Red Rag

Tim Dunlop notes that the Howard Government is bullying TAFEs into moving their staff to AWAs. This strikes me as somewhat hypocritical: given the Government’s commitment to “freedom of contract”, surely the TAFEs should be free to decide how best to deal with their employees?

Considering that we are facing a skills shortage, it make no sense to slash the wages of TAFE staff. That is certainly the Government’s aim — if the AWAs contained exactly the same terms as the EBA, there would be no point. And lower wages are something AWAs achieve quite successfully (especially for women), notwithstanding the Government’s misleading rhetoric to the contrary. David Peetz has done a demolition job on IR minister Kevin Andrews on that score:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest figures on earnings of workers on AWAs and collective agreements six weeks ago, but I didn’t see a press release from the Minister’s office at the time. What did they show?

In May 2004, non-managerial workers on registered individual contracts received an average of $23.40 per hour, which was 2 per cent less than workers on registered collective agreements ($23.90 per hour). As 99 per cent of workers on registered individual contracts were on AWAs in 2004 (the state systems of individual contracting having virtually withered away), we can say that AWAs paid about 2 per cent less than registered collective agreements..

For men, the difference between earnings under the two systems was not significant, but women on AWAs had hourly earnings some 11 per cent less than women on registered collective agreements. This was a pretty noteworthy figure, considering the Minister’s earlier claim that women earned 32 per cent more on AWAs than on collective agreements.

The gender pay gap was worse on AWAs: whereas women on registered collective agreements received 90 per cent of the hourly pay of men on such agreements, women on AWAs received only 80 per cent of the hourly pay of men on AWAs.

For casual workers, AWAs paid 15 per cent less that registered collective agreements. For permanent part-time workers AWAs paid 25 per cent less. Indeed, amongst permanent part-time employees even “award only” workers (those who received exactly the award rate) were earning an average of 8 per cent more than AWA workers.

For female permanent full-time workers, AWAs paid 7 per cent less than collective agreements.

The Low Pay Commission is designed to push down wages, and so are AWAs. That is the Howard Government’s agenda.

It will be interesting to see whether the Victorian CFMEU takes legal action against the Government for “coersion” because it pressured business to reject an EBA. A successful claim there would presumably open the way for the State Governments to sue over the TAFE bullying, and for universities to do likewise.