Is Kevin's direction right for workers?

AS Federal Opposition leader Kevin Rudd yesterday told a Canberra press conference that he did not want to be prime minister of a country that no longer made things, his website operator was anxiously hosing down speculation the $7 Kevin 07 T-shirts being sold to supporters were made overseas.

The confusion arose, according to staffer Alex Cramb, because the samples which were eagerly seized by the press had the labels detailing their origins removed, sparking suspicion they were cheap Asian imports. As they may well have been, but, according to Cramb, True Believers can be assured that the shirts they have ordered will be the real deal. Which will probably not be enough to assure Rudd of the support of T-shirt manufacturer Carol Stott, who employs eight people at Australian T-Shirts Pty Ltd in Perth. "You can thank the Labor government and the unions for putting most people out of business last time around," Ms Stott offered. Even as the campaigning Kevinistas were keeping some people in our T-shirt industry employed, several hundred former employees of the Opposition leader's wife Therese Rein were looking for work. They were among the 350-to-400 employees who lost their jobs with Rein's firm WorkDirections Australia, a part of her global Ingeus group, last Friday as a result of a lengthy independent audit and evaluation process which determined the firm was not providing services of the desired quality. As WorkDirections was contracted to assist some of the most disadvantaged Australians find jobs, the negative evaluation was a damning indictment of its practices. WorkDirections in Fairfield, Caringbah, Liverpool, Bondi Junction, Ballina, Penrith, Hurstville, Campbelltown, Ingleburn, Bankstown, Mt Druitt, Darlinghurst, Coff's Harbour, Launceston, Caloundra, and Maroochydore have now ceased. While Rudd is enjoying premature canonisation in some sections of the generally Left-leaning media, and his business woman wife is being promoted as a worthy competitor to Sister Mary MacKillop as Australia's first saint, disgruntled former employees are less enthusiastic about Rein's corporate skills. Though some of the ALP's spinners are hinting that Rein's company was targeted by the Government because of her marital connection, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations evaluation is a routing operation and the process by which WorkDirections lost its contracts began long before Rudd undermined Kim Beazley as ALP leader. WorkDirections director Greg Ashmead said in July when the company lost its contracts that "having been regularly recognised by DEWR as a well above-average service provider for many years at many of these sites, it is with deep regret we have had to advise our staff impacted by DEWR's decision". In fact, WorkDirections performance had been sliding well prior to the decision and a contact manager had been appointed by DEWR to work the company in an effort to improve its performance. The evaluation of WorkDirections' performance was based on statistics and a comparison with similar performance evaluations of direct competitors in the job network. WorkDirections' entire performance on average as at December 31, 2006, was evaluated in the bottom 30 per cent of commercially responsible job network competitors. Given the sensitivity involved in dealing with a business operated by the wife of the Opposition leader, DEWR checked and double-checked the data. Under the DEWR process, contractors are evaluated on such criteria as the number of jobs they have been able to assign, the length of such jobs, the speed of job delivery, and the level of disadvantage of those they're assisting. On this measure, the 16 WorkDirections' sites which lost their contracts and closed last Friday had slipped from an average of more than 3½ stars to just over two between December 2004 and December 2006. Far from being a paragon of best practice, according to one student of unemployment services, the problem with WorkDirections was it ran along the lines of the unreformed public service - an entrenched bureaucratic layer of Labor-leaning senior management cronies drawn out of the old Australian Commonwealth government Employment Service (the former CES). If the dishevelled wreck of WorkDirections, which now has less than half of its sites still operating, is a microcosm of Australian business and is any example of the skill and understanding the Opposition Leader has of commercial business practice, what would the Australian economy be like in a few years if it was administered by a Rudd government? According to a glowing feature published in the Fairfax press in May, Therese Rein's management style is "inclusive, even embracing", well sort of. Her assistant and friend Dianne Coffey was quoted saying: "She worries about people. One of our staff member's mother died and Therese sent me to give her a 'virtual hug'." Let's hope those retrenched week from the company received at least a 'virtual hug' with their pink slips.