TRANSCRIPT: RADIO INTERVIEW - ABC TROPICAL NORTH - APRIL 20, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC TROPICAL NORTH
TUESDAY, 20 APRIL 2021

SUBJECT: Labor’s Secure Australian Jobs Plan.

HOST: What’s the story how come you’re out around Moranbah at the moment?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: The real theme of this visit is for me to listen to workers and get a real sense of how people are having their wages undermined where labour hire or outsourcing is causing wages to be undercut. So we announced a few weeks ago, a couple of months ago even, Anthony Albanese announced a policy of, shorthand ‘same job same pay’. So effectively, once you’ve got a rate of pay at a mine, at a food manufacturing business, that labour hire can’t be used to undercut those pay rates. But what I’m told is that, you know I’ll be meeting workers, particularly in the mining sector, where you’ve got two people doing the exact same job and the person who works for the company who has the union agreement, they’re on good rates of pay. But the person who’s come through on labour hire is being paid less per hour and has none of the conditions and I don’t know how anyone can see that as fair.

HOST: Now there’s an element to this, which is there has been an ongoing case which I believe is being appealed against in the High Court, the government is involved in that appeal, about the notion of back pay and should the workers who are on those internal labour hire companies, like the ones that BMA have used in the past in Queensland, should they get back- paid. I wonder what Labor’s view on that matter is?

BURKE: Well the Court should work their way through on this, but the simple principle is that the whole back pay argument that gets put by the companies presumes that if you’re being paid a casual loading, you’re earning more. But what’s happening here, is the extent to which wages are being undercut, even with a casual loading, the people coming through on some of these labour hire companies are still being paid a lower hourly rate that the permanent worker employed by the company, who also gets annual leave, sick leave. So you know I just don’t think it’s fair for employers to be able to double dip by taking all of the benefits of a permanent workforce and then offer no job security in return.

HOST: In terms of what mine workers, their families, people who might be training to go into the mining and resources sector as a worker, what can they expect from Labor in terms of offering a platform on job security around here?

BURKE: Well that’s the key principle there. We believe in job security. You’ll hear Mr Morrison talk a million times about jobs but you’ll never hear him talk about secure jobs. And the bills are reliable, but your income needs to be reliable as well. So everything that we’re doing in industrial relations is about job security. It’s about making sure that if you’re a casual and you want to become a permanent, you’ve got a pathway to be able to do that. If you’re a permanent and you want your hours guaranteed, you’ve got a way of doing that. And if you thought you had a permanent job, you shouldn’t suddenly find that it could be completely undermined through labour hire or outsourcing and all that security that you thought, the security of the job itself, the security of the rate of pay, just gets undercut by a whole set of lawyers coming in with different constructs of outsourcing or labour hire. The end point that we want, is really simple. We want people to be able to know that their job is secure and their pay is secure. That’s the only way to make sure you can get in front of your bills.

HOST: Is casual conversion something that Labor would like to see applied across all workplaces, not just resource sectors?

BURKE: Yeah, we’ve been supportive of it. Our criticism of the legislation that the government put through the parliament, is well two. One that they gave a definition of a casual that basically says that anybody who the employer says is a casual is a casual, end of story. And One Nation voted with them and they got that through. The other problem is if your employer says no on conversion when you’re trying to get a permanent job, what One Nation and the Liberal National Party agreed to, is the only way you can then get it fixed is to go to the Federal Court of Australia. Now realistically, how many casual workers, when they want a permanent job are in a position to say, well if you won’t give me job security I’ll take you to the Federal Court of Australia. You need a simple process through arbitration and the Industrial Commission that’s worker friendly, that allows these issues to be sorted out. The government didn’t do that and as a result, they can say, on paper they’ve got casual conversion, but in reality, unless you’re a casual with the resources and the confidence to go to the Federal Court of Australia, you don’t have a way of getting it fixed.

HOST: One thing on casual conversion, some businesses have argued, and those even in and around supporting casual conversion within the resources sector say, applying this wholeheartedly across working sectors that aren’t like mining, that don’t have that same structured roster of four days on, four days off, or other iterations of that, is that it just wouldn’t be practical and isn’t really in the expectation, particularly for a café for example, to turn casuals when they have a much higher turnover, to have those casuals applying for permanent positions. Does Labor engage with that argument?

BURKE: Yeah look, there will always be a role for casuals. There are people who want casual jobs and some jobs are in fact genuinely casual. But when you’ve got somebody who is on a permanent roster, and the worker wants the job security, then there needs to be a pathway to be able to get it fixed.

ENDS