There are a couple of assumptions underlying the unfair dismissal debate which deserve to be challenged. The first is that “unfair” is the appropriate adjective – this is always taken for granted by opponents and interviewers, and never explored by the government.
The second is that in small business in Australia the balance of bargaining power favours the employer.
I’ve spent most of my life running micro-businesses with wafer thin profit margins and limited capital bases – in those circumstances you often tolerate all sorts of behaviour because you cannot afford to lose key staff, even if those key staff are not performing. With the rise of the contractor and sub-contractor in a number of industries from construction to IT, many employers know just how hostage they are to staff. It’s probably one reason why unions don’t do as well as they used to – in many circumstances staff appreciate the situation and can drive a hard bargain without any help.
As a business owner I’d have to admit to being “sacked” by staff a few times. On one occasion we’d taken a young girl on and spent considerable time teaching her the ins and outs of property management. She’d promised to give us at least 2 years, yet six months later she was off back-packing. She didn’t have to give me any reasons for leaving, nor should she have to. She didn’t apologise for the expense in training her, and the cost in hiring someone new, and nor should she have to.
But if an employee can leave an employer on a whim, why shouldn’t an employer be able to sack an employee on a whim? An employee would regard it as unfair if they were forced to work for someone, so what is fair about putting the employer in the same situation?
The debate is being carried on as if industrial production still occurs in the shadow of Blakes’ “dark satanic mills”. But it doesn’t. The system has changed, and many of the enthusiastic beneficiaries of the new system are erstwhile Labor supporters who now vote for John Howard. As the son of a service station proprietor John Howard should understand this class well. It’s the same petit bourgeoisie of which he is a scion. In the 50 years since he counted war time petrol coupons on the family dinner table that class has swelled downwards, so that now there is very little old-style working class left at all.
Labor will miscue this debate if it follows the unions in strident opposition to the legislation.
June 08, 2005 | Graham
Balance of power and unfair dismissal
June 08, 2005 | Graham
Child support and taxes – Howard’s battlers are battling
When John Howard criticised the proposed Georgiou private member’s bills in the party room he is reported to have asked “Don’t you know how we won the last election.” This isn’t just a reference to so-called “dog whistling” but a tacit recognition that a key demographic – the “Howard Battlers” – keeps the government in power, and nothing should be done to upset it.
While the Howard Government might have its eye on the electoral ball when it comes to refugees, it has taken it off with respect to tax rates. From the point of view of winning elections Howard should be reprimanding Treasurer Peter Costello equally with Georgiou, because, as The Australian demonstrates this morning, his failure to increase the lowest tax thresholds in this year’s budget has led to the ridiculous result where a $17 dollar a week wage rise will actually cost some of Howard’s battlers 68 cents!
On another front reform of the child support system is set to result in non-custodial parents (the Australian calls them “dads” in this article on the issue, demonstrating the unconscious bias inherent in the child support system) paying 50% more in support for teenage children. This is based on the supposed cost of raising children as calculated by Professor Parkinson of Sydney Uni in an ACOSS study which doesn’t appear to be available on their site.
However, it sounds similar to two studies (both discontinued) – the Lovering Study and the Lee Study, which are used in Family Court calculations – so I’ll look at them instead. The Court prefers the Lee study, and explains the system on its website here.
Bottom line is that the Lee study reckons that a single income family on $47,127.60 p.a. spends $16,673.27 of it on a single teenage child. After tax the family only earns $36,817.50, so this would mean that they spend more on the child than they spend on each other. More to the point it begs the question – If these calculations are correct, how is it that there are so many families on average incomes with more than one child? Are the parents knocking off banks on the weekend to supplement their income, or just extraordinarily fortunate on the pokies?
That Senator Kay Patterson, the minister responsible, is taking a submission to cabinet to increase child support from non-custodial parents for teenage children when many of those non-custodial parents would already be struggling to support themselves is an indication that in another area, Howard government ministers don’t understand how they won the last election.
It is also an example of how strongly bureaucratic capture of the child support system is entrenched that her department would provide her with such a submission based on economic studies that anyone who’s ever prepared a family budget should know couldn’t possibly be correct. (I know I’m prejudging the Parkinson one, and will be happy to retract if it’s not similar to the ones I have cited).
