Race to the Bottom in the Retail and Service Sectors?

The AIM Network

5 years ago

By Denis Bright

As 2020 gets underway, it must not be assumed that populist conservative corporate values have smothered generations of commitment to fair wages and working conditions in Australian workplaces. Where shortcomings exist, unionised workers themselves with support from favourable media coverage should be able to note the good, bad and the ugly in Australian corporate life.

On New Year’s Day 2020 special arrangements were made to compensate wage and salary earners at three key venues that I visited in Brisbane.

Office Works and Woolworths offered a day’s extra leave to compensate workers for their public holiday commitments. Aldi offered penalty rates and at UQ Sport, gym and pool attendants were paid penalty rates of 250 per cent.

Developments in anti-discrimination law offer fringe benefits for the advancement of social justice in the workplace. At a time when most employers still have a preference for non-union labour, trade unions can and should strive to regain majority support as in the teaching, health and transport sectors.

The Harvester Judgement from the High Court in 1907 made Australia a pacesetter in the development of fair wage employment (Waltzing Matilda and the Sunshine Harvester Factory):

In the Harvester Decision, Justice Higgins of the Arbitration Court decided that 7 shillings a day, or 42 shillings a week, was fair and reasonable wages for an unskilled labourer. This became the basis of the national minimum wage system in Australia. It was a ‘living’ or ‘family’ wage, set at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’. Additional amounts were paid to more skilled workers, for example an additional 3 shillings to a fitter or other tradesperson. These additional amounts were known as ‘margins’. In the Harvester Decision, a fair and reasonable wage for more skilled employees was for example 10 shillings a day for ‘journeymen’, or tradesmen.

In Ex parte H.V. McKay (the Harvester Decision), Justice Higgins of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court decided to determine what ‘fair and reasonable’ wages were using the following test:

I cannot think of any other standard appropriate than the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community. [p.3]

Decades later at the Transfield Factory in Sydney on a visit to Australia in 1986, a youthful-looking Pope John Paul II called for a renewal and a revitalisation of the Harvester Traditions.

Fortunately for Australia, your most cherished traditions place great value on equality and mutual support, especially in difficult times. The word “mate” has rich and positive connotations in your language. I pray that this tradition of solidarity will always flourish among you and will never be looked upon as old-fashioned.

In juxtaposition, some irresponsible corporate managers are hell-bent on fostering the erosion of fair and cherished Australian values in the retail and distribution sectors.

The practice of working for under-award cash wages continues in some small venues where wage theft is regarded as responsible business management to avoid taxation responsibilities, insurance payments to work cover and state payroll taxes.

As a trade-off, irresponsible employers offer some token perks to casual employees. These might include rough accommodation on farms or perhaps part-payment in food which was not used that evening in the restaurant. The selling line for this corruption was the incorporation of family values as a substitute for workplace laws or even a misapplication of the parable about workers in the biblical vineyard which had nothing to do with pragmatic industrial relations in the modern sense.

Customers have the right to quiz employers if they suspect that sloppy and even corrupt practices are occurring at their favourite retail or service outlets.

A century back Sigmund Freud noted that people under siege would often project their insecurities on vulnerable people in their midst.

In today’s new corporate era small business entrepreneurs in corporate malls might ignore macro-problems like exorbitant rent levels imposed by shopping centre managers or national leaders hell-bent on stripping Australians of their commitment to fair wages and working conditions to focus on the challenges posed by customers from less advantaged suburbs.

Guest workers in Australia could easily assume that such corporate values are the vulgar manners of the mainstream society.

Here Felipe from Sao Paolo in Brazil waits in the shade at Petrie Terrace in Brisbane for his next pizza delivery.

It is disappointing to see new arrivals in Australia working as contractors for multinational food distribution networks for piecework payments which should have been extinguished with the demise of those satanic coal mines and mills in Britain’s first industrial revolution.

The inappropriateness of petit corporate values does not take a break for the holiday season. Everyone can communicate about our daily Australian adventures

I enjoy visiting the Southpoint Shopping Complex in Grey Street, South Brisbane which is one of Brisbane’s new Transport Oriented Developments (TODs) It is adjacent to the platform at Southbank Station. This is a half-billion-dollar property investment with retail outlets, food venues, bars and hotel facilities. It also incorporates some heritage buildings which have a new lease of life for this digital age.

Because South Point is near transport hubs for buses, trains, the adjacent TAFE College and local private and public state high schools, the centre attracts customers from a wide southside catchment.

Woolworths is clearly the anchor point of the retail outlet. Here casual and permanent employees work in a convivial atmosphere. Their welfare and industrial awards are protected by a high level of union membership with the Shop and Distributive Union (SDA).

One of the more persistent questions to the security guards at Woolworths is about access to the toilet facilities in the adjacent food court.

Contrary to international hygiene practices, the toilet facilities were initially kept closed at weekends. Now, these facilities have been closed for weeks with the lame excuse that maintenance of facilities is still in progress to justify an abandonment of conventional hand-washing practices.

As site managers, at South Point, the multinational conglomerate Knight Frank Australia Holdings Pty Ltd claims a right to open their public toilets only at their discretion as it is a privately owned facility which can over-ride conventional health standards for the consumption of food from takeaway outlets who pay their fair share of rent to the management centre.

Customers are directed by security guards to use the toilets on Platform One at Southbank Station which is less than readily accessible when escalators are out of order and there is no signage to a lift to the station level.

All this seems rather trivial for a major multinational rental agency with vast global resources with an annual turnover that exceeds one trillion Australian dollars from Knight Franks vast commercial, agriculture, real estate and philanthropic sectors.

This philanthropy apparently does not extend to the maintenance of hygienic hand washing in the food court at South Point. Corporate giants at other inner-city venues across Brisbane seem to survive financially while still maintaining clean and adequate toilet facilities.

Corporate advertising from Knight Frank conceals a mean streak in corporate character which surveillance cameras, security guards and regular police visits should be able to handle.

Times are tough for some sections of corporate Australia. Knight Frank Australia Holdings Pty Ltd suffers from falling real wages. The company’s revenue growth and commercial returns have tapered recently. A fee must be paid to gain access to greater details with strategic block-outs on the corporate profiles available to the general public:

The state government comes in for unfair criticism for apologists for the toilet closures throughout December 2019 at Southbank.

Corporate pressure is being placed on the Palasczszuk Government to install electronic gates at Southbank Station. This would involve an outlay of several million dollars to control the arrival of Train People from less affluent Southside suburbs. The rhetoric is similar to Peter Dutton’s concerns about Boat People to swamp the good fortunes of an affluent nation. It is a short step from abandoning our refugee responsibilities to applying this rhetoric against Trainloads of Bogans from Logan, a local authority to the south of Brisbane.

The financial resources of the Palasczszuk Government are being stretched to the limit to complete the cross-river rail project without any subsidies from the federal LNP for a six billion dollar construction project at a time when GST sharing with the state and territories are likely to be moderated in a slowing economy. There is no holding back on federal subsidies for the complementary Brisbane Light Rail Project being developed by the LNP controlled Brisbane City Council.

Perhaps this exercise in citizens’ journalism will encourage everyone to observe and participate to take control of the remnants of social justice from our corporate elites who are becoming more outrageous with every new year of LNP control in Canberra.

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Citizens’ journalist Denis Bright checking out the good, the bad and the ugly in corporate society and back-pedalling against unfair wages and working conditions under the false flags of free enterprise and trickle-down wealth agendas.