Small business council pushes PM on awards

The Council of Small Business of Australia has called on the government to simplify workplace agreements.

COSBOA executive director Peter Strong says awards and workplace agreements were written with large rather than small workplaces in mind.

“What we’ve had forever is awards written for workplaces that have paymasters,” he tells SmartCompany.

“There’s a very different dynamic in a small workplace where everyone – owners included – is working together side by side, with no experts on workplace relations.

“Let’s have a different set of rules reflecting the fact small businesses are operating without such experts. The system should be very transparent and easy to understand.”

Strong met Prime Minister Julia Gillard last week, and among other issues, raised his concerns regarding small business industrial relations.

Two weeks ago the Fair Work Ombudsman admitted the payment calculator on the regulator’s website was giving wrong totals, leading many businesses to underpay staff.

A report released earlier this year found 26% of 1,800 companies surveyed by the Fair Work Ombudsman were incorrectly paying their staff due to confusion over transitional awards and pay rates.

One industry likely to face increased regulatory confusion is clothing and footwear manufacture.

Legislation has been introduced in parliament to extend the operation of most aspects of the Fair Work Act to textile, clothing and footwear outworkers.

Outworkers in the industry are treated as contractors and often paid well below minimum wage. The legislation has the support of unions and charity groups.

It has, however, been met with resistance from manufacturers and retailers, who describe it as the death knell of clothing manufacturing in Australia.

National Retailers Association executive director Gary Black said in a submission to the Senate inquiry that “the bill… when read in conjunction with the existing legislation, include[d] a potpourri of industrial principles and concepts jumbled together randomly to create a myriad of new legal concepts and principles associated with employment arrangements.”