In sheer weight of numbers, the benefits that the new industrial relations laws give to business look unclear, and possibly light, compared to the fears that it generates for most employees.
… by July last year, a MYOB small business survey found 40 per cent of small businesses had indicated WorkChoices legislation was unfair to many employees.
Further, only 9 per cent of small businesses planned to make any changes to their approach to employment, pay and conditions as a result of the new legislation.
"It appears from these surprising results that small businesses are well aware of the importance of their employees and the communities they operate in," said MYOB Australia's managing director Tim Reed at the time. "And they don't want to damage those relationships." -- Peter Switzer, To win, Howard must take ire out of IR.
You have to wonder about those percentages now. It may be true that small businesses weren't all that enthusiastic about WorkChoices: your local butcher, the single-operation bakery, the fruiterer, and so forth. But those keen operators with a nose for the franchise must be slavering. Anyone with a nose for business is -- let's face it -- a slaverer when it comes to raking in the dough. Put a normal human being in front of a chance to make gobs and he or she will trample any worker who gets in the way. For, along with a nose for business is the realisation that workers are a dime a dozen.
Hence the success in the last century of the trade unions. But Gordon Gecko has prevailed. It's back to the future for the corporate swill and their faithful minions like John Howard.
When Howard screams and hollers about those awful Unions, he is making it clear to working people that his government will not abide them having any rights, that commercial interests far outweigh the public good. "A casual job is better than no job at all," he says, confirming that he is the master of lowered expectations for the work force. That no one can support a family and a mortgage (or rent) with a casual job goes in one ear and straight out the other. By contrast, for up 'n' comer and big time employers, WorkChoices means the sky is the limit.
Howard is not a nation builder, he is a business builder. He stands for the Corporate Masters and we are meant to be their Servants. That is the natural order of things for his party, peopled almost entirely by private school toffs who were born to rule.
That unions should come to the aid of workers is, for he and his ilk, simply scandalous, un-Australian in fact. WorkChoices represents his most arrogant attack to date on those not in the privileged corporate class.
But what is the corporate mentality? Look no further than lowly toilet paper for a prime example.
We've written before about the toilet paper racket, about how it is constantly being repackaged with smaller sheets in rolls that ever diminish. It's one of those travesties that slips under the radar. No one wants to discuss toilet paper, for God's sake, not even when they have large families.
The TP I've been buying for a couple of years costs $3.09 for six rolls at 270 sheets a roll, with each sheet 11 x 10 cm. Most brands routinely screw punters with a measly 200 sheets or even 160 or less. On top of this, they save a few nano-cents by reducing the sheet to 10.5 by 10 cm.
My particular TP no longer seems to be available, but the remaining items of its scented version now lists a roll at 260 sheets.
That's right, even though they're deleting the line, they've reduced the roll by ten sheets!
This is what the corporate mentality is all about.
Some ambitious MBA decides to win favour with his bosses by offering an infinitesimal profit increase if the number of sheets to a roll of fucking toilet paper is decreased by ten. "Whoopee," cry the bosses, recalibrate the machines!" An entire tube of KY is exhausted in the ensuing orgy, helped along by a slide show of wizened shareholders in lewd poses. Freshly showered, the bosses and their new initiate repair to a fuhst clahss restaurant where they are dutifully served by casual staff, some, students perhaps, bleary-eyed from having to work two jobs to pay their HECS.
This is the pathetic bottom line for business types, whether ready to move on from the local shopping strip or ensconced in corporate offices high above the teeming masses. These are people who, regarding the punters as nothing more than profit fodder (or gun fodder, as the case may be), devote their lives to finding methods of delivering less and less while charging more and more. And the workers on their payrolls are mere ciphers. These are the people who John Howard champions.
The faith of the Howard Government in the stupidity of voters is touching. -- Marcia Turner, letter to The Australian.
The big problem for the Howard Government on IR is that it appears to believe its own spin. John Howard, Peter Costello and Joe Hockey trot out statistics purporting to show that employees are financially better off under Work Choices. That cuts no ice with individuals who draw their conclusions directly from the size of their pay packets. -- Agnes Mack, letter to The Australian.
It's a sad old truism that people don't act until they are personally affected. WorkChoices is starting to bite. Especially with the children (now entering the work force) of parents who still hold real jobs. That is, jobs with leave loading, sick pay and all the rest. The kind of jobs everyone used to have before John Howard's WorkChoices invoked the heyday of the 19th century.
-- Olney Garkle
