Letter for Mr Abbot

Dear Mr Abbot,

I am writing to you, not to criticize or anything, but to talk to you about Australia's future and our employment/industrial relations. I know you and your party are yet to still implement a lot of your plans in to Australia itself, but if I were to ask one thing I would ask that you work on the current amount of influence unions have over the future of Australia. One of my biggest concerns (for example) is that by 2016 there will be NO Australian made cars at all. Holden, Ford and now Toyota are all set to be leaving Australia for good because unions representing the workers of these companies would not allow the proposed cuts to the companies to happen in order for them to stay within Australia. In particular Toyota, proposed that they needed to cut at least $3800 per car made which means changing their overall workplace conditions including cutting extra payments workers get etc. But instead the unions representing these workers fought these proposals all the way to end until Toyota (Ford and Holden to) were forced to announce their closure of Australian factories for good ultimately creating job losses for more than 3000 employees per factory.

But who is really at fault here? Surely not Toyota in this case? Toyota proposed the plans that they needed to implement to further ensure their survival within Australia and the unions fought these plans until Toyota had no choice but to shut down. It's quite ironic that unions are in place first and foremost to protect an employee's right to work, but in this short case here the only thing they really did was jeopardize their employees right to work and ultimately cost their members the jobs that they once had, and will now have to give up all because they could not allow these proposed cuts. Surely cuts could be allowed in the short terms, for overall prosperity and increases in the future? Ultimately, unions caused the shutdown of some of Australia's very own businesses for good.

Mr Abbot, I know that unions have become a lot stronger over past years with Labor coming in to power and that is not really your doing. But in my employment relations unit I have been studying at university this semester, we studied many different nations of the world and their employment relations systems. For example Germany, they have quite heavy union influence, but the ER system itself is very collective. The government, unions, management and employees all come together in a way to help maintain and ensure the life of their big companies, and would do anything to stop them from shutting down or moving out of the country itself, even if employees have to take pay cuts for the time being, but they ensure the life of important organisations. I think if unions are going to be around in Australia, they at least need to be more collective and agreeing like these in Germany, but for some reason if they cannot be like this (which they most possibly can't by the looks of things at the moment), than maybe there is no place for them in Australia until they find a way to be different and more beneficial to the whole of Australia and most importantly their own members/workers.

Thank you,


Kind Regards,


Jonathan Milner


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/toyotas-warning-to-unions-on-future/story-fn59niix-1226780194336

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toyota-seeks-to-slash-workers-conditions-20131031-2wllk.html

Working in China

Hey everyone,

This week we get to look at employment relations in China which seems very interesting.

The first thing that caught my eye when reading over some of the lecture slides earlier was 'informal workers'. This seems to be the use of informal employment where most employees are only employed on  temporary, seasonal, casual, and hourly-paid work and has apparently long existed in China. In the urban areas over 150 million of these workers live and can be hired and fired at will with very little job security overall. I found this very interesting, not that i didn't expect it, but because for me China is a country I don't read much in to at all.

While reading these few slides about 'informal workers' I decided that I would try and find some sort of an article or reference to see whether or not this informal work is really as bad as it seems in China. I ended up finding this article from 2010 which explores how bad certain conditions are in one anonymous Chinese supplier who supplies to Disney and Tesco.

Here are the facts:

• Employees are required 13.5 hours a day during peak seasons.
• Employees are at the factory for at least 96 hours per week while working for at least 81 hours with mandatory overtime.
• Overtime work hours per month are more than 100 hours and up to 130 hours which well exceed the permissible overtime hours stipulated by the 1995 Labor Law in China.
• Employees are paid as low as $0.66/hour.
• Machines are not subject to regular maintenance.
• In March 2010, an employee wounded her finger when operating a machine. The employee did not receive proper medical treatments for the crush injury.
• The factory does not educate employees on occupational health and safety.
• The factory withholds employees’ ID cards for 3 days upon recruitment in direct violation of Chinese law.
• Many workers at the factory do not have social insurance.

To no surprise I found that these cases and stories of informal workers and their problems withing the Chinese employment relations system are very true. But the quick point that I would like to make is that yes the Chinese government are more than responsible for not looking after or mediating ER practices in China. But for a long time nations such as Australia and the US have always had most of their products made in China because 'it is cheaper' due to labor costs etc. So quite possibly the fact that these wrong ER practices in China have never changed are because of us big nations ultimately. What does everyone think?

I think this picture sort of gets my point across :)

And my other link: http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/report/37

Hi everyone, this week's topic is on international labour standards and it didn't take me long to find an interesting article regarding this topic while searching the web.

It's interesting that when you google the topic of 'international labour standards' a lot of the pages and articles you find are focused on countries who have some of the worst labour standards etc. I found an article which talks about the 10 worst countries for child labour in the whole world. It is disturbing to read and see that this is still prominent around the majority of the world.

