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

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Search for Bad Bosses Begins

Inspired by Workplace Relations Minister Toby Abbott's comments that a bad boss is better than no boss at all, the Council is inviting unions to put the theory to the test.

Examples of bad bosses will be published in Workers Online over the coming months, with a short-list of worst employment practices compiled at the end of the year.

The Tony will be announced at the final Labor Council meeting of the year.

Abbott last week told the Workforce conference: "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."

Labor Council secretary John Robertson says the Minister's comments were outrageous on two counts - an offence to workers and to people who had been forced to endure domestic violence.

"While the Minister has back-peddled on his statements he is yet to apologise," Robertson says. "Indeed, he should go further and resign as he is clearly unfit to run industrial relations in this country."

Robertson says unions are confronted daily with examples of practices by bosses that should not be tolerated and the contest was an opportunity to chronicle some of the most excessive examples.

The first nominee comes from the Australian Services Union, whose members at Morrisey Malcolm Direct Marketing have endured a reign of terror by Stephen Crockford.

The call centre is set up like a classroom, with a desk out the front where supervisors monitor staff - they site on dining room chairs and use domestic telephones to carry out their work.

Shifts are routinely cancelled once staff arrive at work and police are called if staff complain. Among his other Bad Boss credentials are a flat $10 pay rate, well below the award and no sick leave, annual leave loading or long service leave.

Read a full account of Crockford's work at : http://workers.labor.net.au/143/b_tradeunion_calls.html

Click here to nominate a Bad Boss: mailto:j.marr@labor.org.au

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