The head of a serious business organisation has rubbished the federal government’s plan to overtake entitlements for gig employees, together with Uber and Menulog drivers, saying the $2-$3 pay enhance won’t change employee’s behaviours.
Companies that depend on on-demand employees are within the crosshairs of a serious industrial relations shake-up trumpeted by the federal authorities as an answer to enhance worker entitlements and security.
The proposed reforms, introduced by Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke, have confronted pushback from business leaders regardless of receiving assist from the unions.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief government Andrew McKeller advised ABC’s Q+A program on Monday he wouldn’t assist reforms, saying they’d not assist handle office deaths amongst gig employees.
“Any death, any serious injury on the road, whether it’s work-related or otherwise, it is unnecessary, and we’ve got to do everything we can to try to prevent that,” Mr McKellar advised host Patricia Karvelas.
Asked why then he wouldn’t assist the reform, Mr McKellar stated: “Because it has nothing to do with safety.”
“There is nothing in the law that the minister or government has brought forward that will in any way address safety,” he stated.
“If you think about it, the examples he is giving are people doing courier rides through traffic and so on.
“Honestly you think the argument that they will get an extra $2-3 an hour is going to fundamentally change their behaviours? It won’t.”
Discussion in regards to the reforms centred on security on Monday within the wake of the dying of a meals supply employee, aged in his 20s, in Campbelltown in August, the second that month and the thirteenth since gig work companies first took off in 2017.
Mr McKellar stated meals supply and rideshare employers – the “biggest problem areas” cited by the federal government – have been already keen to comply with a set of requirements surrounding worker pay, in addition to insurance coverage and record-keeping.
Ms Kearney rebuffed these claims and as an alternative argued the reforms “swung the pendulum” again in order that employees stood to get extra out of their preparations with gig employers.
“We are not making it harder to employ labour hire, we’re just making sure that labour hire is not used in the wrong way and that is to undercut working terms and conditions in a workplace and it is in some places being used for that,” she stated.
“We want to look after the gig economy which has been a manifestation of the last decade where people aren’t earning enough to make a living, and they undertake risky behaviours: get run over on their bikes delivering Deliveroo food, working longer hours.”
Fellow panellists, Victorian Young Australian of the Year Darcy McGauley-Bartlett and human rights advocate Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, echoed that sentiment, each telling the viewers that even one dying within the business was “too much”.
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
