The Sydney Morning Herald has an article today by Paul Sheehan about the Australian WorkChoices legislation. I haven’t really followed the arguments over this legislation too closely, but I was interested in one comment that Sheehan made -
“The union ambush has been deceptive, emotive and expensive. It has been delivered via a national TV campaign. But there is a problem: the claims made on camera do not stand up to scrutiny. When the new federal agency set up to protect workers’ rights, the Office of Workplace Services (OWS), investigated most of these cases, it found the bulk of the claims were a load of crap. The new industrial relations laws were not to blame for the dismissals.”
Why is this interesting? Because there is currently a private members bill before the NZ Parliament on the subect of probationary employment, and the New Zealand Educational Institute – the union that covers primary school teachers in NZ – is conducting a campaign against it. Furthermore, on their website they say –
“The Bill must be seen in the context of National’s recent election policies and the punitive employment laws just introduced in Australia…
Across the Tasman, within hours of new employment laws coming into effect earlier this year, people were being dismissed for no reason.” [Emphasis added]
Now I realise that Sheehan may be mistaken or even misrepresenting the situation for some political reason. Nonetheless, this does seem to me to present a challenge to the NZEI. It shows that someone genuinely interested in evaluating the NZ Bill cannot just blindly accept what the NZEI is saying. It requires a much more in depth analysis than the superficial sound bite they have served up.