Workers Docked of Wages 4 Helping Widow

BUILDING workers have been docked four hours' pay for briefly stopping work to collect money for the family of a colleague killed on a construction site.

The workers were docked under the Federal Government's new workplace laws, which require bosses to deduct a minimum four hours' pay for any unauthorised stoppages.

Hooker Cockram general manager Matthew Dalmau confirmed he had advised subcontractors working on a Defence Department site in Port Melbourne to dock the pay of about 25 workers.

The workers stopped for about 20 minutes on Friday to collect $470 for the widow of Christos Binos, 58, who was crushed to death by a concrete panel at a Pakenham building site on March 8.

Mr Dalmau said the law required the unions to request a stoppage in writing, otherwise it was considered illegal industrial action for which the workers must have their pay docked. Employers who failed to deduct the wages could be fined up to $33,000.

https://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pay-docked-for-workers-whipround/2006/04/10/1144521269249.html

uh..
many things in that article strike me as outright horrific..

mandatory pay docking?
Limits on union involvement in the workplace?

Makes me wonder what has been going on in australia lately.
These things seem counterlogical, and I can only marvel at the minds that thought it up and put it into action(and who are most likely raking it in now).

Lots of bad things are happening in Australia now and both sides of politics are pushing it. Industrial Relations though, the ALP is the political wing of the Union Movement.


Big Business is raking it in.

have we heard of the word pedantic? this is what it is.

People do things out of the kindness of their hearts and recieve a punishment for it. Come on, they stopped for 20 minutes, big deal.

If all they could come up with was unauthorised industrial action, they really are scraping the barrel

Oh tough snots. My husband is upper management in a unionized industrial setting. Workers file charges against him all the time for 'harassing' them. He tells them to go sweep up a mess and gets slapped with charges cause that wasn't in his job description or whatever.

Overpaid babies with no education making huge salaries (including prescriptions and dental) for doing manual labor .

Collecting for the widow is not union business. There is no reason it could not have been collected before or after the shift or in the lunch room or whatever!...If there was a procedure to be followed then they damned well should have followed it because you can bet that if each of those same workers had been docked 25 minutes worth of time for a good cause without permission there would have been hell to pay.

You just can't have it both ways!!

By the way...The company should have made the donation in name of the workers

Did you read the article this time tlynn?
really? come on now, be honest..

.. on a related note though, I do agree it seems far too easy to file suits in the workplace. Be it for sexual harassment, wrongful dismissal, or exploitation. Everyone, bosses and workers, seems to want to be treated like spineless dweebs who are unable to actually say yes or no and will break down into an emotional fit of anguish if asked to.

Wow thats totally shocking these new work reform laws are outrages and it has to be put to a stop.Australia is getting out of control I just hope to god next election john howard or his party doesn't get in.they are destroying australia and its like we are turning the clock back wards and not forward.

Surely the employers could have simply authorised the absence and avoid this stupid action which makes them look like total prats.

I have worked for both the private and public sector. Both allowed one or two people to roam the workfloors to collect money.

Should the whole workplace stop for this? No. Surely the management and unions could have come to some agreement on this, allowing both of them to look good.

Common sense seems to be a rare commodity in that work place.

What worries me is that unions will be unable to strike for safety reasons because a business will just say it was an unauthorised stoppage.

That is amongst the many very worrysome details that are mentioned in the article that started this thread.

It looks to me like somebody is manouvering for more corporate power than is wise.

Just the "limited union involvement" and the "unauthorised stoppage" alone are tools powerful enough that, with a little mean spirited thinking, you can really clamp down hard on the people you have working for you.

And who is going to be standing up to this, after all the unions won't be around..

just smells fishy to me.