide set a cricket world record of more than a billion viewers. But it wasn’t Australian – or New Zealand – camera operators, sound people, editors and broadcast technicians who put the show together. They have been shut out of the tournament. Instead, the pictures were sent around the world from a crew of temporary foreign workers brought in especially for the tournament on a visa that allows them to be paid less than Australian workers. “There’s a lot of aspects to this that stink, that is shonky and is potentially dangerous to the sporting public and to workers in this industry,” said the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance’s director of crew and sport, Mal Tulloch. The problem started when the International Cricket Council awarded the broadcast contract for the World Cup to a Singapore-based company, Broadcast Solutions. Mr Tulloch said Broadcast Solutions had made no genuine attempt to employ local crews, and had used the controversial 400 visa sub-class to get around immigration and workplace laws. They have brought in about 200 crew from South Africa, India and Malaysia, who will be paid about US$120 ($156) for a 10 to 12 hour day, compared to the Australian market rate of US$250 ($325) to US$300 ($390) a day. “We think they are going to be treated like dogs while they’re here,” he said. “They will be paid US$120 a day, which falls way short of what the award is, and with 200 people it’s going to mean a significant amount of money goes into the
‘Shonky’: The Australians celebrate a wicket, but viewers watching it on TV were seeing images captured by temporary overseas workers. Photo: Michael Dodge/Getty Images pocket of Broadcast Solutions. “We also believe the standard of the coverage will not be up to the standard the Australian public expects because they’ve done it cheap.” Some major international sporting events in Australia, such as the tennis Australian Open in Melbourne, have been permitted to use some international staff to boost local crew numbers, but had paid them Australian rates, Mr Tulloch said. In those cases, the foreign workers were granted 420 visas, a special visa sub-class for the entertainment industry that allows foreign performers or production staff to work in Australia temporarily. But to successfully apply for workers to be brought in on a 420 visa, an employer must demonstrate that the imported workers genuinely have skills that are not available locally, and must pass a net employment benefit test to prove that their production will create jobs for local workers. Employers also must usually work with the union to comply with Australian employment and health and safety laws.
Most importantly, the union’s involvement ensures that market and award rates of pay are not undercut. But Mr Tulloch said no such requirement exists for the 400 visa and the special dispensation granted to the cricket World Cup was about profit, and profit alone. “There’s a number of broadcast technicians that will be unemployed during the World Cup cricket . . . there wasn’t any real approach by Broadcast Solutions to test the local market. “They are obviously going to exploit people, make a lot of money out of their broadcasting rights by lowering their labour costs [and] they will make significant profits. “It’s purely an economic decision that has been made here.” Mr Tulloch said while the lack of jobs for local technicians was the immediate concern, in the longer-term, a review of the 420 visa was underway which could result in less regulation of the use of foreign production crews and a further watering down of workplace protections and controls for overseas workers.
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March 2015
At Work
H
E has outlasted seven Prime Ministers, seven ACTU presidents, and five ACTU secretaries but the way he tells it, Joe De Bruyn fell into the union movement almost by accident. Mr De Bruyn, who stepped down as National Secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association in October after 36 years in the job, was on course for a career as an agricultural scientist when a friend suggested he apply for a job at the shop assistants’ union. After recently turning 65, he has wound back his commitments but remains with the union as its national president, and will continue as vice-president of the ACTU until Congress in May. “It’s been a long time, but it’s gone fast,” he says. Despite heading the nation’s largest union for almost four decades, Mr De Bruyn would be unrecognisable to most Australians. Quietly spoken and reserved, has never sought a high public profile, rarely gives media interviews, and remains an enigma to many. Yet, he has been at the centre of many of the most important events in the labour movement over that time and has wielded major influence behind the scenes. BORN in postwar Holland, Joe De Bruyn came to Australia with his parents at the age of seven. They lived in various parts of regional Victoria as his father scratched a living working on farms. Young Joe did well at school, qualifying for entry to the University of Melbourne where he studied agricultural science. He then transferred to Sydney University – where he first encountered an ambitious student politician called Tony Abbott – and was studying for a PhD in agricultural economics but suffering a crisis about what he wanted to do with his life when he was encouraged into the union movement by a friend who had a job with the SDA. His PhD supervisor at the University of Sydney thought he was mad and had the world at his feet, and Mr De Bruyn fully expected that he would return to his studies after a year or so of trying life in
He is far from a household name, but as Mark Phillips discovered, the recently retired head of Australia’s largest union is
Not your average
