 New proposed Industrial Relations legislation for Australia
The Australian PrimeMinister, John Howard, is proposing new IR legislation and intends to push this legislation through Parliament using a majority in both houses of Parliament. The draft legislation is controversial, particularly as it was not one of the platforms on which the government was elected.
1 week ago, there were demonstrations across Australia by somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 workers against the proposed legislation. In a country of about 20,000,000 this was very significant.
There are a whole range of measures proposed, including:
* abolition of penalty rates for overtime and working on weekends and public holidays
* establishment of "individual workplace agreements" between the employee and the employer, rather than the current Award system in place in Australia
* replacing the Industrial Relations Commission with a "Fair Pay Commission" (is this a euphimism for a "razor gang" to keep wages low)
* abolition of unfair dismissal processes for workplaces of less than 100 employees. The vast majority of Australian workers are employed in businesses of less than 100 people.
Reading many of the articles on this site it strikes me as ironic that in many countries workers are struggling for the kinds of conditions and processes that Australians take for granted, while here in Australia we seem ready to turn the clock back 100 years.
Does John Howard really think that individual employees have the same bargaining power as an employer in a wages and conditions negotiation with the employer?
Am I being paranoid, or should I be just as worried about this trend as I am about the whole anti-terrorism legislation that we have seen introduced in Australia? I cannot be sure that freedom is a word that we can use to describe life in Australia any more. | 
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