TRANSCRIPT: MIDNIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE - SYDNEY - FEBRUARY 9, 2020

TONY BURKE
SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE ARTS
MANAGER OF OPPOSITION BUSINESS
MEMBER FOR WATSON

TONY SHELDON
SENATOR FOR NEW SOUTH WALES

 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
SYDNEY
TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY/WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2021

TOPICS: Scott Morrison’s scheme to cut workers’ pay, Labor’s plan to deliver secure jobs with better pay.

TONY BURKE, SHADOW INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS MINISTER: Well it’s midnight and right around Australia right now in a whole lot of industries we’ve got people who are working the hours most of us want to be asleep. And right now most of those people are in a situation where they’re being paid penalty rates. If the government gets the legislation through that’s currently before the Federal Parliament, then the protection that maintains those penalty rates disappears. Effectively, the safety net, which is the better-off test, will no longer be there for agreements that come forward. If you get rid of the safety net for workers they will land with a thud. And you get rid of a test that’s there to make sure people are better off, it’s no surprise just what will happen. So tonight I thought it was important. Let’s make sure that we get the message out that most people don’t want to work these hours. Most media conferences aren’t held at these hours. Politicians’ offices are closed at these hours. But these are the hours that penalty rates exist. And if Mr Morrison’s pay cut legislation goes through it will be legal to gut enterprise agreements and make sure that every penalty rate, every overtime rate, every shift allowance is up for grabs. Right now in supermarkets there are people stacking shelves. They could face a pay cut of in the order of $8000 each year based simply based on whether or not this legislation goes through. Be in no doubt, we’re standing in their way. Because right now if you look at the workforce we have some workers with protections and other workers – particularly in the gig economy – who don’t have security, who don’t have protections. What the government is doing is saying well let’s get rid of the protections for the people who have them. And what Anthony Albanese will be announcing later today in Queensland, will be to say no let’s not cut standards, let’s lift those people up who currently are earning below what should be the minimums in Australia. Tony Sheldon’s been at the parliamentary inquiry and he’s been directly asking questions of some of the employer organisations as to how they’re likely to use the legislation if it goes through. And I’ll hand over to Senator Tony Sheldon.

TONY SHELDON, SENATOR FOR NEW SOUTH WALES: What’s really clear about the legislation, and the whole question is there a pay cut? We’ve looked at the legislation, we’ve considered the legislation and quite clearly it’s a pay cut, it’s a pay cut, it’s a pay cut. Now we put that question directly to employers right from the Hotels Association, the hospitality industry, right through over to the mining industry, they would not guarantee that no worker would be worse off. This is quite clearly a government pay cut, and employer association drive to do it, and it’s going to hit the economy as well as hit your pay packet. We need to have an economy that can turn around, make sure people can spend in their local community, keep those small businesses thriving. But what do they want to do? They want the big end of town to force pay cuts on every hardworking Australian, whether it be midnight, whether it be the weekend, whether it be public holidays. Whether it’s the most inconvenient time. This is going to result in a pay cut for tens of thousands of Australians and those employer associations made it very clear that they will not, that wages will not be less, they will not guarantee that no worker would be worse off. This is a travesty against hard working Australians, it’s the wrong time for the economy to make this move and Scott Morrison and this government needs to back off and start standing with Australians rather than trying to put their hand in their pocket and ripping money out. A good example of course is the gig economy. Which has workers who receive no rights, no minimum wage. And what does the government do? Sit on their hands while the warriors of the pandemic, the people who stood up for us, and are still standing up for us during the pandemic, these gig workers, workers in the hospitality industry, workers in the frontline in aged care, right across all these industries, are going to be receiving a pay cut as a result of this legislation.

BURKE: And I’ll just say before I throw to questions, the government says “oh but employers wouldn’t do this”. Why would employers impose a pay cut? I’ve quite deliberately held this media conference today in front of a 7-Eleven. If you allow a race to the bottom you’ll have employers that run in that race – and Mr Morrison has fired the starting gun. I’m happy to throw to questions.

JOURNALIST: Are you saying 7-Eleven is going to cut its workers’ pay?

BURKE: There will be employers who do. I mean the first employers we see using this legislation I think will be some of the worse labour hire companies. And think about all you need to do. You get a relatively small labour hire company, with not many employees, to get an agreement like this through. And then they can undercut every competitor in the industry. It’s very easy to see how this unravels.

JOURNALIST: I notice you didn’t directly say whether 7-Eleven would look to cut its workers’ pay. Is that because a business like 7-Eleven hasn’t really been badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic, therefore probably wouldn’t be able to get an alteration to an enterprise agreement below the BOOT through?

BURKE: There’s a presumption in the question that I need to take on. Because the government has been running a myth that only businesses that have been badly affected by the pandemic would be eligible for these sorts of changes. That is not what the legislation says. The legislation says the Commission simply has to consider whether or not the business has been affected by the COVID pandemic. Now I’ll tell you, you’d be hard pressed finding a single business in the country that hasn’t been affected by the pandemic. The reason I’m not nominating specific individual companies for what they’ll do is that’s for them to decide and I haven’t sat in their board meetings, I can’t speak for them. What I do know is 7-Eleven will be eligible to act under this legislation. Pretty much every business in Australia will be eligible to act under this legislation. But if the legislation doesn’t go through, right now for most workers, not all, but for most workers we have a safety net, that safety net is called the better-off test. The government says it wants to suspend it for two years. Well let me just say if any agreements get through during the two years, and they will, we still have agreements in place today that were put through under John Howard’s Work Choices laws. These agreements don’t just last two years.

