E D I T O R I A L

Bad Bosses
It could only come from Tony Abbott: an impassioned defence of bad bosses that manages to dismisses the experience of every worker who has ever been done over at work.

F E A T U R E S

Interview: Media Magnet
Labor's communications spokesman Lindsay Tanner on Telstra, pay TV, Murdoch and Packer and other media dilemmas.

Bad Boss: Abbott's Heroes
The first nominee in our Bad Boss quest is a man who runs his call centre as though it were a primary school classroom.

Technology: All in the Family
LaborNET's tentacles continue to spread with this week's launch of the New Zealand Council of Trade Union's site.

International: New Labour's Cracks
The British labour movement has plunged itself into another round of tit-for-tat insults flying between the Blair Government and the trade unions, reports Andrew Casey.

Economics: Virtuality Check
Is the Internet Bill Gates' guide to wealth and power or the key to liberation from alienation and corporate power? A new book weighs the arguments.

History: Necessary Utopias
Neale Towart looks at the impact of the Robens Report to argue that worker control of industry is where OHS should be heading.

Poetry: Let Me Bring Love
The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Honourable Tony Abbott, has made an offer that the Australian worker will find hard to resist: 'where there is hatred, let me bring love'.

Review: How Not To Get It Together
Together is a belated reminder that it takes more than high ideals and the right intentions to turn a commune into a community.

Satire: NZ, UK Added to Australia�s Migration Zone
In an effort to increase support for its plan to remove 30,000 islands from the Australian migration exclusion zone, the federal government has added New Zealand and England to the list of excluded islands.

N E W S

Revealed: The Evidence Cole Won�t Touch

Search for Bad Bosses Begins

WorkCover to Set Up Crimes Unit

Electricians Oppose Family-Busting Conditions

Blue-Collar Blokes Back Mat Leave

Murdoch Telegraphs Contracts Push

Abbot Changes Rules for �Employer Advocate�

Gucci's Label Tarnished

Funding Cuts Drives Academics Mad

Star City Casino Strike On The Cards

Chifley Planners Lose Benefits

Qantas Staff Sick of Shivering

Regional Councils Call Jobs Summit

Kiwi Ex-Pats Targeted for Poll Push

Shangri-La Workers Still Fighting

Korean Unionist Freed

Activists Notebook

C O L U M N S

The Soapbox
The Bush Telegraph
Telstra�s poor performance in the bush is not just about reception, argues the CEPU's Ian McCarthy

The Locker Room
The Tennis Racket
You would think that child labour would have gone the way of bus conductors and public telephones that work, but this is not necessarily the case, writes Phil Doyle.

Bosswatch
Capitalism in Crisis
The collapse of a US telco has sent shockwaves around the globe and undermined trust in a system that rewards hype and dishonesty.

Week in Review
Between the Sheets
This column is heartily sick of being called solid, reliable and old-fashioned so Jim Marr gets with the program and discovers this is, in fact, an up-and-down, in-and-out sort of world�

L E T T E R S

WHAT YOU CAN DO

	About Workers Online
	Latest Issue
	Print Latest Issue
	Previous Issues
	Advanced Search

other LaborNET sites

Labor Council of NSW
Vic Trades Hall Council
IT Workers Alliance
Bosswatch
Unions on LaborNET
Evatt Foundation

Family Values

*************

It's a idea the Mad Monk has been developing ever since he took up the workplace relations portfolio - an attempt to justify the ongoing erosion of industrial rights. The underlying logic appears to be that families are unregulated and work just fine - so why can't workplaces?

Up to now the interventions have been silly rather than dangerous. Here's how the thesis has developed.

* first he stated that work was more like "a family" than an employment relationship. The line was designed to undermine the idea that you needed strong legal protections as a workers. Instead you should just negotiate the relationship on a one-on-one basis.

* when asked what happens to dysfunctional families, he assured us we could always go to the Family Court - even though he's ripped away the powers of its IR equivalent the AIRC.

* then he develop this idea, with the workplace like a family neighbourhood. When things went wrong, we didn't need an umpire, we need a policeman. This, we think was to justify his decision to rip away the arbitration of the AIRC and send all industrial disputes into the Court system where workers can be sued for taking strike action.

But Abbott's silliness turned downright offensive this week when he told a conference organised by Workforce that: "A bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband - not withstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more harm than good... He might be a bad boss but at least he's employing someone while he is in fact a boss." This was an attempt to justifying trashing unfair dismissal rights, but it succeeded in hitting a much deeper nerve.

In his bluster Abbott had displayed his insensitivity, not just to workers but to every wife or child who'd been battered, either physically or psychologically by a bad man. It sparked a flurry of angry responses from every woman's group in the land, a back-down of sorts from Abbott and a few days of bad press until that other domestic story kicked him out of the news pages.

While most would regard this as just another verbal gaff by a man whose mouth is to politics what Steve Fosset's balloon is to transportation, we see it as indicative of a deeper problem. For a Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Abbott displays a basic understand of workplace dynamics. It is not a family - it is an economic relationship. The employers has the power; the workforce can unite to bargain a fair deal or beg individually. There is no love, no blood ties to ensure people are civilised to each other - just a system of rules that Abbott is fast ripping to shreds.

Then again, perhaps his analogy is useful in showing why we need some rules. Maybe we should think of unpaid entitlements as akin to a father deferring on child support;

lapses to health and safety are like domestic violence; redundancy is a form of desertion; tax evasion an illicit affair; phoenix companies are like the second marriage - without the need for alimony; while unfair dismissals are the workplace's own divorce proceedings.

The difference, of course is while the law deals with all the above domestic situations, while Abbott is moving to rip away protections for workers in all the above instances. For a Conservative family man, the workplace he is creating looks more like a hippy commune - no rules, no responsibilities, just free love and exploitation.

Show Us YOUR TOOL! The most inspiring interpretation of this week's tool get's a souvenir edition of Ship of Tools. Deface the Tool of the Week, click the button above to post your artwork, fill out the form and send your entry in and we'll post the winners next week in the Tool of the Week Gallery.

Ship of Tools - All the tools in one shed!

Nominate a Tool!

  View entire issue - print all of the articles!

  Issue 143 contents

© 1999-2002 Workers Online
Workers Online is a resource for the Labour movement
provided by the Labor Council of NSW
URL: http://workers.labor.net.au/143/d_pierswatch_abbott.html
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2005