The national CEPU has made an urgent application to the International Labour Organisation to scrutinise the Labor government’s Fair Work Bill again our international obligations 

Dean Mighell, ETU Victorian State Secretary is responsible for the carriage of the campaign and says that we will continue the fight for better laws for workers.  The Fair Work Bill clearly shows that the Labor government has listened too much to business and that is why the Howard government was thrown out.

The Fair Work Bill retains significant sections of WorkChoices which affect workers’ rights and doesn’t reinstate the rights Australian workers lost as a result of WorkChoices.

The Fair Work Bill:

• Retains restrictions that were introduced by Work Choices that undermines the ability of unions to represent members.
• Continues the technical, costly and time consuming secret ballots introduced by Work Choices.
• Retains the prohibitions introduced by Work Choices that prevents workers, in similar workplaces doing similar jobs, from joining together to collectively bargain and take protected industrial action in support of similar pay and conditions.
• Retains the underlying concept of AWA’s and individual agreements which undermine the collective of workers, by allowing employers to offer individual flexibility agreements (IFA) that ‘trade off’ established basic entitlements, such as overtime penalties.
• Won’t allow workers to bring an unfair dismissal claim if they are made redundant, which is a restriction that Work Choices first introduced.
• Like Work Choices, provides workers with far fewer rights to make an unfair dismissal claim if they work for a small employer - and a claim cannot be made until workers have been employed for more than 12 months.
• Makes workers lose 4 hours pay for taking unprotected industrial action (even if they attend a 10 minute meeting), which is a penalty that was introduced by Work Choices.

Neither the Labor Government nor the ACTU have taken the opportunity to test the Fair Work Bill against ILO conventions by submitting the draft legislation.  This is despite the Labor Party and the ACTU having policies upholding our ILO international obligations.

Please see these links for further information: 

• ETU Submission to the Senate Inquiry on the Fair Work Bill
• Submission to Senate appendix 1 - Submissions on the ILO
• ILO Application Attachment A - Particulars of complaint
• Letter to ILO detailing complaint to Committee on Freedom of Association
• Media Release
• Letter to Julia Gillard