Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Victoria: AWAs give women lower pay, longer hours Six women at a mushroom farm in Mildura, Victoria were recently sacked for refusing to sign Australian Workplace Agreements’, or individual work contracts. The contracts replace hourly pay rates with a ‘piece’ rate that cuts weekly pay by an average 25%, pressuring the women to work longer hours, at flat rates, to maintain their incomes. The Australian Workers Union successfully backed the women in a court challenge. Bill Shorten, AWU national secretary, on announcing the challenge said, “Nearly all the women have children to support. They are hard working mothers in a difficult industry… Their only ‘crime’ was to refuse to sign an individual contract. Everyone else who signed … kept their jobs, but suffered significant pay cuts" (www.awu.net.au/ 22.2.05). The employer’s bastardry is a taste of things to come, when the Howard Liberal government gets control of the Senate on 1 July and makes it easier for bosses to impose pay cuts and sack people for not signing individual contracts. Women, who make up a large part of the lower paid, casualised and non-unionised workforce, will especially feel the effects of the coming loss of basic workplace protections. |