JOE Right: Joe De Bruyn at the L20 Summit in Brisbane last November, with Richard Goyder, Managing Director of Australia’s largest retail owner, Wesfarmers (centre), and Philip Jennings, General Secretary of the global services union, UNI (left). the union movement. His first job with the ‘Shoppies’ was as office manager in the Victorian branch in 1973, where he was given responsibility for banking membership fees each Friday. He has pretty much been in charge of the union’s money ever since. At the SDA, Mr De Bruyn quickly came to the attention of Jim Maher, the legendary and highly controversial leader of the Victorian branch of the SDA for a quarter of a century. “He was married but he had no children of his own, so he probably regarded me much like a son,” Mr De Bruyn says. “He and I worked very closely together for my whole time in the union up until when his retirement in 1995 . . . I shared everything with him in terms of decision making.” Within six months, Mr De Bruyn was a research officer, then national industrial officer and his rapid rise to the top
culminated with his election as national secretary of the SDA at the age of 29 in 1978. That came about after a period of internal ructions and disunity in the union, and in effect, Mr De Bruyn was elected as a peacemaker. “I was very young. I was simply lucky enough to be in the right place at the right
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March 2015
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At Work
first to Friday nights, then to Saturday afternoons, and then to Sundays has been crucial by bringing into the sector many more casuals, who then joined the union. But equally important for the SDA has been to maintain employer neutrality that means they do not stand in the way of union recruitment in the workplace. “If we are down to about 18% unionism, we’ve got to go out to the other 82% of workers and invite them to join the union,” Mr De Bruyn says. “It is true if you ask people broadly why are you not in the union, the most common single answer is nobody has ever asked me to join. “And that’s a failing on the part of unions. You have to go out there and invite people to join and give them some good reasons as to why they should join.
He says moving the bulk of McDonald’s workforce from the fast food Award to an enterprise agreement has delivered tangible rewards of higher pay and better conditions for the workers, while the union has gained new members – 12,000 at McDonald’s alone – in the fast food sector. Another success that was many years in the gestation was the decision in 2013 by the Fair Work Commission to grant adult rates to junior workers. “It’s been a long, long, slow process,” Mr De Bruyn says. But it is typical of his systematic and detailed approach. Planning for the adult rates case began in the late-1990s, but it was not until Labor was back in government, in 2012, that the opportunity arose to run a test
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The heart and soul of unionism is providing people better wages, better working conditions, job security, a healthy and safe work environment and a secure retirement.
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“The heart and soul of unionism is providing people better wages, better working conditions, job security, a healthy and safe work environment and then through the superannuation system a secure retirement. “These are the key things.” The direct recruitment approach used by the SDA differs sharply from the organising models used by many unions, but Mr De Bruyn denies the SDA has pulled punches in negotiations with big companies to maintain that employer neutrality.
time,” he says. When Mr De Bruyn joined the SDA in the early-1970s, it had 50,000 members. Today, the SDA has about 213,000 members, but needs to sign up about 70,000 new members each year simply to stand still. The extension of trading hours,
case in the Fair Work Commission. The result was that from July this year, all 20-year-olds under the Retail Award must be paid the full adult rate. The next step is to replicate the strategy for 18 and 19 year olds, and to extend it beyond the Retail Award. The campaign has been a huge success for the union, bringing more than 50,000 new people into regular contact with it through the campaign website, many of whom had previously had no union involvement. “It puts the union in a very positive light. It’s also a wonderful thing to be LOOKING back over his time at the head campaigning about at a time of an Abbott of the SDA, Mr De Bruyn believes the Government because the government union’s negotiation of a growing number of course would set its face against this, of national collective agreements in the there’s no way that Eric Abetz or Tony fast food sector was one of his greatest Abbott is going to agree to adult rates for personal achievements. young people. It took the union about 18 years before “They want to cut back rates of pay.” it finally signed the first agreement with McDonald’s in 2009, and a second Get more of the story at: agreement was negotiated in 2013. workinglife.org.au
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Fight back!” he rallying call that rang around Australia on 4 March, when d 100,000 people took to the streets in 17 towns and cities ralia for the Fight For Our Rights national day of action to s at work and living standards from attacks by the Coalition . had been called by the ACTU in response to the review of orkplace relations framework by the Productivity Commision. t event was in Melbourne, where an estimated 30,000 people CBD as they marched from the Victorian Trades Hall to quare. about 20,000 people rallied outside the State Parliament with l pre-election message for Premier MIke Baird: “New South for sale”. Secretary Dave Oliver told the crowd in Melbourne: “Isn’t it o do what we do best, and get out in the streets and protest essage to this government that enough is enough”.
