TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - FEBRUARY 10, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS AFTERNOON AGENDA
WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2021

SUBJECT: Labor’s Secure Australian Jobs Plan.

KIERAN GILBERT, HOST: Let’s go live now to Tony Burke the Shadow Minister for Industrial Relations. One of the challenges is if you define exactly what the gig economy worker is and rights and so on, that employers can potentially get around that again. So from what I can see here the approach is to try and give a broad remit to the Fair Work Commission so that they’ve got flexibility, is that a fair way to describe it?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: That’s completely correct Kieran. What we’re doing here is effectively giving the Fair Work Commission the same level of flexibility that the platforms have. And that way, you will be able to have a situation where- it’s not identical always to a straight employment situation- but we certainly shouldn’t have a circumstance where we’re seeing the deaths, where people have been under pressure that we’ve seen, but also just put it as simply as this, you had people in that story you just ran a quote of people being paid ten dollars as hour. The minimum wage in Australia is just under twenty. So, we’ve already decided here’s the minimum amount that people should be paid and we’re in a circumstance where for a section of the workforce, that’s being completely undercut. And somehow it’s legal because we’re defining them as contractors. I get that someone will be a genuine contractor, if you know, they’re running a business through the vehicle that they have, they might be dealing with a multitude of clients and there’s some independence that comes with that. But really, someone on a second hand bike running red lights to try to make sure that they don’t get in trouble from the algorithm and that they get food in on time? That’s somebody who is highly dependent. And if it’s not identical to what we would normally consider employment, we need to make sure there’s a level of protection.

GILBERT: So can you give us an example where that latitude might work for the Fair Work Commission for an Uber driver or Deliveroo work in terms of ensuring minimum pay and standards at work?

BURKE: Well it’d be very much up to the Commission and one of the things I think we need to recognise, most people, when we think about the gig economy, we think about the apps that we might have on our own phones. So we’ll think of Uber, we’ll think of Deliveroo, we’ll think of Airtasker. But most people don’t know a huge section of the care economy, including the National Disability Insurance Scheme, is now run through the gig economy. Where the amount that’s being spent by the tax payer for work to be done is not in fact reaching the worker. So this has really been insidious the way it’s gone through the economy but you will end up with a range- and when I gave that description before Kieran when I said, but there are some people who clearly are permanent contractors, who clearly don’t have dependency on a single business, there may be, you go back a couple of steps from that, and the Commission might say, ‘well superannuation’s appropriate here but nothing else is.’ There might be another step back and they say, ‘well we need perhaps some limited leave entitlements here’, or it might simply be to say, ‘if we have rates as low as what a company is paying, that’s actually dangerous for the roads.’ So you give the Fair Work Commission the power to look specifically at what’s in front of it and come up with sensible answers. Because the other thing, you know, I know it’s easy for us to just blame the platforms, but until there’s some level of regulation, the risk for any of these companies is that if they do the right thing, someone else would just turn up on a platform and undercut them and take the work and nothing’s fixed.

GILBERT: Basically does it mean we have to pay more for ordering some food to home instead of paying four dollars for the kid on the delivery bike that you’re paying more for that service?

BURKE: I don’t think we should pretend and I wouldn’t want to be so alarmist as to pretend that every transaction involves exploitation. You will find that different platforms, at different times of day, where people are being paid appropriately. You will find that. But certainly, if there’s a circumstance and we know that they’re out there, where people are being paid less than what we have decided is the legal minimum in Australia, where people are receiving conditions that are less than what we have decided as a nation should be allowed in a first world country, then yes, there’d be an extra cost in those instances. But you know, I’m not critical of the technology. I use the technology. I expect you use the technology. But twenty first century technology doesn’t need to come with nineteenth century working conditions.

GILBERT: No, it certainly doesn’t. And I guess fundamentally though, through the Fair Work Commission, you don’t want to pre-empt anything that might happen if this policy is implemented if you win government, but do you see basically a situation where we just have to pay more? To fundamentally make it viable for people to do this and live?

BURKE: Look it’s the same as the Modern Slavery laws where we’ve said there are some circumstances where different companies have decided to not import from different warehouses overseas, the only difference is, here the exploitation is happening on our own soil. But I wouldn’t get alarmed at massive shifts in price or anything like that, but certainly, on those times of the day and on those platforms where people aren’t being exploited, nothing will change. And where there are circumstances where people are being exploited, they’re running risks and dying on the roads, where they’re being paid less than what the legal minimum is, then yeah as a country we’ve decided that we don’t want that to happen on our soil and we’re willing to pay to be better than that.

