There’s been more chicken than Colonel Sanders himself could handle in Canberra this week, as the debate about Sunday penalty rates continues.
‘Shrill Bill’ Shorten has suddenly discovered an appetite for protecting pay rates of workers, which is a marked departure from the stance he took as head of the AWU.
Back then, he enthusiastically supported a pay deal for workers at Cleanevent that permitted the award to be undercut by $10 an hour per worker, and is estimated to have cost around 5000 workers more than $400 million in lost wages.
But as we know, the current opposition leader’s political backbone is like an eel with itching powder up its rear-end.
Mr Shorten could have chosen to state down union pressure and admit there’s something to the notion that the time of a person working on a Sunday isn’t axiomatically more valuable than that of someone working on a Saturday.
Instead, Shorten has flicked the switch to Chicken Little. His new message is essentially “Sunday penalty rates are falling, and so is the sky! And it’s all so those business-owning bastards can have more cash in their money bins to roll around in.”
The manifest stupidity of this argument is so obvious that even the business lobby’s representatives should be able to defeat it. But alas, it seems it’s unwilling to try.
I’ve previously opined about the lamentable lack of will among peak business groups to involve themselves in political campaigns when it counts. Depressingly, it doesn’t seem things are about to change.
The Australian Financial Review reported on Tuesday that the head of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, is disinclined to campaign on the penalty rates issue, in essence because she doesn’t really believe it affects her members.
I concede Ms. Westacott knows here members far better than I do, but I am prepared to hazard a guess that the penalty rates issue is of more moment to them than constitutional recognition of indigenous people. Yet, Ms. Westacott has been willing to publicly comment on that issue.
As head of the BCA, she’s also been prepared to warmly endorse Labor’s climate change policy, and found time to discuss the results of the U.S. presidential election.
There’s no doubt all of these are important issues. But are they of greater relevance to the BCA’s membership than employment growth and business costs? It seems doubtful.
What the business community needs to realise – quickly – is that this is an issue that absolutely impacts them, because it’s being framed in terms of class war.
It’s doubtful many of the CFMEU’s members were affected by last week’s penalty rates decision. Yet that isn’t stopping the union from launching a massive campaign in support of Bill Shorten’s efforts to overturn it.
This is precisely the wrong time for business groups to engage in a demarcation dispute about whether this issue affects its own members. The union movement is not similarly concerned with the facts, and it is not concerned with politesse.
This is the best opportunity there has been to restore some semblance balance to Australia’s industrial relations landscape since Julia Gillard re-regulated the system in 2009.
The business community has to stop being chicken when it comes to defending its own interests, or it will wind up a dead duck.
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