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March 2015
At Work
Sweet victory at Darrell Lea shows why unions still matter Illustration: Sam Wallman
by TIM AYRES NSW Secretary of the AMWU
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ON’T believe the hype. Unions still matter. In recent years, many have claimed that unions were out-of-date and relics of the past. We’ve had 12 months of sustained attack by Tony Abbott’s royal commission and a chorus of conservative commentators lining up to discredit the people that brought you the weekend. As the NSW Secretary of a union that represents manufacturing workers across the country, my belief in the importance of unions is unflappable. But for those in the court of public opinion who might find themselves doubting, let me introduce Exhibit A: Darrell Lea Confectionary Company. Darrell Lea made its products at a factory in Kogarah for decades. In 2012, after the company went into administration, the Quinn family bought the business. In 2014, the new owners closed the Kogarah factory and moved the business to Ingleburn, on Sydney’s south-west fringe. Most of the 80 manufacturing workers were happy to go. However, for six long-serving employees, the move just wasn’t going to work – the extra distance made it impossible. One of those workers was 64-year-old Steve Perry, who had worked with the company for 36 years. Steve has a condition that makes him partially blind and means he cannot drive. Steve would have had to do make a fourhour round trip each day to get to and from work by public transport. These long-serving workers had effectively lost their jobs because of a business change. Darrell Lea didn’t want to give them anything – but in 2014, the Fair Work Commission agreed with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union that they were entitled to redundancy payments. Darrell Lea appealed the
decision to a Full Bench, and lost again. In 2015, the Commission issued orders requiring the company to pay within 14 days. Instead of paying, Darrell Lea simply set up a new company, transferred its current workers over to it – leaving, Darrell Lea thought, the redundant employees with nothing. What happened next is arguably one of the most powerful demonstrations of why unions matter. The AMWU, along with thousands of fellow union members and supporters, took up a campaign against Darrell Lea. Along with an effective legal strategy that had us able and prepared to recover the money directly, we mobilised thousands of supporters to take to social media. Within four days, the company had agreed to pay the workers. It’s worthwhile pausing here for a moment and imagining how this might have played out if the six workers were
not members of their union. Possibly they would not even have got as far as challenging Darrell Lea’s decision. The prospect of lawyering up and the uncertainty of any outcome would likely have been enough to get the six workers to accept whatever decision the company had made. But even if they got themselves that far without a union, what would they have done then? How would they have managed to mobilise an entire movement of supporters to deliver their message? How would they have dealt with the prospect of a lengthy and expensive court action to pursue the company directors? Where else could they have turned? Sure, some ideologically rigid conservative could answer the above questions by harking to a libertarian slogan about freedom and choice. But for the rest of us, the lesson is really clear. Join your union.
