Labor leads the polls, Spotlight plumbs the depths
Today’s Australian leads with the news that Labor has retaken the lead in the battle of the opinion polls. Labor leads 2 party preferred by 53-47 and primary vote by 41-40 over the Coalition.
Today’s Herald runs with a story about how Spotlight thought even 2c an hour was too generous to offer to workers at its new Mt Druitt store. If the Government thinks the bad IR news is going to stop any time soon, they might want to have a not so friendly chat with some peak employer bodies to discuss appropriate use of power in the workplace.
Workers at the new Spotlight store in Mount Druitt are being offered pay and conditions worse than those available to their counterparts in Coffs Harbour.
They are being offered an Australian workplace agreement that does not include the two cents an hour pay rise offered to the Coffs Harbour workers in return for surrendering award entitlements, such as penalty rates, overtime and leave loading. An agreement offered to a part-time worker at Mount Druitt also guarantees only four hours’ work a week.
The equivalent NSW award guarantees a minimum of 12 hours a week for part-timers.
The agreement provides no guaranteed pay rise, saying “your wage rate will be reviewed annually and any increase in rate shall remain at the sole discretion of Spotlight”. Non-salaried employees may be required to work “reasonable” additional hours and on public holidays but there would be no overtime or penalty rates: “Additional hours will be paid at your base rate of pay.”
Hoowa… that’s a hell of an agreement.
Take an agreement where workers:
- get a crappy base pay rate with everything rolled into it (in effect, a big pay cut),
- lose the right to reasonable minimum hours of work,
- lose the right to regular pay rises that account for the rise in the cost of living (most likely delivering real pay cuts)
Kim Beazley told the Herald:
“John Howard’s wages race to the bottom started at two cents an hour; it’s now at zero and we know where it’s going next”
He is absolutely right
The minister for wage slashing and unfair dismissals, Kevin Andrews, counters that the 38 of 40 workers at the Mt Druitt store who used to be unemployed are now $350 a week better off. But did this store suddenly come into existence because the potential wage bill had been cut?
Stores take time to plan, build, fit, etc. Not to mention the time it took to identify that a store was needed there (identifying market need etc.). The capital investment that would go into it all would hardly have been chopped for the sake of penalty rates. I’m not exactly going out on a limb when I hazard a guess that this store was going to be built whether WorkChoices passed last year or not.
So the question then is how much are these newly workers worse off compared to what they should have been paid under a fairer system? And what of all the other workers within Spotlight who were already employed but who have had their wages cut? And what of other companies who might get to a point where they feel that they’ve got no option but to similarly slash wages to compete on price terms?
This is a can of worms for the Government. It can’t keep claiming that this is good for the economy, it’s got no basis for doing so. It can’t criticise Kim Beazley for wanting to abolish AWA’s when Beazley’s got on one hand hard evidence of AWA’s being used solely to slash wages and on the other the economic evidence of folks like the OECD saying that collective bargaining is the way to go for productivity growth.
It’s opened up a battlefront that it is going to have trouble shutting down. Federal-State relations, nuclear power, gay marriage, asylum seekers, electoral changes… They’ve all been thrown out there, but the wedges and the spin aren’t working anymore.
The mask is off. The Government has shown its ugly face and we’re seeing it for ourselves. Every time another wedge comes out, every time Peter Costello decides he wants to put out another diversionary brainfart, it’ll get a day or two before another Spotlight or Cowra abbatoir happens.
There is no joy for the labour movement (political or industrial wings) in this. There’s no schadenfreude. You can’t point, laugh and think of your own political interests first when people are getting screwed mercilessly, day after day, because of disgraceful laws.
There is simply a growing fury and determination. The Government’s got to go.
jason wrote:
On the Spotlight case you are absolutely correct. It is a huge fallacy for Andrews to suggest that his dumb-arse laws allowed this when this store would have been in planning 2 years ago easily.
One other thing though, when was the poll conducted? I would suggest that Labor hit a huge chord in labelling Howard’s Indonesian visit an arse-kissing exercise (excuse the Lathamism).
B.S. Fairman (not verified) wrote:
The poll was conducted from Friday to Sunday. So it was post Howard’s trip but also post IR rallies.
Scott (not verified) wrote:
I assume Kevin Andrews will knock back the 6% payrise MP’s have recieved based upon the premise ‘this is good for the economy?’.
