MR HARRIS: I know it was your original one and I wasn’t sure whether you were happy with ours or (indistinct). I remember the rationale wasn’t actually obvious to me at the time. MS WESTACOTT: We’re supportive of your position. Okay. The other one I want to ask you about - we’ve had a MR HARRIS: number of propositions put to us about how to make a business transfer work more effectively when an individual business has been taken over, the business taking it over inherits the workplace relations. There are, as we understand it, unused, or virtually unused, processes which might enable the firms to roll the agreements one into the other. Not so much even in your original proposition but in things that have subsequently been said, at the time - this hasn’t really been raised by too many people as being an issue until the hearings, where we’ve had a couple of examples come up of this being a problem. You’re representatives of the firms that are often undertaking a lot of these kinds of activities. Is it a large impediment today? Is there more that we can do than what has been sort of relatively briefly said in the report? It wasn’t really that prominent in the original submissions but it has been put to me orally as being quite a significant issue, and we’ve had examples of firms effectively stripping employees before they did takeovers so that they didn’t actually have to inherit the workplace relationships, which seems an extreme, rather unsatisfactory position. MS WESTACOTT: Yes. We did have a recommendation, 22.1, so that the government would amend the Fair Work Act MR HARRIS: For voluntary? MS WESTACOTT: That is true - that employees’ terms and conditions of employment would not transfer to the new employment when the change was at his or her own instigation. MS KIRCHNER: We support that recommendation and it’s a step forward but we did recommend that it needs to go further in our initial report and we will in our final report, that we should be returning to the 12-month sunset clause that has existed in the past. MR HARRIS: The history here is the bother, that it has been used in the past to, effectively - it certainly created a legal dispute about what the intent was. I’m assuming no one wants to go back and replay that kind of MS WESTACOTT: No.
MR HARRIS: I know it was your original one and I wasn’t sure whether you were happy with ours or (indistinct). I remember the rationale wasn’t actually obvious to me at the time. MS WESTACOTT: We’re supportive of your position. MR HARRIS: Okay. The other one I want to ask you about - we’ve had a number of propositions put to us about how to make a business transfer work more effectively when an individual business has been taken over, the business taking it over inherits the workplace relations. There are, as we understand it, unused, or virtually unused, processes which might enable the firms to roll the agreements one into the other. Not so much even in your original proposition but in things that have subsequently been said, at the time - this hasn’t really been raised by too many people as being an issue until the hearings, where we’ve had a couple of examples come up of this being a problem. You’re representatives of the firms that are often undertaking a lot of these kinds of activities. Is it a large impediment today? Is there more that we can do than what has been sort of relatively briefly said in the report? It wasn’t really that prominent in the original submissions but it has been put to me orally as being quite a significant issue, and we’ve had examples of firms effectively stripping employees before they did takeovers so that they didn’t actually have to inherit the workplace relationships, which seems an extreme, rather unsatisfactory position. MS WESTACOTT: Yes. We did have a recommendation, 22.1, so that the government would amend the Fair Work Act MR HARRIS: For voluntary? MS WESTACOTT: That is true - that employees’ terms and conditions of employment would not transfer to the new employment when the change was at his or her own instigation. MS KIRCHNER: We support that recommendation and it’s a step forward but we did recommend that it needs to go further in our initial report and we will in our final report, that we should be returning to the 12-month sunset clause that has existed in the past. MR HARRIS: The history here is the bother, that it has been used in the past to, effectively - it certainly created a legal dispute about what the intent was. I’m assuming no one wants to go back and replay that kind of MS WESTACOTT: No.
20150911-canberra-transcript.docx