The List included:

10. Ethiopia
09. Pakistan
08. Burundi
07. Afghanistan
06. Zimbabwe
05. Democratic Republic of Congo
04. Sudan
03. Somalia
02. North Korean
01. Myanmar

Have a read for yourself :)


Now these are the top 10 countries for child labour in the world which mostly include children who are put to work in factories and fields from a very young age. But the article goes on to also explain how some of the top countries on this list such as Sudan, Somalia and Myanmar mainly employ children in to the military and militia for the countries use which is even worse having children exposed to such things so young.

Furthering my reading to the ILO (Check it out) website I found:

• 246 million children worldwide aged 5-17 (which is 1 child in every 6) are involved in child labour.
• 8.4 million children are caught in worst forms of child labour including slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labour.

The fact that child labour happens often in countries who are politically and economically unstable makes it really hard to find a solution for. But I think out of any sort of international employment standard, child labour has to be the most abused type of labour and needs an ongoing solution to try and fix it as quickly as possible. Lastly, I just wanted to say that not all child labour just happens in majorly unstable countries, the United States actually has a law which exempts 'farm workers' from having a minimum age requirement like most other jobs have. It is reported that many Latino children can be found forced to be working long hours out in hot fields all day.

2nd Blog Post

Hi everyone,

Apologies for the lateness of this blog but I had trouble logging in to my gmail and blog account, but I have got it working now :)

This week we are looking at employment relations in Europe. I found the European Working Time Directive to be quite interesting, which regards laws on the maximum number of hours employees can work each week at their workplace. Right now the European Working Time Directive states that an employee does not have to work for any more than 48 hours per week. But if the employee wants to work for additional hours beyond the 48 hours, he/she can opt out of the 48 hour agreement with their employer but this must be voluntary and in writing as well.
Working Time Directive Laws
I found a lot of useful information about working time laws at the website above.


European Working Time Directives and Opting Out

Above is one short video I found which talks about the Working Time Directive and how employees can also choose to opt out on whether they want to work above the maximum weekly hours for their job. The video also interestingly discusses how from a safety perspective the working time directives are a real positive as well. With studies to show, workers who stick to the maximum working hours make less mistakes in their job than they do when working beyond the maximum hours required.

I think this is a positive way for countries within the European Union to look at the the Working Time Directives especially when employee's safety comes in to the question. But at the same time this is interesting because in Australia the maximum numbers of working hours for an employee by law is 38 hours, which is quite a big difference to the European Unions 48 hour maximum.

Is 48 hours to much? Or is 38 hours to less? Tell me what you think.

Thanks everyone!

1st Blog Entry

Hi everyone, my name is Jonathan and this is my first blog post for the semester. I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say.... (you guys probs wont)

Anyways.. This weeks topic is focused around multi-nation corporations which you already may know, and I understand that everyone probably knows what a multi-national corporation is, but I will just re-enlighten you all (in which case I may receive some bonus marks of somekind Andrzej!?). A multi-national corporation is a company with a clear national home base but operating in several countries, which is almost every company you can think of these days. But today I don't think I am going to be 'blogging' and engaging the meanings/understandings and the what, why, when and how of what a multi-national corporation is, I think i may go with a more modern example closer to myself.

In Nicholas' presentation during our tutorial on Tuesday, he talked a lot about how these days entrepreneurs (mostly the good ones) barely have to do any work but merely produce a bright and innovative idea to get some sort of investor/buyer interested. Mark Zuckerberg would throw a measily 1-2 billion dollars at you for just making him smile (as it would seem). These ideas that Nicholas talked to us about got me interested (must of been the guitar) and thinking, and it came to my mind a good example that I will quickly share today. This example is of a close acquaintance of mine, and proves the fact that because of huge multi-national corporations today taking over the world, entrepreneurs can make a lot of money fast, and then move on to the next without much hassle.

This close friend of mine created a company called e2o along with two other partners. This business specializes in the oil and gas industry. Within 3 years of being created the company was bring in huge earnings and pulling in big contracts within the industry including Wheatstone, Origin and Gladstone projects. they were bought out by Clough (another big player in the industry). For me this sheds a light on how quickly a business or even a good idea can be picked up by a big multi-national corporation, and for a business 3 years of actually operating before being offered a big pay out is not a very long time. And now that they have been bought out, two of the owners are already looking in to their next project, whereby no doubt they are expecting to make some more money by a multi-national corporation.

If you want to have a quick read about my short story, the link is below:

http://www.proactiveinvestors.com.au/companies/news/38930/clough-acquires-commissioning-specialist-e2o-for-14m-38930.html


I hope everyone enjoyed my first blog, I'm sorry but I have never done it before to be honest.