Saturday, February 07, 2004
A little time in the real world never hurts before making policy
On January 23 Margaret Wilson asked business to 'engage' in the select committee process re the Employment Relations Act amendments. To balance the fact that the Unions had 6 months in Maggies pocket whilst the policy was being formed.
Roger Kerr has laid out 12 questions for the professor in this weeks Independent. The first challenges the underlying principle of the Bill, that the employment market is fundamentally different to any other market, it assumes that individuals don't have the capacity to bargain for themselves and that employers are inherently bad.
Personally, I enjoy amicable and mutually beneficial relationship with 'the man'. Union? Not for me thanks. Some other people may have less capacity to bargain for themselves and have a less than perfect boss. Union? Perfect. But this ideological drive towards compulsion is so clearly driven by a woman who went from school, to varsity (learning), to varsity (teaching), to parliament and has read a little to much Marx....
An overview is available here, but it is worth picking up a copy of the Independent for the full article (and others), good read.
