It's been a difficult 2023 for workers.
Supermarket prices have shot through the roof, while retail giants post profits in the billions. Mortgages and rents have skyrocketed. Financial insecurity driven by unreliable work is up. Stolen wages. The labour hire scam running rampant. Now add ten years of coalition policies to suppress wages. Workers' wages simply weren't ready.
While keeping the big end of town flush, real incomes have taken a dive. It's a bleak picture where Australia's workers are once again putting in the work, wearing the pain and footing the bill.
The passing of the Albanese Labor government's Closing Loopholes Bill (part one of two) is a big step towards tackling these crises. Major elements of the bill passed with the help of the Jacqui Lambie network, senators Lidia Thorpe and David Pocock, and the Greens. These urgent reforms will come into effect over the next year, giving time for employers and workers to adjust and prepare.
Returning balance and fairness to our industrial relations system is not an attack on businesses at large. Rather, it is in recognition of our current laws having been dragged to their present state by some well-resourced big corporates who have engaged teams of lawyers to identify and apply every possible exception or loophole in the current laws.
Here's how the bill is going to help.
It's now illegal for your employer to intentionally steal you wages and your superannuation. When a worker steals from an employer that's rightly a crime, but when it's the other way around it's not. That's now changed. This new bill will criminalise employers who illegally withhold wages, for example, not paying workers for their shifts or penalty rates.
Failure to pay superannuation is rife, with recent Super Members Council modelling showing that on average about 2.8 million people are underpaid a total of $4.7 billion in superannuation each year. The criminalisation of wage theft means real uplift to incomes for working families and retirees on fixed incomes where every dollar matters.
Labour hire workers will now get a fair day's pay. Australian workers' wages are being suppressed by labour hire. Companies such as Qantas and BHP have been gaming the system for years by creating wholly owned labour hire firms that only exist to drive down wages for workers. These well-known faces of corporate Australia might be the most visible users, but this scam is present across the economy. It is easily replicable and should be ended.
Workers expect their boss to pay the rates they agreed to. The business lobby's inference that labour hire workers are lesser than their direct counterparts is a smokescreen to justify driving down pay.
As well as protecting the incomes and livelihoods of workers, the bill includes provisions to protect the health and wellbeing of workers on the job. For first responders diagnosed with PTSD, they'll no longer need to jump through hoops to prove they were injured at work.
Australia is in the midst of a silicosis epidemic with research showing that as many as 100,000 workers in the coming decades will contract the disease. The legislation now adds powers to the Asbestos Safety Eradication Agency to address this crisis and protect workers. This means diseases like silicosis from cutting engineered stone products are treated as seriously as asbestosis.
Workers subjected to family and domestic violence will have protections against employers discriminating against them in the workplace.
Industrial manslaughter will be a crime.
It is laudable that the cross bench has chosen to support some changes before Christmas and provide cost of living relief to millions of workers. The rest of the bill will be subject to debate into the new year. For the parts that have passed, a majority in the House and the Senate have agreed that this package is too urgent to wait on.
Part one is an incredible step forward, but the jobs not done yet. Next year we will look to update the laws to ensure casuals and gig platform workers gets some basic rights. Too many workers in Australia have no sick leave, no annual leave, and no security. That needs to change.
- Liam O'Brien is the ACTU assistant secretary
