WorkChoicesWorld … where every worker wins a prize
Industrial relations - - Posted on May, 19 at 1:09 pm by Ken L
Are you confused by public discussion of WorkChoices? Do you have trouble relating the employers and union bosses who inhabit Joe Hockey’s world to the ones you see in your own workplace? Do blog commenters who enthusiastically endorse WorkChoices seem to be employed in an alternative universe where employers behave like no employers you have ever known?
Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with your perception of the world of work. It’s the supporters of WorkChoices who have parted company with reality. Let’s look at some of the myths they peddle to support their distorted view of employment relations.
Employers run the business
Most pro-WorkChoices rhetoric talks about an ‘employer’ to mean ‘the owner of the business’. The rhetoric fails at the most basic level because it pretends that relationships at work are between an ‘employer’ and its employees. In truth, the majority of relationships are between employees and their managers or supervisors. Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that most of the inductive logic supporting WorkChoices is flawed.
In very small businesses, the owner may indeed be the manager but once an organisation has more than about 20 employees, an increasing number of them report to a supervisor or manager who is not the owner of the business. Millions of people are employed by large organisations owned by anonymous shareholders where the owners play no role at all in employee relations. Moreover, about 25% of Australian workers are employed in the public sector or by not-for-profit organisations of various kinds where there is no conventional ‘owner’ at all.
Let’s see how many assumptions collapse once it’s understood that many organisations aren’t businesses trying to out-perform other businesses, nor are they being run by their owners. But first, let’s get one other urban myth out of the way:
Managers faithfully represent the interests of owners
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Now you tell one.
(See also: Enron, HIH, AMP, NRMA, Qantas …)
Employers have consistent IR policies
Once it’s understood that organisations are run by professional managers not owners, it’s silly to talk about what ‘the employer’ does, as if it’s one single actor in the employment relationship. In fact, as anybody knows who’s worked in a large organisation, IR decisions reflect internal power and politics. That’s why you might see everyone getting generous pay rises one year and 10% retrenchments the next. It just means that the balance of power in the top management team shifted when they sacked the HR Manager and made the new one report to the Finance Director. The employment relations behaviour of organisations is the outcome of a process of negotiation amongst various power bases and is therefore fundamentally irrational. The WorkChoices assumption that organisations make consistent, sensible policies to serve a set of rational objectives just ignores everything we know about organisational behaviour.
Managers are good at their jobs.
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe.
There’s a reason why shows like The Office are not only hilarious but also make us uncomfortable … it’s because they are true to life. Around this great brown land, hundreds of thousands of men and women are exercising managerial authority for which they are either untrained or temperamentally unsuited, often both. They couldn’t act in the interests of the organisation even if they wanted to because they don’t know what those interests are or how to serve them. They don’t regard their subordinates as human assets for the organisation, they regard them as personal friends/enemies/potential sexual conquests/jokes/bastards/freaks/threats …anything but human beings to be coached with the aim of helping them do the best job they can for their organisation. Anybody who doubts this has never worked in a big enterprise.
Employers are interested in the performance of workers
This is the most persistent myth of all. “No employer would risk losing good workers,” goes the pro-WorkChoices propaganda, “Workers are too hard to replace. High turnover is a road to business failure.”
This is a wonderful example of something that appears to be so self-evidently true that most people don’t even try to rebut it. However, it’s far from true in many enterprises.
First of all, as noted above, about a quarter of all workers are employed by organisations that are not subject to market competition. Therefore it doesn’t matter if workers perform poorly and keep quitting as soon as they get another job. As long as blame can’t be sheeted home for clear breaches of the law or organisational policy, managers can be as bloody-minded as they like … and frequently are.
Second of all, many private sector organisations have deskilled their jobs so they can be done by virtually anyone. Therefore if workers don’t like their jobs they can piss off and the company will hire someone else without missing a beat. One good example is your favourite fast food company, which has designed its work so it can be done by school kids on a few bucks an hour, with staff turnover of anything up to 200% per annum. A lot of retailing is the same – in fact most jobs are like this in the casual/part-time sector where 25% of us are employed.
