Fair Work review needs you

Today, I will attempt the impossible. Not only will I try to get our community interested in industrial relations (in the last business week of the year, no less) but I will also try to get you to make a contribution to what is looming as an important event of 2012 – the Government’s review of the Fair Work Act.

New Workplace Relations Minster Bill Shorten has always been a man in a hurry, but he’s had a particularly busy first week in the job, first getting a truce in a nasty ports dispute and then launching a pretty major review of the Fair Work regime.

There is always a danger that it can descend into farce when a government reviews its own laws. The result ends up being something like: Of course they are working, nothing to see here.

As Alan Kohler points out today, Shorten doesn’t want to seriously change the Government’s IR laws and neither does Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who created the regime. But they do appear willing to make tweaks and have at least appointed a panel with a good deal of clout: academic Ron McCallum, former Federal Court judge Michael Moore and economist, former Reserve Bank board member and former Keating adviser, John Edwards.

While McCallum has already appeared in today’s press supporting Shorten position that the review is about tweaking rather than major changes, and while he was a strident opponent of Work Choices, these are serious, experienced players who will no doubt discharge their duties in an independent and consultative way.

But they will need help. The panel’s expertise is skewed towards the legal rather than practical impacts of the Fair Work regime and there does seem to be something of a lack of deep experience with the SME community.

While I am certain it will be big business IR disputes that are the focus of this review – particularly Qantas – it must reflect the everyday problems that SMEs are having with the law.

These do not necessarily result in dramatic shutdowns of international business. But the battling unfair dismissal claims or sorting through an adverse action process can chew up the time of entrepreneurs and managers, time that should be spent growing their business and employing people.

So if you are an SME that has had first-hand experience of the impacts of the Fair Work Act, you’ve got a duty to sit down and bash out a quick submission to the Fair Work review.

If you’ve felt that that the unfair dismissal process has been difficult to work through, explain why.

If you’ve had a bad experience (or a good one) with the Fair Work Ombudsman, explain why.

If you feel that the adverse action process is being used by disgruntled employees to air a wide variety of grievances, tell the review panel about it. Explain what doesn’t work about the process. Give real-world examples.

My sense from talking to our IR experts Peter Vitale and Andrew Douglas is that adverse action and the general protection provisions are the hot button issues at an SME level, probably more than any concerns about bargaining or arbitration.

But without real-life examples, it is going to be very hard for the panel to make tweaks that would matter to small business. They need you.