Meanwhile, in Queensland, where Premier Beattie reigns on the basis of the support of the same battlers who elect Howard, he has his headline priorities right. Large dollops of money to the public hospital system, and an increase in the land-tax threshold. Land-tax is not obviously a battler issue, but given that it currently kicks in at $200,000 and that a second residential property is the favourite investment of low and high income Australians it will have an impact.
He’s also making provision for some of the mess that Senator Patterson might be about to create by spending more money on hostels and boarding houses. They may be needed by some of the non-custodial parents who will be unable to afford to put a conventional roof over their heads and who have less money in their pockets, even though they just received a pay rise.
June 05, 2005 | Graham
Some days are Diamond, some days are Jared
Thursday last week I went to hear Jared Diamond, over here, over-hyped and with the most outrageous comb-over I’ve ever seen. What is it with Australians that we are such suckers for the latest snake-oil salesman from the US, unless their name is George Bush?
Diamond is the author of Collapse, and also of Guns, Germs and Steel – books that rely on a broad range of expertise.
Mark Ridley thinks that because of his broad expertise he is not a single person but instead “is a committee”. Perhaps that explains why he is so able to produce camels rather than horses!
Diamond, we were told by the compere of the evening, prefers to take questions from young people because “they are the future”. Yes, and they may also not have enough contextual knowledge to ask the tough questions. When his self-professed youngest interlocutor of the evening asked Diamond what he as a young person could do to save the world Diamond said, after much fillibustering, ‘You should vote’. Diamond probably doesn’t realise it, but in Australia, unlike the US, you are compelled to vote (or at least turn up and have your name crossed off the roll).
That’s not all he doesn’t appear to appreciate about Australia. He claimed during the course of the lecture that there were only four countries in the world that didn’t accept that greenhouse warming was occurring – Monaco, Lichtenstein, the US, and Australia. So what is this organisation about?
In his book Collapse he claims that Australia’s agricultural sector is so weak that we import most of our agricultural needs. Perhaps he should read this paper by the Australian Bureau of Statistics which shows that about 50% of our agricultural produce is exported. Or he might care to look at this paper where for the half year ending December, 2001 the ABS estimates agricultural exports to be 6.645 billion and imports $204 million.
Then in the Spring 2005 Edition of New Perspectives Quarterly he claims:
With globalization, they [Australians] have realized it is cheaper to buy food from elsewhere and devote less land to farming. Sensibly, there are now plans on the table to wipe out 99 percent of Australian agriculture. If they can make 80 percent of their profits from 1 percent of the land that is suited to agriculture, it makes sense to change.
Someone better do some investigative reporting and get this plan on the front page of the paper – thanks for alerting us Jared. If Diamond has this level of error on the most basic facts, what weight should we give any other “facts” that he cites.
His problems aren’t restricted to facts alone. Diamond may be very good in his real fields of expertise, but the problem is that he doesn’t have any expertise in the disciplines that ask the really vital questions about human societies adapting to change. He told us that he asked his students what the man who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island said. The guesses have ranged from “It’s my right to cut down this tree,” through, “Science will find a replacement for trees,” to “God told me to do it”. But they’re all guesses. Diamond has no idea why the tree was cut down and no real insight into motive. He appears to disdain economics and have no feel for politics.
He thinks Mayan civilisation failed because the Mayan rulers locked themselves away in their castles and could ignore the problems around them. We’re like that today, he opined, because people lock themselves off from the world in gated communities. With powers of observation like this it makes you wonder how much he could really know about long-dead civilisations. What people exactly are living in gated communities? How many? Where? And what about the fact that we live in a democracy where one un-gated vote is worth exactly the same as a gated one!
Truth is, the people who live in gated-communities are probably over-represented in his audience, because they are the sort of people who are scared of the present and much more the future, and it is fear that Diamond is preaching.
Which is why I mentioned the comb-over at the beginning. It typifies Diamond’s approach – it romanticises the past and faces the present with fear, while shunning the very approaches that could make the future palatable, even if different.