Finally, it’s a myth that employers are all concerned with the long-term success of their businesses. Many couldn’t give a stuff whether the place will be thriving in 10 years’ time. Businesses are increasingly becoming tradeable assets as opposed to sources of income. Many owners and managers are obsessed with short-term performance with a view to boosting the share price so they can sell the bloody thing at a huge profit. These days when a new CEO takes over it’s virtually compulsory to sack five or 10% of the workforce, just to show the stock market that the place is in safe hands. Workers are just pawns in these corporate games.
*****
Needless to say there are organisations out there where the owners care about the long-term, they see employees as a source of competitive advantage and they don’t need anything like WorkChoices to make sure they treat workers fairly. They’ve also hired competent managers who have the organisation’s interests at heart. I know some enterprises like that. However, it’s either naïve or dishonest to pretend that all employers meet that description. Many don’t.
Millions of Australians work in places where the owners are only interested in making a quick buck, or top management is on a little self-serving jaunt of its own, or many supervisors are incompetent; in many workplaces all three apply. Yet such workplaces barely register in the pro-WorkChoices rhetoric. If their existence is acknowledged at all, they are dismissed as an insignificant minority which will quickly go broke. The reality of course is very different. They are anything but insignificant and many of them survive and prosper because labour is sometimes not, in fact, an organisation’s most important asset.
That leaves unanswered the WorkChoices’R’Us crowd’s final argument: if workers don’t like their jobs they can just quit and get another one, so what’s the problem? This requires the demolition of a second category of urban myths about employment relations, which I’ll leave for a second instalment, coming to you soon!
(Cross-posted at kenalovell.com)
Posted in Industrial relations |
May 19th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
[...] (Cross-posted at Road to Surfdom.) [...]
May 19th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
I have placed this article on the “Compulsory Reading Material For All Persons Who Wish To Understand Politics” list.
May 19th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
I agree with everything u just wrote, Ken (even though i suspect I am among the blog commentators you disparage)
However, the real question is how do we improve the situation?
You probably know what I think, but I will look forward to reading the second installment before I see how well the two mesh. Should be interesting.
May 19th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Brilliant insight, Ken.
I guess it doesn’t make it any more palatable the fact that Workchoice drafters actually believed some of this mythology. It’s really not much different from those Des Moore disciples a few years back reckoning that market forces would clear away all our problems.
Reminded me of a Wizard of Id gag years ago (vale Larry Hart)
RODNEY: Sire, this is stablehand Smith. After 7 years hard work part-time at night school, Stablehand Smith has now graduated with a degree in Accounting.
KING: Well, congratulations, Stablehand Smith. Such diligence should not go unrecognised…
I’m putting you in charge of our smartest horse!
May 19th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
It was once called “Arbeicht Macht Frei” by a similar jackbooted regime.
May 19th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
As a manager I can tell you that the best way to get a lot of work out of your staff is to get them to want to work. Threatening them with the sack OR hemming them in with contractual obligations is counter productive. That’s why WorkChoices AWAs are not a terribly good idea. If you trick the employee into signing a disadvantageous contract, they’ll have a very good reason to hate your guts. If you sign a mutually advantageous contract where both of you are working to the same end, you’ll never need to refer to the letter of the contract again anyway.
After all, it is entirely possible for a human worker to be busy the entire day and be quite unproductive. And while the worker knows when they are doing this, the manager can only suspect. Acting on that suspicion will cause unrest, resentment and an unpleasant work environment.. It will not achieve anyone’s goals. Trying to enforce an employment contract to make a person work harder/better is only for the insane.
Almost all people will work quite well if given direction and being left alone. The art of the manager is:
a) don’t make it worse
b) try and make your staff want to make it better
c) try not to be a complete snot.
May 19th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Ken, this post is brilliant. It cuts through all the ‘management’ bullshit that I had to ’study’ to ‘understand’ what life was all about.
Congratulations.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:54 am
It’s really quite simple: Work Choices has taken the bottom out of the barrel. Scraping around won’t get you anywhere.
