Industrial boot back on left foot

By SELWYN PARKER

Between the lines

Goodbye Employment Contracts Act, hello "more balanced legislation" in the new Government's words.

For "more balanced," read legally strengthened unions. Judging by the pre-election blueprint, the Coalition's new workplace legislation could have been written by the Council of Trade Unions.

Some time early this year, when the laws are passed, union representatives will have new powers to enter workplaces, to negotiate and to organise labour. There's even a hint of a return to the dreaded industry-wide bargaining.

There's no doubt about it. The boot's back on the other foot.

But how will the new employment laws affect managers? For those who took the trouble to understand the act and to implement its spirit of mutual cooperation, probably not a lot.

The best companies used the flexibility inherent in the Act to knock down barriers between employers and employees, to provide career opportunities, to offer incentives for improved skills, to reward higher productivity and generally to design a friendly workplace relationship where the risks and rewards were shared.

Yes, friendly. Critics of the act should remember what suspicious, tense, even violent, not to mention unproductive workplaces we had in the early eighties. The same industrial relations laws Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton appears to admire.

The workplace "anarchy" predicted by unionist Ken Douglas when the act was introduced in 1991 never eventuated. The last decade has probably been the best we've had in workplace relations for 50 years.

And if some unions didn't have much of a role in this revolution, they've only themselves to blame. Made flabby by their long monopoly in representing the workers, they lost their members at a dizzying rate when that monopoly was removed.

However, many employers will deservedly struggle under Labour's "more balanced legislation." There are managers, usually of smaller companies and in particular service industries, who spent the past nine years ignoring the opportunities presented by the act and instead used it to put the boot in.

Realising that the decline of union influence, coupled with rising unemployment over the past three years, gave them the cards, they played them to their staff's disadvantage, and probably to their own in the long run.

Some stalled on writing employment contracts, failed to provide training or other forms of self-improvement, or denied staff lunch breaks - non-stop 10-hour shifts aren't uncommon in the service industries.

You hear it all the time. Foolish employers who missed the whole point of the act. When the union reps come through the door, they'll be back to square one.