GILBERT: Part of the speech that I’m interested- that jumped out at me- the idea of portable entitlements for those in insecure work, so say someone has sick leave or annual leave entitlements approved with one particular employer that moved onto another contract or something, how can you take a portable approach when you’re moving to a different business? Can you give us a sense of how that might work?

BURKE: Yeah look, there are some industries where these schemes already exist and certainly all we’re announcing tonight on that one is that we’d be consulting with the states and territories to work out what might be practical, what mightn’t be. It comes out of the problem that we’ve seen during the pandemic. Where when people don’t have leave entitlements, they’re working so many multiple jobs, it has created public health challenges. It has created whole series of extra problems. And insecurity for the worker has actually created problems for the whole community. But on that one, we’re not announcing that there’s some national scheme or anything like that, that’s simply the beginning of consultation with the states and territories.
The other one, if I can just mention because I know you’ve got limited time, but the same job same pay principle that’s in our announcement tonight is huge. That effectively what this means is that labour hire can be used, or the proper role of labour hire dealing with surge workforces, things like that, that it can no longer have a situation where labour hire or outsourcing being used to simply undercut the wage rates that are lawfully imposed at a workplace. It’s ridiculous and unthinkable in most parts of the world. But in Australia, you can have a full negotiation. It can be agreed and formally registered as to what the minimum rates of pay are at a particular place of work and then the employer can just get a labour hire company to come in, and because it’s technically a different employer, it can radically undercut and you end up with two people working side by side, where the person employed by the labour hire firm is earning radically less and earning a wage that would otherwise be unlawful at that workplace. You don’t have to go far in a number of sections, including construction and mining, before you see what a change this policy would make in ensuring that wages are not undercut.

GILBERT: On the Industrial Relations Bill, there is a measure to crackdown on wage theft, I would imagine Labor would be supportive of that initiative. So will you be looking at trying to compromise with the government to get that, at least that component, through the parliament? If you don’t like the other element in that industrial relations bill, will you negotiate to try and at least get the wage theft measures through as law?

BURKE: Look at the moment, the only way to get to that part of the debate is to vote in favour of a wage cut. And there’s no way that’s we’re going to be voting in favour of Mr Morrison’s wage cut. Whether we get to that part of the debate, I don’t know that’s sort of on the heads of the government because we’ve made clear from the start, at no stage will we be supporting legislation that allows for every single penalty rate and allowance to be cut and where you suspend the safety net for the better off overall test for workers. But can I also just add on the wage theft example, the legislation isn’t actually as straightforward, even on wage theft as the government would want you to believe. I’m in Queensland right now. In Queensland the Commonwealth wage theft laws would override laws that are already here and would mean that protection for workers goes backwards. And employers who steal wages will become more likely to get away with it than they are now. The same goes for in Victoria. So the way that they’ve drafted it, in some parts of Australia it is an improvement, but certainly where I am right now in Queensland and in Victoria, it would actually take people backwards. So, even if we get to that point in the debate, there’d be some heavy amendments. And I should also add the wage cut part of it, the pay cut part of the proposal, isn’t the only problem with this bill, it’s the worst part of it. But you know, our test is secure jobs and this is a bill that makes casualisation easier than ever.

GILBERT: Just quickly, we’re going to go to Christian Porter in a moment, the government’s minister on this, but he says the Labor party’s efforts to give entitlements, and you believe in entitlements and so on, to those that currently don’t have them will be a twenty billion dollar tax, going to redistribute tax from business, into new forms of leave entitlements for three and a half million workers, he says it’s going to be an extinction level event for tens of thousands of businesses. What do you say in response to that?

BURKE: Good luck to him if he wants to argue that. Doesn’t surprise he wants to lie about that, he lies about his own legislation and pretends there’s not a pay cut in it, which there is. But that exact issue you just said is going to want to go hard on is the one I just told you is we would be consulting with the states and territories. How he arrived at a twenty-billion-dollar figure on that, I reckon it’s a fair bet he’s making it up. But you know, if you call him out on that, he’d make something different up. I’m not surprised by that, it’s the way he behaves.

GILBERT: Tony Burke thanks for joining us live from Brisbane.

BURKE: Thanks very much Kieran.

ENDS