the Banner Bright

A Sydney pub chain has been forced to pay $100,000 in backpay, after staff formed an informal union to demand wages they were owed after being systematically misclassified as lower-level employees. The company initially denied any wrongdoing, sacked the staff member who initially complained, offered half of what was owed with a non-disclosure clause, before finally capitulating and admitting the full extent of its wage rip-off. The company admits that “Management did advise one specific employee that it was inappropriate for her to be asking individual employees about their pay rates (as this was the private information of each employee)” — this was the employee who identified the problem, and who was trying to ensure her colleagues. The Greens and Labor have committed to outlawing pay secrecy clauses, in an effort to reduce the gender pay gap. If a boss ever asks workers not to discuss their pay with colleagues, it’s a warning sign that one way or another, they may be up to no good.

It won’t be possible to properly assess the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry for some time, as recommendations will first need to be translated into policy, and then into legislation. If any criminal cases actually make it to court, it could take a decade. But to get a quick sense of how tough Hayne really was, it’s worth seeing what the in-house newsletter of the finance industry, the Australian Financial Review, has to say about it: “Hayne blames remuneration incentives as the source of just about all the unethical and illegal problems identified during questioning by the inquiry’s chief legal counsels, Rowena Orr and Michael Hodge. And yet, he does little to try and deal with this problem.” The AFR puts “big banks” at the top of its “winners” table — and over at The Australian, Adam Creighton agrees: “Banks’ and fund managers’ share prices may well surge today, as the modesty of the final report dawns on investors and financial executives alike. Bottle shops in Sydney’s and Melbourne’s east would be well advised to stock up on Moet.”

Daniel Andrews has announced Victoria will ban so-called ‘gay conversion therapy’: “everyone should be able to celebrate who they are with pride. But for far too long and for far too many Victorians, an evil practice has instead peddled in shame and stigma. These activities – commonly referred to as ‘gay conversion therapy’ – claim to be able to change someone’s sexuality or gender identity. What they really are is a most personal form of torture, a cruel practice that perpetuates the idea that LGBTI people are in some way broken. … But it’s not LGBTI people who need to change. It’s our laws.”

From an extract from Sally McManus’s forthcoming manifesto, On Fairness: “Rapid growth in wealth inequality results in the inevitable isolation of a very small, very rich, very privileged section of the community from the material experiences of everyone else. And when this out-of-touch minority group is enfranchised to make the decisions on behalf of people they don’t know, can’t see, have no wish to understand, and think of entirely in dehumanised, transactional, abstract terms, the results for the rest of us are devastating.” The book will be released this week.

A Dutch church held a 96-day vigil, ending it after receiving a guarantee that a family taking refuge in the building would not be deported: “Taking advantage of an obscure Dutch law that forbids the police to interrupt church services, ministers at Bethel Church in The Hague had been running a round-the-clock liturgy since October 26 in order to prevent the five members of the Tamrazyan family from being arrested and sent back to Armenia.”

The Andrews Government is setting up a workplace fatalities taskforce to advise on new health and safety laws: “The grieving families of Victorians killed at work will help the Andrews Government design new workplace manslaughter laws to put negligent employers behind bars for up to 20 years. The crackdown is expected to be introduced to parliament this year after a horror twelve months in which 23 Victorians lost their lives in the workplace.”

A new report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare examined the link between socioeconomic status and disease: “Overall, researchers said the findings showed social disadvantage was linked to poorer outcomes, including higher rates of disease and a greater likelihood of dying. In fact, if all Australians had the same chance of dying from the three diseases as those in the highest socioeconomic group, the report said there would be 8,600 fewer deaths each year from cardiovascular disease, 6,900 fewer deaths from diabetes, and 4,800 fewer deaths from chronic kidney disease.” That’s about 1 in every 1200 people in Australia.

Greg Jericho has been complaining for years about the flexible definition of “middle income” used by politicians and swallowed by journalists: “there is no reality in which an Australian worker on $120,000, let alone $200,000, can be classed as a middle-income earner. It is utterly misleading to suggest that someone on $84,600 is middle-income — let alone someone on $158,730.” I’ve always assumed that people who fall for this rhetoric just have a poor understanding of where they sit on the distribution curve, but today I learned there’s more to it than that. A marketing executive told the SMH that choosing an expensive private school for his son was “the equivalent of taking a $30,000 pay cut in salary”. What a neat trick: simply take your extravagant spending decisions, pretend that they are the same as not having money in the first place, and you too can be part of the struggling middle class! Life imitates dril.

The Yothu Yindi Foundation is calling for a full audit of all government funding earmarked for addressing Indigenous disadvantage, after its analysis showed that the money was being syphoned off to porkbarrel in other areas. The NT’s Indigenous Affairs minister was thrown out of caucus for questioning the government’s spending priorities: “We’re going to say we need [more money] because we have remote Aboriginal communities — then we’ll spend it on a water park.” Meanwhile, Commonwealth Indigenous Affairs minister Nigel Scullion was caught using Indigenous Advancement Strategy money to Country Liberal Party networks and his white business mates, in part to pay for lawyers opposing land rights claims. He’s retiring soon — good riddance.

The High Court has upheld the union movement’s challenge to NSW’s electoral spending laws, which privileged political parties by tightening a cap on spending by community organisations. The decision hinged on NSW’s failure to explain why it thought $500,000 was an appropriate cap — cynics might suggest the fact that bosses’ groups spent just under $500,000 at the last election had something to do with it. The NSW Liberals have form; their 2013 law limited spending by industrial organisations that were affiliated to a political party. When their lawyer claimed “it is not as though … we have simply targeted, sotto voce, the ALP”, Justice Hayne demanded, “Well, your side does not point to any other party to which this would apply? … Are we to ignore 100 years of history in this country…? Are we to shut our eyes to what has been observed over the last decades? … Apparently so.” That law was also struck down for illegally restricting freedom of political speech.