Archives for September 2005

Normally driving to work is not that exciting. I’m lucky that I don’t have a big commute but I still have to negotiate peak hour traffic and it’s normally quite boring.

This morning, however, I passed a ute that had lots of sheep and some dogs in the back. This isn’t that out of the ordinary, but these were all fake (made out of fibreglass). I had to look twice and then look back to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

Because it stuck in my head and made me laugh I had a quick look at their Sheepbloke website. Don’t think I’d ever be in the market for one of these but it was a good light-hearted way to start the day.

As someone who will be affected by Australian’s Industrial relations reforms I watched with interest the ABC’s Four Corners show on Monday night about the ‘Brave New Workplace‘.

‘In the next few weeks, barring some unforeseen political accident, John Howard will finally get to deliver on his bold vision. He will steer through the most radical upheaval of the system that governs how Australians work.’ (ABC – Four Corners website)

I watched this show because I thought there might be some argument they posed that might convince me that these reforms might actually mean a Brave New Workplace.

I am convinced though, that it won’t. Our beloved Prime Minister John Howard (oh how I cannot bear to watch that man on television but because I wanted to watch the whole show I did watch him) kept saying that these new reforms will increase productivity. HOW??? I have this question for you John.

How can taking away my current enterprise agreement which is about 200 pages long and replacing it with an Australian Workplace Agreement that I’ve been told will be about seven pages long increase my productivity? Obviously I will lose a heap of my current entitlements and I don’t imagine my pay will rise to anywhere near compensate me for those lost entitlements. This will not increase my productivity – this will lower my morale and therefore drastically lower my productivity.

Well, this would be John’s answer about productivity increasing as he told the reporter for the Four Corners show, Sally Neighbour,

‘Because they will give a much greater focus on agreement-making at the workplace level. And experience all around the world tells us that if we allow individual employers and employees to work out the arrangements that best suit them, the businesses go better, they make more money and they pay their workers higher wages.’

The organisation I work for (and I dare say most organisations) cannot pay higher wages unless all our other conditions are cut and once employees realise that their higher? take home pay packet doesn’t cover annual leave loading, sick leave, parental leave, maternity leave, superannuation etc etc, productivity is surely going to decline.

Also I fail to see how each individual employee, especially in large organisations, will be able to negotiate their own agreement. It will not happen. Imagine if there are 1000 employees. How long will it take each employee to negotiate an agreement? The cost to the organisation would be huge just doing that. I cannot see it happening.

As our union rep told a group of us, and as Sally Neighbour reported, John Howard is saying these reforms will bring about more flexible workplaces. Flexible for whom? Our union rep used the story that his dad used to line up outside the factory each morning in the hope that he might get a day’s work that day. Hopefully it won’t come to that for most workers but if it did, how can we pay off our expensive mortgages, or even get mortgages because the last time I got a mortgage I needed to be in stable employment to get one. With John Howard’s Brave New Flexible Workplace I probably won’t have a stable job.

Universities are also being held to funding ransom with this Brave New Workplace. If they don’t adopt the Higher Education Workplace Reform Requirements (HEWRR’s) they will lose quite a bit of government funding, all with the intention of making universities more flexible and productive.

No, I’m still not convinced that the industrial relations reforms will mean increased productivity. I am convinced though, that they will mean increased profits for corporations which is all that matters right?

Yesterday was the Australian Football League grand final. This doesn’t mean anything to me except that I was on the road yesterday and I noticed that there was less traffic. I had to go down south to visit some friends at Port Willunga and aside from having to slow down needlessly to 40kms per hour for two long stretches because of ‘roadworks’ (I put roadworks in quote marks because the roadworks are so nearly finished that I could not see any reason why traffic had to slow down) between Port Noarlunga and Port Willunga, it was a quick trip. I won’t go in to a diatribe about how if the Southern Expressway had been built to deal with two-way traffic it would have been even quicker.

The main reason I went down this way was to go and see Wallace and Gromit’s the Were-Rabbit. I like movies like this where adults can enjoy it on a different level than kids. JJ enjoyed the big rabbit and all the other rabbits and I liked the little things like Wallace wearing a cardboard box to cover his nakedness that said ‘may contain nuts’. JJ didn’t get this as he doesn’t read yet and he doesn’t know that nuts has another meaning apart from they make him sick. There were heaps of other things that many adults would get that many kids wouldn’t like the be humane to animals thread throughout.

I spoke to my sister today about the movie and she said when she saw it last week that she was bored with it. I definitely wasn’t bored with it. I thought it was very clever. I appreciate the amount of work it took to make (five years if I remember correctly). I appreciate the underlying messages and the humour. I also loved all the gadgets that Wallace invented.

With this, and the new take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I have had two recent movie experiences I’ve been able to enjoy, and not just endure, with JJ.