the Banner Bright

Coles, publicly: “Supermarket giant Coles is calling for enforceable, uniform housing standards for seasonal farm workers and rules against unfairly docking their pay to prevent overseas labourers from living in poverty and squalor and to shore up supply chains in an industry wracked by reputational damage. In a lift for the government’s war on labour-hire firms, Coles and major unions released a report on Friday taking aim at the horticulture sector’s heavy reliance on outsourcing workers. It attributes labour-hire firms with a decline in transparency and certainty in the industry, and links them to poor pay and lodging.”

Coles, privately [$]: “Coles, one of the nation’s largest supermarkets, is privately urging suppliers to cut costs rather than request price rises as it deals with a surge in demands to raise the price of products on shelves. In new correspondence with suppliers obtained by The Australian, the company says every business should ‘turn its mind’ to reducing costs… Coles has told its suppliers it will also reserve the right to negotiate price rise requests — or block them completely — if the supermarket feared a higher shelf price would have a negative effect on shoppers or cause a slide in sales. ‘All businesses will incur impacts to the cost of doing business at some point,’ a note sent to suppliers reads. ‘Every business needs to turn its mind to how it can remove costs from its operations. … Even where you can substantiate increases to cost of doing business including rising cost of inputs, Coles may not accept your request for a cost increase in full or at all.'”

It’s hard to see how any serious commitment to eradicating exploitation and modern slavery from the supply chain could be achieved by squeezing suppliers even harder, and refusing to allow them to pass on the increased costs of proper pay and adequate lodging. (Perhaps as a show of good faith they could sack Jeff Kennett, the “independent” arbiter Coles pays to resolve disputes with suppliers — who is hiding his work from the government’s Food and Grocery Code reviewer.)

Labor is planning to implement a ‘same job, same pay’ system that would require companies who use labour hire to ensure the outsourced jobs are on pay and conditions equivalent to directly hired employees — a fundamental principle of fairness in the workplace, and one that was significantly undermined by Labor’s introduction of enterprise bargaining in the early 1990s. I’m fascinated by the contortions employers are going through to complain about the proposal [$]. First, they trot out Mark Wooden to argue that “labour hire workers usually receive a wage premium” — in which case, what are they worried about? Next, the IR extremists at Qantas and BHP: “In the case of cabin crew Qantas uses four different companies providing four different rates of pay to meet seasonal peaks. Qantas general counsel Andrew Finch has cautioned that ‘same job, same pay’ regulation could increase costs for the company if it made labour hire untenable. … BHP also set up its own in-house labour hire firms to operate its coal mines in 2019.” Note, these aren’t even really outsourced workers — the companies are using tricky corporate structures to artificially split up their workforces to slash pay and conditions. Next, veteran mining industry troglodyte Steve Knott just throws around “Marx-inspired” and “ridiculous”. But then the big one: “An enterprise agreement could simplify some of these issues with standard rates and classifications but firms point out that most workplaces don’t have such agreements.” Well then they should sit down and negotiate such agreements! Problem solved.

Ben Schneiders, in his book, Hard Labour: “This book… seeks to provide some of the finer-grained detail of how inequality has increased, and how power relations have evolved between those with and those without wealth and power. Since 2015, in my role as an investigative reporter at The Age, I’ve written hundreds of articles about wage theft… Over the years, I’ve received significant pushback over my wage-theft reporting — far more than I’ve received from any of my other work, which has ranged from exposing religious abuses to political corruption. … I’ve pushed ahead, as wage theft — to me, at least — is offensive to the idea of a fair society, breachign laws and norms about how people should be treated. It is an assault on the idea of equality, which is a fundamental requirement of a well-functioning democracy. Left unsaid in all this pushback is the assumption that those with money and connections have a right to steal, unlike those with nothing, who can be jailed for smaller thefts. … However, … change is always possible, and there can be a future for a fairer, more democratic system. The solutions are there before us, at first in small steps and then later in bigger ones.”

Hard Labour is a thorough, detailed, and accessible read. Everyone interested in equality — why it has collapsed, and what needs to be done to restore it — should grab a copy. You can read an excerpt in The Age.

I took a break for a while when things got hectic this year. Things are less hectic now, so I am back. When I went on hiatus I nuked my Twitter account, so I had to start a new one from scratch; if you followed me there, please follow again. I’ve also set up a Mastodon account — @thebannerbright@aus.social — if that’s your preference.

Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer [$]: “It speaks volumes about how skewed our politics — and the media reporting of it — has become that Anthony Albanese saying workers’ real wages should not fall is deemed controversial by the press and denounced by Scott Morrison… [who] says that there’s no magic wand to lift wages, and that businesses raise wages, not government… But the history of the past decade is Australian businesses don’t lift wages. What they do is use multi-year enterprise agreements to lock workers into lower wages growth, demand increases in immigration to put downward pressure on wages, rely on the Coalition stacking the Fair Work Commission with employer group representatives and Coalition mates, and engage in economy-wide wage theft that has left workers out of pocket by billions. And all along profits rose at the expense of wages, with the profit share of income surging from 2015 at the expense of the labour share — it currently stands near the all-time high level of 2020 — with real unit labour costs falling 9% between 2015 and 2021. Employers have banked all that, while ordinary households were stuck with real wages at 2013 levels. … Albanese should welcome the feral reaction to his monstrous idea that workers shouldn’t go backwards for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And he should signal, loud and clear, to voters tempted to see the whole political and economic game as rigged against them, that as prime minister he’s not prepared to tolerate it. It might do more for politics than just winning an election.”