Actually - how do we (taxpayers) put John Howard, Kevin Andrews and Co on an AWA? The minimum wage sound good to me.
Mark Bahnisch wrote:
Trackback:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/07/04/spotlight-in-ir-spotlight-ii/
jason wrote:
I believe the increase in the Labor primary vote is the key in this. When was the last time it was on or above 40%?
Factoring in Greens preferences, further increases in the ALP primary will make the next election unwinable for the Coalition.
July 2006 is too early to tell for a late 2007 election…
dibo wrote:
OzPolitics shows half a dozen occasions since 2004 that Labor’s primary vote has been 40%+. More importantly I think Jason, is the fact that on only 5 occasions in the same period has the Coalition’s combined primary vote been as low or lower than this.
There’s nothing spectacular happening here. I don’t think there is anything really wild in politics to drive this. As Crikey! (sorry, no link available) said today, there’s nothing super remarkable in the polls over the long term bar a steady but gentle trend away from the Government.
Thus has it ever been and thus shall it ever be. Governments, especially old ones, especially ones with new found power to legislate for all their dreams, obsessions and perversions, will always push the dirty stuff hard up until the point where the bleeding must be stemmed and the electorate must be soothed in time for another assault upon the polls.
IR is obviously the defining issue for many members of the Coalition Government, and so it’s the sort of thing that they’re willing to sacrifice a lot for.
Maintaining policy orthodoxy at the expense of policy orthodoxy* is a small price to pay in order to keep your name on the glass panel in the ministerial wing over the socialist scum opposite. Because the longer you stay in, the more times you can pass go, collect $200 and go for another rampage through the aisles of our longstanding institutions of progressive social democracy.
*What’s that? Centre-right governments handing over billions of taxpayers’ dollars to the self-same taxpayers in a morass of wasteful bureaucracy all in the name of election-buying bribes?
jason wrote:
Quite right to contextualise this Dibo. I couldn’t recall hitting 40% for a while and got carried away. I often think reporting the polls so often is as bad as reporting the financial markets every damn newsbreak - a big who cares factor as those in the need to know situation already have the info to hand.
Still I contend the primary vote is all that should be paid attention to this far out.
B.S. Fairman (not verified) wrote:
Primary vote means not a lot when the Greens are in double figures because the ALP has taken a moderate stand on something to upset the left of the voting block. Last Newspoll had a figure of 12% Green mainly because of the Nuclear debate which took a few % off of the ALP.
The next election is going to be won or lost mostly in Queensland. That is where the ALP needs to make up the most ground.
B.S. Fairman (not verified) wrote:
Also did anyone catch up on the fact that with the welfare reform as of July 1, if you are dismissed for “misconduct” from your job, you can’t get the dole for eight weeks? Just wait, some prick of an employer will use that as threat to hold over their workers. Not sure too many are aware of this yet.
jason wrote:
I saw the headlines but not the detail. Was a busy week.
I also have not checked out the Qld redistribution so can’t comment on election being won or lost there. Is the new seat likely to be ALP? In NSW I would not expect to lose Parra and we could gain Macquarie + Lindsay and perhaps have an outside shot on one other metro seat.
dibo wrote:
the new seat of wright is notionally national, with some other seats becoming slightly better or worse (it varies) for the government but with no seats changing hands on notional numbers.
Michelle Grattan in The Age quotes unnamed liberals as saying that some liberal marginals were fattened up by a mark latham factor, and so their margins are soft.
there’s a couple of things you could read into this, depending on which way you’re inclined to view the glass -
i think both are true, but there is a simple notion that labor are maybe closer than a lot of people (like punters) think to winning the next election that can be true whichever option you pick.
the question of how much ground we’ve made from a zero-net-gain position is debatable. my feeling is that we’ve made ground already, it’s just not quite showing up in full yet.
people are getting a picture of their industrial relations future. people are also seeing a government that looks like it’s worried (now apparently we’ve got to solve the federal-state problem in the next year… what, are they scared of other things we might talk about in the interim?).
if the government looks worried about its job security, and people are starting to get worried about their job security, then there’s the potential for this enormous positive feedback loop to whip up and blow so much of what we think of as the prevailing political landscape away very quickly.
jason wrote:
Long time between now and november 2007.
A very, very long time.
I know I sound like a broken record but I seriously worry about the public’s ability to adjust to the new climate. It has happened before.
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