Turns Out Bill Shorten Might Not Be The Greatest Person To Be Defending Penalty Rates

The new Turnbull government’s been in office for less than a month, and already it’s looking more and more likely that they’re going to take a policy of ditching or watering down weekend penalty rates to the next election. Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg first raised the idea in an interview on Channel Ten late last month, and Malcolm Turnbull has picked up the ball and run with it this week.

Speaking to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell in Melbourne on Tuesday morning, Turnbull said the main reason weekend penalty rates have stuck around for so long is “history” and predicted that “over time you will see a move to a more flexible workplace”. Fun tip: whenever a politician or industry group spokesperson talks about workplace “flexibility”, they’re using code. “Working twelve-hour days for cash under the table on a contract that offers no proper working conditions or job security” is a bit of a mouthful, especially when you’re trying to get people to swallow bullshit.

In response, unions are gearing up for a good old-fashioned WorkChoices-style campaign of the kind that booted out John Howard in 2007, and the one-term Victorian Liberal government earlier this year. Historically, going after industrial relations has been such an electoral disaster for the Coalition that Tony Abbott kept his famous 2010 promise that WorkChoices would remain “dead, buried and cremated”, which is pretty spectacular given he went ahead and broke promises in just about every other area.

But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten might have a harder time turning a fight over penalty rates into an election-winning issue than his predecessor Kevin Rudd did with WorkChoices. He definitely hasn’t covered himself in glory on that front so far; his comments yesterday that “penalty rates are the difference as to whether [parents] can afford to send their kids to a private school” made it sound like penalty rates are a luxury rather than a right, and as though public schools are somehow inferior to the alternative. After people took him to task for it, he was forced to spend a whole day cleaning up after himself.

In which I rightly give @billshortenmp a pasting for his idiotic private school / #penaltyrates remark: http://t.co/KjMTJ01FOJ #auspol

— Van Badham (@vanbadham) October 6, 2015

Shorten’s seeming inability to put a coherent sentence together aside, there might be more important reasons he can’t make too much noise about the sanctity of penalty rates. During his time as a union leader, Shorten was often tasked with ensuring workers negotiating conditions with their employers didn’t get ripped off, and given what’s come out on that score during the Royal Commission into trade union corruption this year, Shorten might have good reason to stay quiet.

–

Bill Shorten’s Time At The AWU

The trade union Royal Commission has been widely criticised for being politically motivated, especially after it was revealed in August that Commission head Dyson Heydon was due to speak at a Liberal Party fundraiser.

But it still uncovered some pretty questionable things about Shorten’s past, especially his time at the head of the Australian Workers Union. As national secretary of the AWU from 2001 to 2007, it was Shorten’s job to hammer out workplace agreements between workers and companies contracted to some of Australia’s biggest construction projects. 

Back in June, the Commission heard that Shorten reached a deal with Thiess-John Holland, the consortium slated to build Melbourne’s East Link tollway, that stripped construction workers of conditions like rostered days off and allowed Thiess-John Holland to work on the project around the clock. After the agreement was signed in 2005, Thiess-John Holland paid almost $300,000 to the AWU in largely unexplained donations over two years.

In another deal Shorten signed off on, cleaning company Cleanevent was able to pay its staff below-award wages on nights and weekends, saving the company millions of dollars a year. Cleanevent’s workers were automatically signed up as AWU members unless they explicitly opted out, with the company paying their union fees. Under the bargaining agreement Shorten reached with building firm Winslow Construction in 2004, “workers were forced to work on ‘forty-plus’ degree days without water”. Winslow has admitted to the Commission that it paid over $38,000 in worker’s union fees to the AWU, disguised as an OH&S expense.

David Marr, who’s just published a Quarterly Essay profile of Shorten, spoke at length about Shorten’s time as AWU national secretary on Q&A last week, saying that Shorten’s dealmaking may have constituted “a conflict of interest”.

#ICYMI Are we about to witness Bill Shorten’s death by opinion poll? David Marr responds #QandA http://t.co/L4cpSTOGSJ

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) September 29, 2015

The royal commission resumes sitting next week, and will be going over more testimony from current and former AWU workers and leaders. If anything more about Shorten’s AWU history comes up then, it could look pretty awkward for him to be out spruiking the case for penalty rates when so many of the work contracts he signed off on failed to secure proper working conditions for the people they affected.

It’s a shame, because the right to decent pay and conditions at work could be the defining issue of the next election if Labor get their act together. Fairfax’s ongoing revelations about the endemic exploitation of foreign workers and contractors across the country have been especially powerful. In an editorial on Tuesday, The Age warned that Australia is “creating a subclass of labour,” rendering whole sections of the economy increasingly reliant on underpaying and ripping off their workers.

“Look around when next you go shopping, for there is a chance that the young woman in your manicure salon, the young man serving noodles in the food court and the masseurs pummelling shoulders are not getting legally mandated minimum wage rates,” The Age argued. Those people need a champion in politics to fight for their right to work with dignity and safety, but Bill Shorten might not be it.