AWA lodgements stay on course

The number of AWAs lodged with the Workplace Authority continued to flow in at the rate of around 1000 per day in December, despite the election of the Rudd Government on an anti-AWA platform.

The 1000 per day figure, published in The Australian Financial Review, means December lodgings are likely to match the preceding months and about 30,000 AWAs will be filed.

Although the process of negotiating AWAs would probably have been started by most businesses well before the election in order to be lodging them in December, the figures suggest that business owners have not been inclined to change their human resource strategies with the change of government.

ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence expressed disappointment at the figures and called on the Federal Government to exert moral pressure on business owners to stop using AWAs.