Federal election 2016: Bad news in store for Coles bosses should Coalition win

Good news. The Coalition seems ready to head into an election with an industrial relations policy that prohibits financial transactions between businesses and unions. Bad news for the managers at Coles though — they might have to stop paying the SDA for health and safety “training”. The royal commission into trade union governance uncovered myriad ways that employers and unions financially transact. Part of the final report, titled Corrupting Benefits, says companies are quite happy to pay unions in order to achieve industrial objectives. The report says these payments are uncompetitive, harmful to the economy and normalise corruption, spreading it throughout society. It recommends they be outlawed, with penalties for those employers who breach the law. The Coalition has said it looks favourably on accepting this recommendation for adoption into policy and, should it win the election, legislation.

If these recommendations were in place today, Coles could be investigated and individuals might be charged. Coles admits money has changed hands, for “training”, but refuses to provide the details. Even if this training is occurring, seriously, who in their right mind swallows the assertion that any business, let alone a huge corporate, needs to bring in a bunch of union officials to train its staff?

The idea is laughable. As the royal commission found, “employers and unions are adept at disguising corrupt payments or benefits as membership fees, donations or payments for services”.

At the same time that money is changing hands, Coles and the SDA are jointly standing in legal defence of a contentious enterprise agreement that cut the pay of some Coles employees. The Coles EBA has recently been the subject of a legal challenge, on the grounds that it cut the pay of some employees, and we are waiting for a decision on whether the agreement will be struck down.

In the past, Coalition types have seen the SDA as a “good union”, and one that employers should support, because otherwise the “bad unions” would take over. This attitude is naive, simplistic, shortsighted and self-defeating. Employers are corruptly channelling rivers of gold to “good unions”, which then channel this into Labor coffers, with the party then bringing in laws that employers dislike. And at the bottom of the heap lie the lowest-paid workers who are jibbed out of wages and kept in the dark. You don’t have to be terribly bright to see the writing on the wall; if Malcolm Turnbull wins the election, corrupting payments should be, quite rightly, stamped out.