Unfair dismissal protection removed for workplaces of 100 or fewer work-
ers or for‘operational reasons’.
AWAs no longer subject to the‘no disadvantage test’and allowed to
override other types of agreement.
Secret ballots before industrial action that is‘protected’(i.e immune from
civil liability).
Union rights of entry prohibited from agreements.Finally, under the‘Australian Fair Pay and Conditions Standard’, the
Commonwealth legislatedfive‘minimum conditions’that employers were
required to observe, including a minimum rate of pay, maximum ordinary
hours of work, annual leave, personal leave, and parental leave.
Existing awards werenotabolished, but the intention was that the federal
award system would wither away, as new awards could not be arbitrated. The
only way in which a‘new’award could be made was as a result of the award
rationalization process, largely subject to ministerial direction, rather than as a
decision of an independent arbitral body. Awards were to provide only
residual protections, as the emphasis wasfirmly on the making of individual
and collective agreements between employers and employees, with no
approval mechanisms and no comparison to otherwise applicable award con-
ditions. Once an agreement was lodged, the award that would have otherwise
applied to the relevant employee was no longer applicable to that employee.
Nor could an employee ever return to coverage by that award. The one
obligation of the employer was to ensure that it provided thefive minimum
‘Australian Fair Pay and Conditions Standard’conditions.
Of the 1.13 million employed under registered agreements between March
2006 to June 2007, 399,000 thousand, or 35 per cent, were on AWAs. Thirty-
two per cent of these were in Retail, Accommodation and Food Services
(DEWR 2010). Thus the 1997 emphasis on AWAs being most prevalent
among mainly professional workers changed in the 2005 legislation to those
in low-skilled, low-paid employment.
It can be argued that the WorkChoices reforms were not radical or a major
departure from the path of reform begun by Hawke and Keating (Lewis 2008).
Reforms were based on the premise that improving the well-being of Austra-
lians, including the ability of government to provide for the least fortunate,
relies on economic growth which can only be achieved through improving
competitiveness and productivity. Labour market regulation prevents busi-
nesses from organizing labour and capital in different ways in order to achieve
competitiveness and productivity. This is now largely recognized, to varying
degrees, by most academics, commentators, and politicians. However, the
vested interests in regulation managed to halt (and reverse) much of the
progress which had taken place since 1983.
Phil Lewis