Before WCs you could hold off a bad manager with a set of basic rules that applied to all, across all industries. You mightn’t always win, but you could keep you balance while you looked for alternative employment. Now that is all gone.
I never belonged to a union and was only asked to join once. The union rep was so rude when he came around to sign up the new employees (in the pub industry, many years ago) I just ignored him, and by the time he came around again I was ready to move on anyway. But I was aware that my conditions were won for me by a union, or many of them. I had a backup, even though I never used it.
That backup is now gone. It’s every man and woman for themselves. Their only recourse is to go to a public servant who is likely not particularly committed to their own job, and certainly isn’t committed to maintaining the job of the complainant. They are appointees of the government that legislated Work Choices in the first place, so they are institutionally uninterested as well.
Every WCs agreement is confidential. You’re not supposed to even discuss its terms with your colleagues. You’re on your lonesome, isolated. Exactly where Howard wants you. Some people are strong and can fight for their rights. In strong moments I’ve done a bit of boss baiting myself. Won some, lost some. In the end I realised I was better off working for myself, which is what I have done for 25 out of the last 30 years, since I was in my 20s. But then I was single and had no family or responsibilities. It’s completely different for people with families or mortgages.
Sensible people will realise they have their good years and bad in various jobs. In a good year, for them and the business they work for, they can hold their own. In bad years they become superfluous. That is the tragedy of Work Choices, and why it has been rejected by the public. Howard is asking voters to put the noose around their own necks in the hope that they never lose their balance and fall off the gibbet. It’s too risky.
May 20th, 2007 at 6:22 am
I know next to nothing about the Austrialian labor situation or WorkChoices. But I do know that you could change a few keywords and produce a very similar article about the flawed logic that pervades establishment labor analysis in the U.S. And you would be s-o-o-o correct. This is a great post.
May 20th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Yeah, it’s a great piece Ken.
Like Invig, i’m wondering what policy consequences might flow from such a ‘re-imagining’ (or maybe de-imagining) of the relationships between owners, managers and workers.
I’ve seen arguments from you and from Tim which imply there is a genuine anti-red tape agenda to be had. Is that as far as it goes? ie: should the rest of Workchoices be completely scrapped or is Labor’s apparent compromise logical?
Is collective bargaining the best way to deal with increasing beauracracy/managerialism? And while im being so demanding a final tangentially related question:
Did the Coalition’s attempt at extinguishing what was left of the Union movement succed only in bringing it back to life in a way that could never otherwise have happened? How would Bastard boys have played the other night, if IR had never come up as a significant political issue? I’m not sure that the concept would even have been pitched to ABC esecutives!
May 20th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Oh, and this from AB is another descriptive masterclass. What’s a gibbet?
May 20th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Good post.
I think one other point that maybe you might have made is that the power in the employer / employee relationship is heavily weighted in favour of the employer. This is most obviously true for low skill, low pay jobs, but is also true for higher skilled jobs as well.
A high skill job usually involves the employee investing a lot of time and effort in understanding and developing the skills required to do the job. It’s often the case that the more senior the job, the less directly transferable these skills are. For example an engineer who spends years learning everything there is to know about a particular company’s product is tied pretty tightly to that employer. They may be able to get employment elsewhere, may be able to apply some of their skills with a new employer, but not without a significant loss on the time and effort they have invested with their current employer. The bargaining power is heavily weighted to the employer.
I guess this is really getting onto your promised second installment about why employees shouldn’t just hit the road if they don’t like where they are. And of course the reason they don’t is because labour markets are not the perfect, frictionless, commodity markets the fantasists who dreamt up Work Choices think they are.
May 20th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Very interesting piece.
I agree that most workplaces are goven by whom likes whom, and this will not chnage, also I agree with the comment that its poor management practice to give workers a reason to hate you, for the old saying rings true, good people wont put up with crap, they take their talent and walk.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:31 am
An excellent piece Ken.
Some valid & well articulated comments too.
You’re blowing away the smoke…smashing the mirrors…we need that.
