It's not cold at all. I'm sick of half of Australia being cheerleaders for the poor and the other half being cheerleaders for the rich. Its brought policymaking to a standstill and preventing much needed reform from taking place.
it goes both ways. There are distortions that benefit the poor and distortions that benefit the rich. Both need to be removed to create a more prosperous society for all that can eventually provide greater protections for everyone. We need to act like adults and accept the removal of distortions that directly benefit us so those that hurt us and directly benefit others will also be removed.
Having a government mandate double overtime is a distortion. Workers should get more for overtime, night shifts and weekends but a mandated 200 percent? My wife works in industry with double overtime payloads that is a bit under 200 percent for public holidays and Sundays and people jump over each other to get those shifts. That suggests the pay is far in excess of the social costs of working those days. 50 percent sounds more reasonable. Ideally we would have zero percent mandated and let the free market work out the appropriate penalty rate but given the structure of jobs where workers don't yet have enough freedom to choose which days they would like to work each week then a mandate of fifty percent sounds fair. Unions should be focusing on getting more flexibility and worker choice into the market place and less on mandated penalty rates. That way the true social cost of working those shifts would be reflected in the penalty rates.
It will never happen as long as labour, liberals and the media treat policy debate like a football match.
Labor created the FWC.
Labor created the FWC.
This is my concern. Any extra wont go back into hiring more workers. The same workers will have to do the same work for less. Agreeing or not with Penalty Rates the argument put up by business owners is complete BS
Inflation is low. Take a look at official CPI figures for the last 10yrs.
So, you have a formula that says working Sundays is worth double? He didn't even say he had a calculator, he said 50% seems reasonable and in his anecdotal experience the current rates just result in greater demand for shifts than supply.
There is clearly such a thing as the free market, whether you agree that is how we should be working out wages and conditions is another point. As a country, we decided we wouldn't have a free market and we would regulate wages and conditions. In their infinite wisdom the Labor party put in the Fair Work Commission. The FWC has decided existing Sunday penalty rates are out of touch with modern life and they should be set similar to Saturday rates. However, they only did this for part time and full time employees, casual employees (so uni students and those earning extra money) are less impacted. Now, the Labor party is complaining about the system they set up. The usual suspects are getting behind them because that's the side they cheer for. However, nobody seems to have any backing for why Sundays should get paid more than Saturdays.
That wasn't the experience of New Zealand, where more places opened on Sunday and those that were already open were open longer on average. Plus, it isn't just that there will be more hours to be handed out, many places charge more for Sundays and Public Holidays, these places should be reducing their prices on Sundays. It is fair that this will probably mean those who used to work 6 hours on the weekend will just end up working 8 hours, but they still get paid like they worked 12 hours during the week. It's not that vicious of a change.
