TAKE A NUMBER AND STAND IN LINE! THIS REALLY IS A DISGRACE – HOWEVER, IT IS NOT SURPRISING. ITS BEEN HAPPENING TO INJURED AND ILL WORKERS FOR A LONG TIME. THIS EMPLOYER HAS JUST BEEN DUMB ENOUGH TO MAKE IT A FORMALITY. HITLER WOULD BE PROUD OF THEIR EFFICIENCY!
CASUAL workers at a warehouse in Melbourne’s west are being required to wear – and pay for – armbands identifying them as non-permanent staff.
The armbands contain employee numbers on barcodes and must be used to obtain scanning equipment needed for their work. Permanent workers at the Sunshine warehouse do not have to wear the armbands.
The case has come to light as unions raise concerns over the increased casualisation of labour. Five per cent of Australia’s workforce, or about 605,000 people, are now employed by labour hire firms, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Labour-hire casual workers are concentrated in warehousing, manufacturing, property and business services, and health and community services.
About 15 workers at the Sunshine warehouse must have the barcoded armbands.
The workers are employed by labour hire company Manpower and the warehouse is run by logistics firm DB Schenker to ship equipment for Fuji Xerox.
While the armbands do not need to be worn at all times, the casuals must scan themselves in before starting work and carry the armbands at all times. They also have to pay for the bands.
An official with the National Union of Workers, which discovered the Sunshine armband case, said all employees should be treated with dignity, and questioned whether there was enough regulation of labour hire firms.
”The unregulated use of agency casual labour is creating an underclass that threatens our way of life,” said the union’s assistant national secretary, Paul Richardson. ”Every worker should have the right to a job they can count on and be treated with dignity at work.”
The general manager of Manpower Australia and New Zealand, Chris Riley, said the wearing of armbands was sought by the warehouse operator. ”Many of our clients require people that we place on site to wear ID badges,” he said.
He said it was Manpower’s responsibility to ensure its workers were ”not worse off in any way … We have to ensure that the work practices are appropriate for our people. But in terms of how they are identified, [that] is really another thing”.
The Recruitment and Consulting Services Association, which has many labour hire firms among its members, recently put out a report on benefits of the agencies to manage skills shortages. ”For the majority of employers, it’s not a choice of ‘hire permanent staff or hire temporary staff’. It is in fact ‘hire temporary staff or don’t hire at all’,” the report said.
The ACTU has run a campaign on what it says are the growing effects of job insecurity. It has singled out the practices of labour hire firms as an issue.
Unions say insecure jobs – those providing little economic security for workers and little control over their working lives – now account for almost 40 per cent of the workforce.
But critics say the ACTU is exaggerating. John Lloyd, former head of the construction watchdog and now at the Institute of Public Affairs, said the 40 per cent figure did ”not stand up to a lot scrutiny”.
Many business operators – about 9 per cent of the workforce – were very happy to work for themselves. ”The ACTU calls them anxious workers,” Mr Lloyd said. ”Most business operators are quite happy with what they are doing, using their own skills to create their own wealth and independence and very few of them would be running around being anxious.”
He said the same applied for many independent contractors, who also make up about 9 per cent of the workforce.
F*cking DISGUSTING! They may as well put an ear tag on people like they do on cattle and pigs
And people are dumbfounded by the rapid rise of psychological work-related injuries. It’s anxiety provoking and depressing reading about it – never mind being treated on a daily basis like a number.
This is the exact same playbook that has been used here in America to undermine our rights as workers:
1) Start hiring more temp or part-time workers at drastically decreased pay and benefits.
2) Make draconian or dehumanizing policies standard for the temp workers.
3) Find ways to rid yourself of any non-essential permanent employees by shutting down departments only to re-open them with the temp employees.
4) Make it literally impossible for the temp employees to organize or to form a union.
5) Sit back and watch the entire worker populace fall into serfdom and indentured servitude.
“The workers are
Under attack
What do we do?