Bernard Keane: ”The Greens, meanwhile, have demonstrated there’s at least one party taking the climate emergency seriously, unveiling a policy to end coal-fired power by 2030 and ban coal exports by then, ending new fossil fuel projects, and guaranteeing jobs for workers affected by decarbonisation.  Oddly enough, the Greens’ plan is the closest we’ve seen from a prominent party to the plan put forward by the international lobby group for fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency, to reach genuine net zero (i.e. nothing like Morrison’s farcical ‘net zero by magic’ policy) by 2050, which includes phasing out unabated coal emissions in developed countries by 2030. It’s a demonstration of the extraordinary extent of state capture in Australia that the major parties being profoundly outside the global consensus on the need for urgent climate action attracts little if any media scrutiny. Though, of course, much of the media is itself an arm of the fossil fuel industry, so don’t expect to hear much about the Greens’ plan.”

Tim Dunlop: ”Our existence is mediated more than we like to admit, to an extent we generally don’t notice. To help us control the information that saturates our every waking moment, we rely on mental shortcuts, heuristics, and everyone from advertisers to politicians lean into these shortcuts… In politics, this is why easily demonstrable falsehoods persist: that the Coalition are better economic managers; that working class means men in factories and high-vis vests; that deficits are always bad… It is easier to regurgitate received wisdom than to pick it apart. It is more agreeable to maintain our prejudices than see past them. … When we talk about the power of the media, then, this is how we should be thinking about it: not that a single article or newsclip is going to sway people one way or another, but that the media helps create an overall environment that boxes us into certain ways of thinking. The box is never completely airtight, and other institutions build their own boxes, but the media — broadly understood — helps maintain strict perimeters around our thinking about almost everything. That is the nature of its power… and so it will always remain a key progressive goal to hold the media to account and provide alternative outlets. Put it another way: we happily talk about the importance of ‘soft power’ in the projection of our interests in foreign policy, but we are just as susceptible to it at home, and the media remain the primary tool for the dissemination of that power.”

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First: “Scott Morrison is defending his record on protecting manufacturing jobs after a factory he visited conceded within 24 hours it is sacking Australian workers and outsourcing work overseas. Mr Morrison on Tuesday visited a Rheem Australia facility in Parramatta, spruiking an election commitment to create 1.3 million jobs within five years. But Rheem later confirmed there would be job losses at the same factory, after a restructure to shift some operations to the company’s Vietnam site.”

And then: “The industrial relations watchdog will investigate claims Perth shipbuilder Austal paid 30 Filipino workers as little as $9 an hour. The company has been accused of exploiting the workers just months after being awarded a $350 million defence contract by the Morrison government. … ETU WA secretary Peter Carter … said the extension of their visas in May also coincided with Austal laying off 30 WA workers, sparking concerns the company may have been seeking to slash its wages bills.” The Fair Work Ombudsman investigated the ETU’s claims and agreed that underpayments had occurred, issuing compliance notices against Austal. But that didn’t stop Morrison using Austal for a campaign photo op.

There seems to be a bit of a pattern forming…

The High Court has made another in a series of judgments aiming to unwind decades of legal progress, returning employment law to a black-letter fantasy-land where there is no power imbalance between bosses and workers, and where the words on the page are more real than the actual circumstances of employment: “A majority of the High Court, led by Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, overruled the long-running approach by some courts to look beyond a worker’s contract to the social reality of the work relationship, and instead relied almost solely on the terms of the contract itself. … Experts say the decision effectively means that if lawyers draft a contract correctly businesses can avoid minimum award pay and conditions, workers’ compensation, superannuation, redundancy and other statutory requirements. … University of Adelaide law professor Andrew Stewart said the decision ‘widened a loophole’ that had existed in other rulings… ‘What the High Court majority has said carries with it the implication that it will be much easier for businesses to source labour from contractors rather than employees and achieve significant cost savings from doing so,’ he said. … Barrister David Chin, SC, said the ruling was a ‘significant shift’ in the courts’ approach to employment contracts that explicitly rejected an unequal power relationship between worker and employer as a relevant factor. ‘There can be little doubt that the approach of the High Court is to treat the construction of employment contracts like any other contract.'”

Bernard Keane is angry: “Hundreds of Australian aged care residents died miserable deaths in January as a consequence of the Morrison government’s staggering failures on aged care regulation, the rollout of booster shots and its refusal to address the aged care workforce crisis. The numbers are horrific, and a national disgrace: according to the government’s own figures, 389 aged care residents have perished as a result of COVID in January alone — far more than the total for 2021 — 282 — and already more than half the 2020 total which was dominated by another outbreak in [Commonwealth-regulated] aged care facilities in Victoria. … Literally every Commonwealth response to the pandemic within its aged care responsibility has been bungled and delayed, and the same disastrous errors have been repeated: the original vaccination rollout; the booster rollout; RAT supplies; PPE supplies; interventions by the Commonwealth aged care quality regulator, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. … [T]hat hundreds of seniors are dying two years into a pandemic due to persistent government failure is a national tragedy that lies at the feet of Colbeck, his portfolio minister Greg Hunt and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. There is no excuse for, no explaining away, no dodging, this disaster. The blood of the dead is on their hands. And the grisly toll of their incompetence grows more horrific each day.”

Morrison is now offering a miserly $800 payment to aged care workers, but as Keane points out, he “has failed to adopt the main [aged care] royal commission recommendation to support the current Fair Work Commission case for a substantial pay increase to retain aged care workers in an increasingly tight labour market — something Labor’s Anthony Albanese committed to do at the weekend.”