What synchronicity that the same day the High Court confirmed Qantas broke the law when it sacked 1,700 workers during the pandemic, property developer and eternal youth spruiker Tim Gurner came to global prominence courtesy of The Australian Financial Review. Gurner, presumably pausing from biohacking with a house-crafted protein bar in a hyperbaric pod, complained about arrogant workers who “decided they didn’t really want to work so much any more”.
The only solution was punishment: “Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50% in my view” (so, erm, to 5.5%?).
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”
Employer groups must be kicking themselves. Last week it was Qantas that distracted everyone from its campaign against Labor’s new laws designed to curb the exploitation of contractors, and here’s a billionaire property developer calling from his cryotherapy bed for them to suffer more pain.
But Qantas wasn’t finished yet, of course. At 10am, the High Court revealed it had rejected Qantas’ appeal against the Federal Court ruling that it had illegally sacked baggage handling workers, because the goal was to prevent them from exercising their legitimate rights to take industrial action under the Fair Work Act.
Over decades of industrial relations reform by both sides of politics, Australia has become a tough place in which to take industrial action. That’s why days lost to strikes now are a minuscule fraction of what they were in the 1990s, let alone the 1980s. But Qantas sacked 1,700 people to stop them from even exercising those highly restricted rights. It wasn’t good enough for former CEO Alan Joyce, his management, Qantas chairman Richard Goyder and his board that the playing field between employers and workers is now heavily tilted against workers — they wanted to throw the latter off the field entirely.
Qantas offered one of those half-baked “apologies” after the court decision — not for its illegal conduct, but for the harm its actions might have inflicted on the sacked workers. That is, it apologised if anyone was offended. And it said that it “accepted” the decision — in contrast to what, one wonders? Call for a return to Privy Council appeals, perhaps?
Business groups in Australia, from the top end of town at the Business Council of Australia (BCA) down to small businesses, continue to demand yet more “industrial relations reform” to tilt that playing field even further against workers. Economists and newspaper columnists continue to support them. No amount of “flexibility” is ever enough for Australian employers and their cheerleaders.
And if they don’t get it, they’ll simply resort to breaking the law.
Qantas isn’t alone in acting unlawfully toward its workers. Around 40% of Qantas’ fellow members of the BCA — the biggest firms in Australia — have (like Qantas) been guilty of wage theft, stealing billions of dollars from their employees. Underpayment is so systemic it has become a basic feature of how Australian businesses operate.
Big business — amazingly given they claim underpayment is because of “confusing” awards — is even worse than small and medium businesses; work by the Fair Work ombudsman in 2019 suggested that “just” a quarter of smaller businesses were guilty of wage theft. Because when employers don’t get more “reform”, they resort to breaking the law.
That’s in addition to their use of the existing system to impose wage cuts on workers over the past decade, with real wages in many private industries declining even before the pandemic and the ensuing inflation. Since then, all workers have endured a significant cut in real wages despite fantasies of the “wage-price spiral” conjured up by business and the Reserve Bank. Virtually all the productivity growth in that time has gone directly to businesses’ bottom lines, helping the profit share of national income to record highs as the wage share fell to record lows.
Throughout that time, we were constantly told that the problem was overpaid, unproductive workers and the lack of legal sanction against militant unions (despite the serial failure of most cases brought against unions such as the CFMMEU).
Strangely, no-one ever mentioned militant employers and their enthusiasm for breaking the law, when a large proportion of Australian business was engaged in wage theft.
Gurner might be a wanker, but he’s refreshingly honest about his loathing of workers. It’s clear that many businesses in other sectors feel exactly the same way: workers are lazy and need to be taught a lesson, the kind of lesson significantly higher unemployment would teach them — to be grateful to employers and to accept what they’re given. Gurner just said it. Much of Australian business has been doing it, for years.
Do you think Gurner’s remarks accurately reflect how employers feel about their workers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
