Casualisation
All employment should be treated on the same basis at law.
Telecommuting
Workers should have the right to telecommute unless the employer can demonstrate that this is not feasible for the employees' role.
If each office worker was able to telecommute for 1 day a week they would reduce their loading on public transport and road infrastructure would be reduced 20%. Similar savings are feasible for transport energy consumption and greenhouse emissions.
Wage Fixing
A 'new deal' is needed whereby wages reflect the financial health of publicly listed companies.
This would involve employees wages being linked to a formula that considers the share price, profits and dividends for that company. Such a formula would need to use rolling averages to avoid wage volatility. The intention is that wages would go slowly up or down with the fortunes of the company.
This would make the workforce real partners in the business and allow companies to endure tough conditions and then re-bound.
The wages of employees in unlisted companies could be linked to general market conditions via the S&P300 share index and other measures.
No-Fault Termination Package
To discourage outright termination of employees (instead of reducing hours), all employees with more than one calendar year of service would be entitled to a package comprising:
- X weeks pay*.
- X weeks pay for every Y months of service.
- Outstanding entitlements.
(* where 'pay' is the average weekly pay of the employee over the proceeding Z months.)
This could be held in trust where the employee has been charged with a criminal offence related to their employment. Where an employee has been convicted of such an offence then reasonable costs associated with their offence may be refunded to the employer.
This is intended to prevent the increasingly widespread practice of denying worker's redundancy payout on the basis of minor transgressions that have been carefully recorded for the purpose during the workers employment. Pursuing unfair dismissal cases through the IRC is high risk as the employers can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat the employee and then use the threat of action on costs to force the employee to sign highly unfavourable settlements.
Employers can 'set-up' employees using some of the following techniques:
- Specifying that computer facilities are only for 'reasonable' personal use and then providing unlimited e-mail, internet and colour printer access and then logging transgressions.
- Specifying complex travel and entertainment policies and then logging transgressions.
- Providing employees verbal approval to perform tasks, take time in-lieu, make purchases, etc. that can later be denied.
CLSA Staff Take Cut Pay
27th Oct 2008: "Hundreds of top staff at CLSA, the Asia-focused brokerage arm of Credit Agricole, have agreed to a take a voluntary pay cut of up to 25 per cent to stave off the threat of redundancy." more...
ASEAN FTA Farce
11th Sept 2008: "What it means is we haven't got anything to
bargain with. We go to the table
and say we are thinking of cutting tariffs from 10% to 5% and the other side looks good when it
says, "We will cut by the same,
from 35% to 30%." more...
FTA Failure
DFAT: '...positive and negative effects of the free trade agreements will
take many years to fully materialise." more...