Last night for work I attended an industrial relations seminar covering the new Fair Work legislation. Part of this legislation is already in effect, some of it is not far away – 1 Jan 2010.
I guess in a way we are fortunate in that we have been working on our enterprise bargaining agreement and have already had to pay attention to the new legislation. We’ve got the jump on what is happening in the industrial relations arena. A lot of the other attendees were completely in the dark about it. There was uncertainty, fear and anger.
Despite that it was still a useful session, the presenter was very good and invited us to fire questions at her throughout the evening and although we were the only not-for-profit there I managed to find out a few things that affected us directly.
The message from the seminar was that if they don’t already have them, employers must have processes in place to systematically handle and document all employee conditions and work-related issues. It is ridiculously easy these days for an employee with a grievance to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman, it can be done via a website. If an employer does not have records or systems to back up its case in most instances the matter will be ruled in favour of the employee.
The industrial relations system seems very biased towards the employee, and most of the attendees were business owners – there was a lot of grumbling about the Labor government. Having worked for a large corporation years ago and experienced the full power of human resource management machinery in motion I had to bite my tongue a couple of times – my thoughts are that if you take on employees you take on the responsibility for properly managing them – to protect them and the business. No matter how small a business is, once you start to employ people you just have to know this stuff.