Subject: LL:ART: Unions declare war on working hours
THE AGE
http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990309/news/news18.html
Tuesday 9 March 1999
Unions declare war on working hours
By PAUL ROBINSON and MEAGHAN SHAW
The Victorian Trades Hall Council yesterday used
Labor Day to warn employers that unions were
determined to stop an explosion in unpaid working
hours.
The council secretary, Mr Leigh Hubbard, said a
huge increase in casual working hours was breaking
down family life and contributing to Australia's drug
problem.
``I hope that within the next year there will be
significant industrial disputes and campaigns around
the whole issue of working hours. These disputes will
differ from industry to industry,'' he said.
At a ceremony yesterday in homage to the union
leader John Gration, who helped win the eight-hour
working day in 1856, the building union leader Mr
Martin Kingham said the shorter working day and
other industry standards were still under attack.
Mr Kingham, the Trades Hall Council president and
the state secretary of the Construction, Forestry,
Mining and Energy Union, said the Federal
Government had made an application to remove
public holidays and penalty rates from the
construction industry's award conditions.
``Once you remove penalty rates, you remove the
eight-hour day,'' he said.
Mr Kingham said his members were working around
the clock at building sites in Melbourne to get State
Government projects finished in time - ``if you look
at my industry, the eight-hour day is a bit academic.''
Mr Kingham said the stonemasons who led the
movement for an eight-hour day - including Mr
Gration, whose restored headstone was unveiled at
the Melbourne Cemetery yesterday - understood
better than some present-day leaders that people
should work to live, not live to work.
``To them, a day divided into eight hours of work,
eight hours recreation and eight hours rest was the
foundation of a decent, civilised life,'' he said.
Mr Hubbard said Australia had become the
second-biggest employer of casual labor in OECD
countries behind Spain and the ``rot of casualisation'',
temporary work, contracting out and excessive
amounts of paid and unpaid overtime had to end.
``This is not a short-term campaign. It will take
several years and a lot of preparatory work on the
part of the union movement. But all of our surveys
and polling shows that the lack of job security and
increasingly stressful workplaces is the number one
issue for Victorian and Australian workers.''
To highlight the inequality of casual work, the THC
has brought international industrial relations expert,
Professor Gerhard Bosch, from Germany to brief the
union movement.
Professor Bosch said the trend in Europe had been to
reduce working hours, or to cap them at 48 hours a
week over a three-month cycle, in a bid to improve
employment distribution.
Copyright (c) David Syme & Co 1999.
Any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
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