Strikes make jobs less secure

Whatever support ACTU secretary Sally McManus wants to elicit arguing that casual positions should be more secure will evaporate quickly as unions set about “turning up the heat” on employers. Many workplaces around the nation are still weeks if not months from getting back into full swing as the Covid-19 pandemic enters its final stages and vaccine coverage reaches 80 per cent and higher. But industrial action, picket lines and product boycotts are on the ACTU’s agenda to pressure companies to offer workers more secure employment conditions. The campaign will backfire, however, if companies stricken after months of lockdowns and border closures have no more to offer staff and shut up shop. It also overlooks the fact workplace flexibility encourages firms to hire staff, even in tougher times. In doing so, they boost economic activity and prosperity.

One of the most disruptive campaigns is being planned by the Transport Workers Union, which could hit when most customers are relying on deliveries rather than buying goods in person and taking them to their businesses or homes. Revealing “a change in our industrial campaigning”, Ms McManus said unions also would be targeting employers in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution who kept operating during the pandemic but had switched workers to labour hire and other forms of insecure employment. The “whole union movement” will be uniting behind workers and individual unions pursuing job security claims against individual employers, she told workplace editor Ewin Hannan. Such a campaign will not foster economic recovery or encourage employment. Neither will it reverse the trend in which trade union membership in the private sector has fallen to a ­record low of 9 per cent, a decline of almost 200,000 members in six years.

Ms McManus cited ACTU polling in western Sydney and Queensland that highlighted how widespread loss of casual jobs during the pandemic had changed attitudes among voters, including Liberal supporters, from accepting insecure work to wanting government action to fix it. Voters polled in the federal seats of Lindsay and Herbert found 72 per cent, including 50 per cent of Liberal voters surveyed, believed insecure work was being made worse by government and business, she said. More than 62 per cent believed their jobs had become less secure during the pandemic. But the pandemic also has made many businesses less secure. As business picks up at Christmas and the summer holiday season, so will opportunities for workers. But rigid, cumbersome workplace conditions will make many employers think twice about hiring as the economy bounces back.