Workplace relations changes transition

The new Commonwealth Government was elected only 1 month ago but there is a great deal of interest in its plans to change workplace laws.

According to a media release from the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, the transition bill, which is currently being drafted, will be introduced into the Parliament as a matter of priority in the first sitting week of 2008.

The transition bill will, among other things:

• prevent the making of new Australian Workplace Agreements;
• create a new form of individual workplace agreement – the Interim Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA) – to be available only for limited use during the transitional period;
• remove the previous Liberal government’s Workplace Relations Fact Sheet requirements;
• put in place a new no-disadvantage test for new agreements to provide better protection for employees; and
• enable the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) to undertake the process of modernising industrial awards.

Further information is contained in a transcript of an interview on 18 December. The key points are:

• after the law is changed there will be no new Australian Workplace Agreements
• existing AWAs stay for the balance of their term
• under the new law, "our options could be to make a collective agreement with all of your staff to govern their terms and conditions, to make individual common law agreements but those common law agreements have to give people better than the safety net that is the significant difference with AWAs which can give you something worse than the safety net. Or for a two year period, there will be a transitional instrument called an Interim Transition Employment Agreement, an ITEA, that’s a statutory individual agreement but once again, unlike an AWA that has got to not disadvantage you compared with the safety net."
• "there would be two pieces of legislation. The first bill, the one ... that ends Australian Workplace Agreements, the ability to make new ones, that’s the transitional bill. It will be followed by a substantial piece of legislation. That substantial piece of legislation will deal with the whole of our new IR system. Now the system will come into full operation...on the first of January 2010. That’s when awards will be modernised, that’s when our new industrial umpire, Fair Work Australia will come into operation. Obviously that bill will deal with a number of matters including unfair dismissals. ... What we want to have is a streamline system that works for everybody, that makes sure if a worker has a genuine complaint about their dismissal that gets heard and fixed but that people aren’t dragged away from their business that the complaint is dealt with quickly."

UPDATE 8 January 2008: Page 136 of The Parliamentary Library Briefing Book (pdf) contains a helpful summary of the proposed changes.