JOURNALIST: This press conference kind of reminds me of something Nick Xenophon would do, which tried to cut through issues, tried to distil things down to a simple phrase because it was very hard to get public attention to them. Do you feel Labor is actually cutting through on industrial relations? Is this press conference a sign of trying to grab some more attention to it?

BURKE: This is about drawing attention to what the government’s doing. I’m completely upfront about this. This is being held at midnight to make a particular point that the workers who work at these hours are the most at risk. That’s what the government’s doing. They are doing it eyes wide open, they are doing it deliberately. And that’s why we’re holding the media conference now.

JOURNALIST: It’s not a sign that you’re struggling to get attention in other ways?

BURKE: I think you know, it’s easier to get a bigger crowd in the middle of the day. I’m grateful, we’ve got you Nick here in person, we’ve got Paul on the line. I’m glad you’ve come along because this is the biggest story in your round right at the moment. You’re both on industrial relations. It’s not often that a government decides to come forward with a proposal for a pay cut. And certainly, after the 12 months that we’ve had, we hadn’t thought they’d come forward with a pay cut for the heroes of the pandemic. But that’s where we are and Labor’s going to do everything we can to stand between those workers and the pay cut the government’s wanting to hand them.

JOURNALIST: Tony in his speech Anthony talks about extending employee entitlements to employee-like workers. Other than food delivery and rideshare, which sectors do you think should be regulated in that way?

BURKE: You’ve gone to the right area there Paul in terms of the announcement by referring to the gig economy. But what I’d say is the gig economy is much bigger, and is penetrating much deeper into the Australian economy, than just the apps you might have on your phone. There’s a whole series of people in various trades where Airtasker has become a way of their rates being cut. But also now in the care economy. A huge section of the care economy, and the NDIS, is done through an algorithm now of various apps that those workers have on their. Now, we want the technology. I want the technology, I use the technology. Most Australians use the technology. What I want though is the technology without the exploitation. I want 21st century technology without the 19th century working conditions. I want to make sure that we can be a first world country without a section of our workforce on third-world conditions. And I want to know how on earth it is that we’ve got to the point now that there are some people working in the gig economy who are being paid less on an hourly basis than the legal minimum wage in Australia. That needs to be fixed and that’s what the policy is aimed at.

JOURNALIST: (Inaudble)

BURKE: The policy that Anthony’s announcing refers to the power of government in promoting secure employment. It goes both to the direct employment from government but also to procurement policies. I’d remind you, John Howard did the opposite of this. John Howard used the power of government to promote individual contracts. That’s what the Liberals were willing to do. We want to use the power of government to promote secure work. Because let’s face it, if you’ve got secure work, you’ve got a secure household budget. If you’ve got secure work, the bills you’ve been putting off over the last 12 months, you know you’ve got a plan to now be able to pay. If the public have secure jobs then business has secure income. It’s in the interests of workers, the interests of business and the interests of the economy that we have a shift back to more security at work.

JOURNALIST: (Inaudible)

BURKE: The question from Paul goes to the issue of having an objective definition of casual. One of the problems at the moment is we’ve ended up with a situation where some employers have completely abused casual employment. And there are other employers who may have inadvertently used it the wrong way. What we want to do is have it clear, in black and white, when someone is a casual and when someone is not. But what we don’t want to do is what the government now has before the parliament, which says ‘well whatever the employer says, if they say someone is a casual well then they are’. And 12 months later if the casual wants to get it fixed their only option is to go to the Federal Court of Australia. That is simply a recipe for insecure work. And so that’s not our path. But having an objective definition of a casual is the way forward and that’s what’ll be put in the Act.

JOURNALIST: You’re talking about the objective definition of a casual. I was talking to a few Uber drivers earlier tonight and earlier in the night spoke to some retail workers. None of them were really aware that this debate was going on. How do you cut through to people like that and convince them that this is a policy worth voting for?

BURKE: I’ll tell you what happens as this campaign runs. The casuals that you refer to Nick will realise when they get a payslip and they hear about what’s happening. It’s very simple to look at a payslip and work out how much of your take home pay is loadings. How much of it is casual loading, how much of it is late night shifts, how much of it is penalty rates on the weekend. And when you see that amount and you know the government wants to make that optional rather than guaranteed? It’s a very short line between that and people knowing the impact on themselves. With respect to gig workers and riders, I’ll tell you this. I was with some riders only yesterday. They know they’re being paid less than the legal minimum. They also knew, the riders I was with, that one of their mates had died on the road. And that the company had never even bothered to notify Workcover because they didn’t think they had any obligation to that worker. Those workers know that what’s been happening to them, is wrong. They know that the protections that they thought might be in Australia aren’t there for them. And they also know that when they do work to make a quid they’ve got to ride at paces that are unsafe. And if you drive through the streets of any city, you see it. You see people running red lights, you see riders going between the lanes, with the risk that a parked car door will open at any point and all of a sudden they’ll be lying down on a busy road. The workers know exactly what’s wrong and I think it’s reasonable they don’t yet know what our policy is to be able to fix it. It’s midnight and it’s not until the other end of today that that officially gets announced in a speech by Anthony. But we will be talking about every layer of job security right through to the election and beyond. Because job security is not just casualisation as a threat. It’s gig work, it’s continued short-term contracts, it’s the misuse of labour hire, it’s outsourcing when it’s being done to drive down wages. These are all forms of insecure work and it is spreading across our workforce in a way that is hurting households, hurting demand in the economy at the exact same point that the Australian economy is going to be more dependent on needing people to spend than we ever have before.

ENDS