There is a certain sense of irony, then, that the Australian Parliament is also hurrying to pass radical new laws which will remove many of the safeguards that this day celebrates.
Not the least is the exemption of small businesses from unfair dismissal laws. Now, it would seem curious that "small" in this context appears to mean 'less than 100 employees'. In the scheme of things the firm with 75-100 employees would not seem particularly small. Indeed the Small Business Coalition's own report defines a small business as
A small business is a business which is independently owned and operated, with close control over operations and decisions held by the owners. Business equity is not publicly traded and business financing is personally guaranteed by the owners. The business will have less than twenty employees.This would I think accord with people's understanding.
Maybe the whole debate, if conducted rationally, would actually bring out certain objective challenges that we face in the workplace. But this seems unlikely to happen when we are hell-bent on getting legislation through by the end of the year.
What I think we are witnessing is not a political expedient but rather the dogma of economic rationalism once again being slavishly adhered to. "Why is it good to ban unfair dismissal laws? Because it will free small business to be more flexible and thus benefit the whole workforce?"
Now, I can see various non-sequiturs and logical leaps; or at the very least matters that are open to debate. If we are not going to debate them then we should be aware that we have entered the realm of political ideology and we should tread cautiously...but we won't do that, will we?
2 comments:
I find it interesting that in your country a "small business" is defined as one with less than twenty employees, whereas here in the US it is defined as one with less than 500.
Twenty sounds better.
I haven't seen you around The California Conservative lately. Did you know that TCC just picked up a new writer? He hasn't been officially announced yet, but any diligent researcher can figure out who it is.
Anyhow, I just wanted to stop in and say, "hello."
Yes, there is a size difdference in our respective countries of course(as I have alluded to elsewhere).
This country runs an amazing network of enthusiastic small (less than 20 or 30 employees) type businesses. Our economy would collapse without it.
We are vulnerable to the failure of big companies because they are so few and far between.
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