THE proposed "casual work" amendments to the Fair Work Act were so broad that anyone starting a job could be defined as a casual, injured former Mount Arthur mineworker Simon Turner said yesterday.
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Mr Turner is the lead claimant in a 2018 class action against BHP and its labour hire provider Chandler Macleod and has held numerous meetings in Canberra since then with senior government politicians and bureaucrats over various mining and industrial issues.
Mr Turner is among those who are criticising Wednesday's draft legislation as "an employers' wish list", rather than the balanced change Attorney General and Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter had promised was on the way.
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One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts - one of four cross-bench senators whose votes will be needed if Labor opposes the legislation in the Senate - said he was still going through the Bill in detail.
Although debate on the Bill will not resume until the return of parliament, scheduled for February, the government did have its "union demerger" legislation passed this week.
The laws had been targeted by the government at its union bete noir, the CFMMEU, the legislation has been welcomed by the union's mining division, which is keen to distance itself from the Melbourne-based construction division.
The mining division has also launched a new campaign against BHP over employment conditions at its Queensland mines, where it says the company and its "in-house labour hire firm, Operations Services", had been pushing enterprise agreements with "the same substandard conditions as those recently ruled invalid by the Fair Work Commission".
The union's Queensland president Stephen Smyth said the commission had ruled against two Operations Services agreements, saying they were not valid because had not been "genuinely agreed to by workers".
"The agreements were voted on by a small number of iron ore miners in the Pilbara," Mr Smyth said.
Senator Roberts said that when it came to the IR Bill, One Nation would listen to all of the stakeholders, especially those "outside of the Industrial Relations Club' of lawyers, industry bodies, union bosses, courts and governments".
The Bill has also been described as "anti-class action", and Mr Turner said this was because it would "legislate away" the issues employers had raised as a result of the "Rossato" decision being appealed by employer WorkPac.
He said his class action and others of a similar nature were all on hold until Rossato was decided in the High Court, which could take years.
That was if the Coalition hadn't changed the law, retrospectively, as it intended to do now.
"The 'double-dipping' argument is a scare tactic as much as anything else," Mr Turner said.
"To start with, in the coal industry, the award does not allow for 'casual' employment of mine workers, and secondly, there has never been the supposed 25 per cent loading that might go to casuals in other industries.
"We might be employed by labour-hire firms but we are on set, year-long rosters doing the same work as directly employed mine workers but on 40 per cent less.
"Now that the employers have been found in the courts to be doing that illegally, they are getting the government to legislate them out of trouble."
Senator Roberts said One Nation was "disappointed with the process to date".
He said the government was "tinkering with the law and adding complexity that will give more power to the IR Club", rather than address the issues properly.
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IN THE NEWS:
Ian Kirkwood
Reporting journalist at the Newcastle Herald since 1987. Editorial writer, general reporter, industrial relations, industry and coal.
Reporting journalist at the Newcastle Herald since 1987. Editorial writer, general reporter, industrial relations, industry and coal.