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March 2015
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Politics
A veteran battler, Jim digs in for the fight of his life by GREG KOMBI TEAR the heart out of a community and you do more than leave behind empty shops and schools and clubs. You can create empty husks of people too. Jim Pearce knows this only too well. Jim, 66, is the newly-elected Labor member for Mirani in central Queensland in the Palaszczuk Government. A former coal miner and resident of the central Queensland mining town of Dysart, this is Jim’s second stint in politics. He was an MP from 1989 to 2009, and has seen too often the scars left by Big Mining – scars which slice far deeper than open cut mines – in towns where the 100% fly-in fly-out workforce makes locals feel like second-class citizens. “Just recently I spoke to a woman whose husband had lost his job at the mine,” Jim tells Working Life. “BMA (BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance) simply turned their back on him and his wife became very disturbed about his behaviour. She told me she was deadset scared he was going to do himself in.” Suicide is a real and unreported problem in mining towns. It’s like the farming community when drought strikes. Jim knows this not just from his friends and constituents, but from first-hand experience. “I went through one of these stages myself in 2009 when I felt I was underachieving,” he says. “These things had just started to happen in the industry but no one wanted to take notice of me when I talked about it.” Jim got through with the support of his family and community. But the experience of feeling worthless stays with him. He knows how locals feel when they’re told they can’t work in their own towns, or when they’ve been unfairly laid off for daring to protect their working rights. That’s why, this time around, he’s promising to rip into his role as a local member with more gusto than ever before. “I always wanted to be a good local member,” he says. “I was raised the right way where you don’t bully yourself into
A man of principle: Jim Pearce in his campaign clobber. positions. But where I failed last time is that I didn’t go and bully some of those blokes. I made the mistake of believing in people who were elected to positions where they could influence the coal industry, but I didn’t bat hard enough. “This time, they will be copping it from me to make sure that the people of central Queensland have their voices heard.” Jim speaks passionately, honestly and in real English: he’s just about the opposite of most politicians you’ll meet. Born in Sydney, he served in the Vietnam War and lived in western Sydney until in 1985, when he moved to Dysart to build a life. “It was a beautiful little community,
Dysart,” he recalls. “Everyone knew everyone and they looked out for each other’s kids. There were clubs and schools, but slowly the mining companies undermined the community stability.” In a column in April last year in his local paper, the Mackay Morning Bulletin (Jim lives just up the river in the small town of Walkerston), he wrote the following: “Absolute 100% FIFO employment policies are morally wrong and should be brought to an abrupt end.” On the campaign trail in early-2015, Jim found an ally in then-Opposition Leader/ now-Queensland Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk, who announced that a Labor Continued page 11
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March 2015
Politics
Could privatisation end up being Mike Baird’s Achilles’ Heel? Voters don’t want any further privatisation of public assets, writes Mark Lennon. The New South Wales Premier should take heed.
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N 28 March, voters in New South Wales will elect their next government. The 2015 NSW election was always going to pose a problem for the Liberals and Nationals – how to limit the loss of a swag of government seats. After the Coalition’s landslide victory in 2011, Labor was bound to win back some of its traditional heartland, lost last time when the electorate rejected a government that had been in office for 16 years. Barry O’Farrell won power promising change and promoting himself as the ‘infrastructure premier’ only to fall by the wayside after his performance at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Enter Mike Baird, with a corporate finance background, and a yen for selling off the farm to “recycle assets.” He told voters he would realise the value of old investments held in public hands, generating billions in new money to finance his ambitious infrastructure plans for the state. In quick succession as Treasurer, Baird sold off Sydney’s water desalination plant, Port Botany, Port Kembla, and $300 million worth of state-owned real estate. But the Liberals always had the remainder of the electricity network in their sights, the lucrative “poles and wires” privatisation that could generate a war chest of more than $20 billion dollars. When Baird unexpectedly became Premier in April last year, he moved to sell off 49% of the state’s electricity network. The deal looked like an election-winning formula: go into the campaign rolling out a succession of big promises, all paid for by the electricity sale. But the problem for the Liberals is the public doesn’t like privatisation. In NSW, 70% of those polled are against privatising the electricity network. They believe electricity prices are already too high and
