Therese Rein has done very nicely under the Coalition government — particularly since its 1996 decision to privatise the Commonwealth Employment Service and set up a private Job Network to steamroll the unemployed into often underpaid and unrewarding jobs. From humble beginnings in Brisbane in 1989, Rein has built up an international employment business with an annual turnover of $175 million. She should be a poster child for the benefits of the Coalition's privatisation drive for business, except that she is also the wife of federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd.
On May 24, the Melbourne Herald Sun revealed that the Australian arm of Rein's company, Work Directions Australia, not only exploited the unemployed, it also screwed its own workers. In June 2006, Work Directions took over a rival, Your Employment Services, and offered workers common law contracts — the kind that Rudd's ALP wants to use to replace individual contracts (AWAs). In return for abolishing penalty rates, overtime and allowances, the workers were offered 45 cents extra an hour: their total pay was $30,000 a year, just above the lowest award classification in the industry. To add insult to injury, 58 of the 220 workers were underpaid (according to the relevant award) to the tune of $70,000.
Labor ducked for cover when this example of an unscrupulous employer using (common law) individual contracts to rob her workers of pay and conditions came to light. It didn't say a word about the fact that this employer had an obvious prejudice against negotiating collective union agreements with staff. But it did move quickly to try to cover up the whole messy business.
- See more at:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/37691#sthash.2LWjMEMN.dpuf
A fair go for all Australians, but a better go for therese and I.
30k no penalties overtime or allowances fmd, what a scoundral boss