Once the ‘great economy’ hype bites the dust & the Masters of the Markets decide it’s in their interest to use the ‘downsizing’ scythe…the Federal Govts. IR reforms will come in mighty handy…the Worker’s jobs, security, conditions, pay will litter the Corporate floor…like severed limbs.
Then multitudes of new migrants…& hesitant but desperate individuals on work visas will be told to enter the killing fields…be forced to pick up the pieces…rev up the machines of tomorrow, the handles & buttons still bload soaked…& in the fear & trembling, take us into the next stage of the ‘Age of Corporatism’…motivated by a ‘barely able to survive’ minimum wage.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Fascinating isn’t it – Westpac Chairman, Ted Evans gets his agenda up in the Australian today about how it is inevitable that banking industry jobs will be going to India. Collectively they have been doing this for years - or is it about to accelerate?
It’s also fascinating that this very same industry has the highest and most obscene salaries across CEO’s and executives of any industry in Australia. Collectively, retail banks like Westpac are only second in this measure behind the merchant banks like Macquarie.
Excuse me! What justifies these obscene incomes when all they are doing is counting and re-lending our money – this is merely an accounting job dressed up as something special and called banking? It’s a nice little oligopoly operating under the auspices of the “four pillars” policy and encouraged by Governments of all persuasions.
And if you look at the employment trends in Australia over the past 20 years you will discover that the middle level jobs (including bank employees) have been decimated. Employment in middle level administrative, clerical, technical, management and other jobs has actually declined because these are the ones that are easily offshored. Employment growth has been at both the high and the low ends in roughly equal numbers.
The high end is made up of managers and professionals – many self employed who charge what they want or who are often part of a nice little monopoly – think doctors and lawyers. We can’t send these jobs offshore – because a key value proposition of the professions revolves around trust and you can’t develop trust remotely.
The low end is made up of $10 to $20 per hour jobs that are colloquially known as the services industry. These are the cleaners, the checkout chicks, the shelf stackers, the waiters and bar-persons and the shop assistants. These are the jobs that you can never escape from. We can’t send these jobs offshore either – because it doesn’t make sense to ship tonight’s dinner from Bangalore.
The low end is growing because the high end need others to do their menial work – to clean for them, to cook for and serve to them and to fetch for them. These jobs employ the most numbers of people of any in Australia with shop assistants being the most numerous.
So what does the future hold for our children and grand children? They will increasingly have limited choices – at the high and low ends. Clearly we will want our kids to be at the high end but there are only so many vacancies for bank CEO’s, doctors, lawyers and other managers and professionals. Many of them will end up at the low end – regardless of education.
This is why we must resist attempts by banks and others to send Australian middle level jobs offshore. We need those jobs here to provide careers and opportunities for our kids – unless of course we are happy to end up being servants. Some might remember that Lee Kuan Yew had a few words to say about this 30 years ago.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
The Libs are now backpeddling so hard they must have turned around and be stearing the bike with their collective arse. Note Mr Hockey right at the end:
Piers Ackerman was right in G’s “Blue Smoothie” post - ver Evil Unions have gained mind control over Avuncular Joe and are forcing him to speak their words!
I’M FREAKING OUT!
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 pm
How dare the Jolly Hockey Stick nick our slogan?
They’re not his rights at work, they’re our rights at work. Or your rights at work. Somebody’s rights at work, anyway, but certainly not HIS !
He’ll be joining the CPSU and claiming ‘Unions good, bosses bad’ before we know it!
May 28th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
[...] wrote a post the other day. I pointed out that most of the rhetoric justifying WorkChoices relies on this [...]
May 29th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
[...] Ken at the Road to Surfdom has written the definitive guide to workchoices in two posts - part 1 and part [...]
May 30th, 2007 at 1:53 am
Joe Hockey‘s “right to contract” doctrine, “empowers” individual’s to negotiate with a virtually immortal, omnipotent and inanimate entity known as a corporation, for an individual Australian Workplace Agreement for wages and working conditions.
It is therefore is bewildering to me to find that one corporation ‘Telstra’ has the largest number of AWA’s (9,000) that are all identical. Tim is this called ‘pattern individual bargaining’?