Small and medium establishments and the new federal workplace relations system

Employment Relations Record, Jan, 2007 by Michael Lyons, Dennis Mortimer, Elizabeth Whiting, Fiona Wilkinson

Not only does the NWRS place a lower priority on awards, collective bargaining and collective agreements, and industrial tribunals, it also establishes basic minimum conditions of employment with wide application by way of the concept of the Standard (Abetz, 2005: 15). What constitutes 'ordinary hours of work' under the Standard is explained in section 183 of the Amendment Act: if an employee is employed on a full-time basis, but the terms and conditions of the employee's employment do not determine the number of hours in a period that is to constitute employment on a full-time basis for the employee, the employee is taken to be employed to work thirty-eight hours per week. With limits to working hours being the major concern of the SMEs surveyed (see Table 7), it is difficult to see how this employee entitlement of the Standard will be of benefit to SME employers (unless it is a meaningless entitlement, see Waring, de Ruyter and Burgess, 2005)

CONCLUSION

The paper reports survey responses from 121 SMEs located in Sydney and interviews of thirteen SME employers or managers. The results show that the respondent firms rely on employer associations for employment relations advice, and this advice is almost solely concerned with industrial award issues. The results question the motivations of the Howard government's industrial relations reform agenda. The majority of respondent firms were dependent on the industrial award system to regulate the pay and working conditions of employees. Moreover, they indicated strong satisfaction with the workings of the traditional award system. The results also show the respondent firms had little interest in AWAs and were untroubled by the pre-2006 unfair dismissal laws. This lack of evidence from SME employers to support the federal government's policy agenda implies that it is driven more by ideology rather than the needs and concerns of management in SMEs. Indeed, the federal government has acknowledged it failed to conduct any research into the need for the changes made by the NWRS before its introduction (Henry, 2005). Hence, the results reported in the paper also show avenues for future industrial relations research into SME employment practices under the federal government's NWRS. Specifically, the impact of the NWRS 'award system' on both management and employees, the impact of the NWRS unfair dismissal exemption for SMEs generally and its employment effects in particular, and the impact of the Standard's working hours restriction on labour use and type of employment arrangements operating in SMEs.

NOTE

One of the co-authors of this article, Elizabeth Whiting, passed away shortly after it had been accepted for publication in the Record. Elizabeth joined UWS as a casual lecturer in 1999, after previous careers as a high school teacher and as coordinator of a job skills network for retrenched and unemployed workers. She was recommended to Priscilla Leece to fill a casual academic vacancy by one of her friends, Sue Bond. Elizabeth took to academic work like a duck to water, and was subsequently successful in obtaining a full-time appointment at the beginning of 2003. Elizabeth passed away in October 2006 after a battle with cancer.