they don’t want even higher bills. The McKell Institute estimates electricity prices will rise by $100 a year once the poles and wires are sold. And when electricity services are cut by storms, or bushfires, the public wants services restored quickly. Private operators will slash staff numbers leaving families waiting longer to have power restored to their homes. Now, with the campaign off and running, every day Mike Baird is promising new projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars – but only if the poles and wires are sold. What Baird won’t admit is that selling the network comes at a price, running into billions of dollars. Every year his government spends the $1.7 billion in dividends it receives from the electricity network on schools and hospitals. What he’s really doing is bringing forward that money, so he can offer a massive infrastructure inducement to voters to return the Liberals to power at the election. But Baird’s privatisation plans go further. Whether it’s our electricity network, our hospitals, our health services, our TAFE system, or our public transport – the fact is this Baird Liberal Government has never seen a public asset they don’t want to sell. We are seeing the full-scale Americanisation of our public health system with
plans underway for a major hospital on Sydney’s Northern beaches, to be built and operated by the private sector. And there will be more. Much of the state’s TAFE system has already been turned over to private providers, leading to job losses among fulltime TAFE teachers and savage increases in fees for students. Under the NSW Liberals a two-year diploma in Electrical Engineering, for example, has increased from $3000 to $8000. And this at a time when our youth unemployment rate is one-in-eight, they need to be investing in jobs and training not ripping them away. In response to the Baird Government’s mass privatisation agenda the NSW union movement has launched a multi-level campaign to send the message loud and clear that ‘NSW is Not For Sale’. The campaign includes strategic door knocking, phone and digital campaigning, as well as radio and television advertisements. The undeniable fact is that the people of NSW do not want the Baird Government’s hyper-aggressive privatisation agenda. It’s about time the NSW Liberals actually listened to the public rather than trying to demonise the union movement for giving voice to the sentiment of workers. Mark Lennon is Secretary of Unions NSW
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Ask Us
Can a casual worker be sent home early without being paid? ALI asks: I’m a casual worker in a shop. Sometimes if there isn’t enough work I get sent home early, but there are other casual people who stay until the end of the shift. Is this legal? The General Retail Industry Award states that the minimum shift call out for a causal employee is three hours; or 90 minutes if: (a) the employee is a full-time secondary school student and (b) the employee is engaged to work between the hours of 3pm and 6.30pm on a day which they are required to attend school; and (c) the employee agrees to work, and a parent or guardian of the employee agrees to allow the employee to work a shorter period than three hours; and (d) employment for a longer period than the period of the engagement is not
by RIGHTS WATCH
GET HELP AT WORK Phone Australian Unions on 1300 4 UNION (1300 486 466) possible either because of the operational requirements of the employer or the unavailability of the employee. If you end up working less than these hours your employer has to pay you for the three hours or 90 minutes (whichever applies to you) even though you worked less time. With regard to being sent home while other staff are kept on, unfortunately as a casual there is no guarantee of a set number of hours.
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A veteran battler, Jim digs in for the fight of his life Continued from page 8
I walked into Dysart recently and I almost burst into tears. It’s stuffed, and BMA don’t give a stuff about it.
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government would end 100% fly-in, flyout practices for resource projects. How that promise pans out will be well worth watching in coming months, and could be the fight of Jim’s life. Meanwhile, Working Life has seen documents which state that BMA plans to reopen the Norwich Park coal mine, 25 kilometres south-east of Jim Pearce’s old stomping ground of Dysart. “Success of the project will be dependent on being able to operate using labour that is paid significantly less than is currently the case at their nearby operations,” the document reads. “A strong desire has been expressed that labour should be sourced outside of Queensland (Adelaide, Melbourne for example).” That infuriates Jim. “BMA are in denial at the moment with regard to the documentation that ‘fell off the back of a truck’,” he says.
Are there other factors at play though? By this I mean could it be that you are being singled out for less favourable treatment for discriminatory reasons (for example, are you the only woman or the only man in the workplace?) Are you treated differently because of your religious beliefs, the colour of your skin or your age? If you’re a union member you should talk to your delegate. Why don’t you give us a call on our advice line on 1300 486 466? When we have a bit more information we can advise you on what you might be able to do. We can also help you join a union if you decide that’s what you’d like to do – it’s the best way of making sure your rights are represented in the workplace and you can also claim your membership fees as a work-related expense come tax return time.
Fresh-faced and optimistic: Jim Pearce back in his Vietnam War days. “It just showed the community how low they were able to go. “Dysart is back to one-third of the population that it was. “The itinerant workers have their shift, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, but they don’t want to be involved in community. “They take the money home and spend it in their own community.
“I want jobs for central Queensland. If we’ve got jobs out there at the mines, there’ll be a flow-on effect to regional cities, small business will employ people, women who want to work can work. “I walked into Dysart recently and I almost burst into tears. It’s stuffed, and BMA don’t give a stuff about it.” And if you doubt Jim Pearce’s stomach for a fight, consider this. Despite living in Queensland for more than half his adult life, this former New South Welshman remains a Blues supporter come State of Origin rugby league time. “It’s quite handy to stir up a room,” he jokes. “But I still cheer for the Blues. I’m a man of principle, you know.”