Stand up! Fight back!”
Stay strong.
MG
Hi Marshall
I agree. The concept of casual employment in an Australian context is directly linked to benefit and rights exclusion within the regulatory framework governing employment. It has been for this reason that that there is an ongoing debate between unions, a number of academics, business leaders and government as to how best handle the rapid and continuing growth of casual employment. For example, casual employees are excluded from the rights and conditions attached to permanent employment. According to Burgess,Campbell and May (2008) it is this exclusion that is the hallmark of being a casual employee in Australia. Casual workers are assumed to have such short-term tenure that they do not qualify for protection from unfair and arbitrary dismissal (Burgess,Campbell and May, 2008). Nor do they have the right to notice of employment termination or any of the benefits that are accrued through continuity of service, such as sick leave, holiday leave, carers leave, or long-service leave (Burgess,Campbell, & May, 2008). With no rights under law casual employees are vulnerable to exploitation and potential abuse.
NOT MUCH DIFFERENT TO INJURED WORKERS UNDER THE THE VARIOUS WORKERS COMP SCHEMES.
Hi John,
It just leaves me aghast that this is pretty much the exact same scam going on in so many supposedly “first world” countries. Here is an example of a great article written about the dystopian world we are heading for from an excellent investigative journalist who went to work in Mississippi to show just how bad it has already gotten in deep south America.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor
Thank you for making your voice heard. Keep up the fight on behalf of decent standards for our current, and future, generation of workers.
Hi Marshal
Very scary piece . Also British researchers McAvoy and Murtagh, (2003), aptly described this growing phenomenon by stating:
A deadly combination of economic rationalism, increasing competition, “downsizing,” and the current fashion for tough, dynamic, “macho” management styles have created a culture in which bullying can thrive, producing “toxic” workplaces. Such workplaces perpetuate dysfunction, fear, shame, and embarrassment, intimidating those who dare to speak out and nurturing a silent epidemic (p.776).
According to Chester Spell, an associate professor of management at the Rutgers School of Business, in the U.S., extensive research shows a clear connection between fairness and psychological health. In fact, how a worker is treated is an even more important predictor of mental health than how much he is being paid. And even if the unfairness is not directed at all workers, but they see it going on around them, it is like a contagion on the whole environment.
John, I have witnessed so much depression, stress, and mental anguish amoungst my fellow countrypersons these last couple of years that it has truly has been scary. Between squeezing everything possible out of workers, our homes being foreclosed on in a giant land grab by the banks, and the total lack of affordable healthcare, I’m not sure what the state of our national psyche will be when all is said and done.
Unregulated hyper-capitalism at its best?
At any rate our media tells us to worry about our ineffectual soap opera of a national election and the latest celebrity gossip, so I think it will still have to get even worse here prior to any significant change.
Not a great era when I’m thinking soup lines might actually be beneficial to my country in the long run.
Via twitter with thanks
:
This is a slow process of dehumanising people and widening the gap between the have’s and have not’s. Turning people into insignificant numbers with little self respect. ( slaves) I wonder if they are barcoded at the door and swiped before they start and finish work? A little like a coding system for stock? Systems such as theses are slowly being made acceptable. Will it infiltrate to our personal lives? Within 5 years or less barcoding people will be a normal occurrence if not challenged and controlled immediately. Individuals will always have the power to say, NO!
Hi Trinny
So true: “This is a slow process of dehumanising people and widening the gap between the have’s and have not’s. Turning people into insignificant numbers with little self respect. ( slaves) I wonder if they are barcoded at the door and swiped before they start and finish work?”
German Sociologist Max Weber in the early 1900′s warned that bureaucracies would eventually take control over people’s lives and spirits through the replacement of human judgment with strict rules, regulations and structures specifically designed to increase productivity and efficiency – he referred to it famously as people being trapped in an ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’.
Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, said it well : “ In the past few centuries economic rationality has been so successful that we have come to take for granted that the bottom line of any human effort and worth is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of human experience.