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MELBOURNE - Job security for Australian workers is a thing of the past, unions say, following a ruling allowing a company to sack an employee with 19 years' service.
The Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) this week decided that cinema company Village Roadshow could sack a long-serving manager because the complex he managed at Doncaster, in Melbourne, had been closed.
The commission's full bench overturned a successful unfair dismissal claim by Warren Carter, ruling Village Roadshow had proved there were "genuine operational reasons" for the sacking.
But ACTU president Sharan Burrow said the ruling demonstrated the new Work Choices laws had given employers unwarranted power to sack at whim.
"What an amazing story when Australians can now face a situation where they simply have no guarantees of job security," Burrow said yesterday. "Nineteen years, a loyal employee [and] Village, a huge corporation, simply found it convenient to sack this worker."
Burrow said the employee had offered to take long-service leave so the company had time to redeploy him.
But management was not interested and the ruling showed employers no longer had an obligation to redeploy their workers, she said.
"Working people would normally expect after 19 years of service their employer would reward them by trying to keep them in work looking for another position," Burrow said.
"[But] it doesn't matter whether you're in a small business, whether you're in an employment situation where there's over 100 people - you can be sacked in the case of big business for operational reasons.
"What that says to all employees out there, all of their families, is if it's convenient for an employer to restructure your position, you can be sacked tomorrow."
However, Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews said employers still had to prove there were genuine operational issues at play.
"No employer should get excited about this decision because they can't just assert carte blanche that there are operational reasons, they have to produce evidence," he told ABC Radio.
- AAP
