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