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SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke joins me from Canberra. Tony Burke, welcome to the program.SARAH FERGUSON: I'm sure you're familiar with that advertisement. Employers will have to pay workers with little knowledge or experience exactly the same as workers with a lot of knowledge or experience. Is that true?
What the law does, it says if as a business you have agreed in an enterprise agreement to what the minimum rates of pay should be, then they are the minimum and you shouldn't be able to just go off to another technical employment entity or a labour hire company and undercut the rates of pay you have just agreed to.
So I just say look at the record there. The record has been if you pay people properly, it is good for the economy, and the rates of pay that this bill calls for are simply the rates of pay that are already agreed to. And similarly with the gig economy, the moment you are classified as not being an employee, which happens in the gig economy, every aspect of the Australian safety net falls off a cliff. A lot of it is gone.
Now, I get if you are a student when you are younger, usually you will choose the loading any day, you want the flexibility to just automatically take time off during exams... You have said before that there are people having difficulty making that conversion from casual to a permanent job. Do you have any idea how many people underpin this desire for change?TONY BURKE: Well, we are talking about what will people choose in a situation where at the moment they don't have a choice.
It is not about the numbers, it's about if you have fixed costs and you need that level of security, and you are working the hours where it can already be done, you should have a right, backed up by arbitration with the power of the Fair Work Commission, to make it happen. SARAH FERGUSON: But we are also in a time of sustained productivity slump with everyone looking for ways to super charge the economy that has been slow for a very long time.
SARAH FERGUSON: I beg your pardon but gets access to look at the books to understand whether or not there has been underpayment. Who decides if they get that access? SARAH FERGUSON: But what would be the threshold for that? It is a very important point this, the idea of people having a new, easier form of access. Just explain what the threshold would be, what type of evidence are we talking about?
SARAH FERGUSON: Let's go back to the gig economy that you raised earlier. Will the Fair Work Commission have, will they be setting a target for a minimum wage for gig workers? Is that what we are going to see?
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