Labour-hire firms under fire over ‘idiotic’ strategy

Seventeen labour hire companies have used a template submission to criticise Labor’s workplace policy changes.

Talent Quarter managing director Sue Healy. Picture: Nikki Short

Seventeen labour hire companies have used a template submission provided by their peak industry body to individually criticise the federal government’s industrial relations changes, in a move that has been labelled “idiotic” by a top workplace law expert.

A pro-forma submission attacking the Closing Loopholes Bill was prepared by the Recruitment, Consulting and Staffing Association and provided to members who added details about their company before individually submitting the document to the Senate inquiry into the bill.

University of Adelaide law professor Andrew Stewart said the employer strategy risked getting offside the Senate crossbenchers whose vote was critical to whether the bill was passed or defeated.

“I think it’s idiotic because you are trying to get crossbenchers on side and all you’re doing is making extra work for some hard-pressed adviser who’s got a billion and one things to do and now has to read through all these submissions,” he said.

“Why not put in an industry submission with firms providing examples but then also saying we support this submission. It’s not like 20 versions of the same submission makes it 20 times as powerful. What it makes it is 20 times as irritating to the people who you are trying to persuade.”

The 17 similar submissions make up more than 10 per cent of the total submissions to the ­Senate inquiry.

RCSA head of advocacy and policy Brooke Lord acknowledged members had probably “borrowed straight” from the “pro-forma” document, but said the number of submissions indicated the level of member concern about the changes.

“We give them all assistance,” Ms Lord said. “A lot of them were very keen to help but they don’t know the process so I said, ‘Look, here’s the broad position we are taking, just insert what you can from your business’s perspective where it’s relevant’. There were sections where they could add or not. It was just a guidance document for them.”

She said the association did not generally take the approach but added: “There were so many people who wanted to individually contribute.”

Talent Quarter managing director Sue Healy, one of the 17 ­labour hire businesses, said the company was an RCSA member and put in a submission that included details of the firm’s situation. Talent Quarter employs more than 400 employees and provides staff to the healthcare and community services sector. It has made annual offers in the past three years to 60 casuals to convert to permanent employment but no one had accepted.

“They don’t want to lose their loadings. They don’t want to lose the extra 25 per cent on their pay rates. They want the flexibility,” she said.

Ms Healy said there were a small number of organisations which had used current labour hire arrangements to set up deals to get around enterprise agreements or reduce their costs.

“That’s not a majority, it’s a minority. What the government is doing is making wholesale changes to employment arrangements that work and that provide flexibility,” she said.

“They should address those issues and not turn the whole ­system upside down and put everything else at risk, or put organisations that are providing a key component of productivity to organisations, to put that at risk”.