CFMEU demand to scrap Fair Work Ombudsman

Incoming CFMEU construction division national secretary Zach Smith has slammed the Fair Work Ombudsman as a ‘toothless chihuahua’.

Incoming CFMEU construction division national secretary Zach Smith. Picture: Aaron Francis

Incoming CFMEU construction division national secretary Zach Smith has slammed the Fair Work Ombudsman as a “toothless chihuahua” that should be scrapped and replaced with a new workplace regulator overseen by a union-controlled board.

Mr Smith said construction workers were facing endemic corporate insolvency, wage theft and sham contracting but the FWO was “prioritising the anti-worker ideological fights of the previous Coalition government”.

The FWO has taken over legal cases initiated by the ­Coalition’s former union regulator, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, given the ABCC was abolished by the Albanese government.

Mr Smith said sham contracting was a massive issue ripping off construction workers but “we don’t know its full scale because the ombudsman has completely dropped the ball”.

On corporate insolvencies, he said: “We’re seeing Australian builders collapsing regularly. Only last week, PBS went under with millions still owed to contractors and workers. But we haven’t heard a peep from the FWO. Either the FWO doesn’t care or they don’t have the power to act – neither is good enough and workers and businesses in the construction industry are suffering as a result.”

Mr Smith said the government should scrap the FWO and “start from scratch with a body that puts workers first”.

“Australia’s industrial watchdog is more like a toothless chihuahua than any serious workplace regulator. The FWO’s priorities are all wrong. It is fundamentally broken beyond repair,” he said.

“A new workplace watchdog must drop the anti-union, anti-worker hangover from a decade of corrosive Coalition industrial relations policy. Workers deserve nothing less than a watchdog with teeth that is focused on them, not playing nice with businesses who do the wrong thing.”

The Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union’s construction division says a new regulator should not commence or continue prosecutions against unions for activity “protected under the relevant International Labour Organisation conventions”.

It said a new body should be supervised by a board that included “at least 50 per cent workers’ representatives”.

“Wage theft is rife in construction but we simply don’t have a watchdog which is pulling its weight. The FWO is relying heavily on large corporates self-reporting wage theft, despite being the regulator for 13 million Australian workers. If we want to properly address wage theft, we need a tough cop on the beat, not a regulator that needs bosses to tell them when workers have been ripped off.”

The union said while the FWO would claim that over the past five years it had recovered $873m in unpaid wages and entitlements, almost two-thirds came from self-reported underpayments by large companies, not enforcement action.

A FWO spokesman said the regulator recovered more than $532m for 384,805 underpaid workers in the last financial year, a record annual recoveries figure for a record number of workers.