Contributed by Jim Hayes

Major employer groups have launched an offensive to immediately push down working conditions for more than a million and create the means to extent this to many more.

Their call is for legislative change to change the legal definition of what is a small business. This is now characterised as having less than 15 employees. Employers want to increase this to 25 employees. This importance of this is that small businesses are exempt from honouring existing legal protection from unfair dismissal.

The called for change would include the ability of an employer to use uncertainty of permanency and incapacity of unions to negotiate and prevent clauses to disadvantage the workers being written into enterprise agreements.

This opens gate for many more workers to be easily dismissed, and the creation of a path towards expanding the casualisation of work. Once on a roll, this could be expanded to impact on more than the one million workers who would be hit immediately.

Casual and insecure work will increase without the unfair dismissal law

Australia has been plagued by the problem of casualised work for some time now. This has always been a policy to slash the workers’ share of national income to raise that of employers. Extending this through smaller businesses is used as the thin edge of the wedge, to allow bug businesses to follow. Casualised work puts downward pressure on wages and conditions across the board.

This is the approach towards dealing with the matter in conditions of an underperforming economy. The intention is to make the workers of Australia pay the cost. Most affected will be younger workers who are overwhelmingly employed in the hospitality sector. A new inroad here will pass on to other sectors.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has called on both Labor and the Coalition to reject this. It will take more than an appeal to make this happen. Industrial campaign may well be required. But the ACTU’s tie to Labor could dampen this. Especially when the employers are planning to ratchet this up during next year’s election campaign, where they can wage a major media campaign vilifying Labor as being out of control.

Photo by Joel Carrett/AAP: ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has called on political parties to rule out any reduction to workers’ rights. This is good. But this will require more than a plea

Not wishing to embarrass Labor in government has effectively paralysed the ACTU in recent times. This is obvious in its appeasement of this government’s attack on the CFMEU, its failure to call out unproven allegations, and willingness to accept a precedence that will spread through the construction industry and beyond.

A problem like this requires a different approach. One that raises the matter and the need to act on it in the union movement. It requires making this attack on workers public knowledge, to build a wave of public opinion against it, and it requires needed union organisation was consults with and involves union members.

Political parties approaching an election must be told that if they continue this trajectory, they will pay a price. This should feature in the unions’ activity around next year’s election.

If doing the right thing is awkward for a Labor government, so be it. Justice demands protection of wages and conditions. Responsible economic management demands blocking moves that will hurt the economy. Lowering living standards when they are already falling because of the cost-of-living crisis, will mean less growth and rising unemployment, causing a faster downward spiral. There is no excuse to justify anything else.