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Workers' rights to Easter Public Holidays are being slowly but surely eroded under IR laws
No extra pay for working the Easter weekend is becoming the norm for workers in the retail sector as more employers use the Coalition Govt's new IR laws to abolish public holiday penalty rates say unions.
The well-known chocolate shop chain Darrell Lea is the next major national employer to come under fire for axing public holiday and weekend penalty rates with the company adopting what it calls a '100% AWA' policy for its entire workforce of casual employees.
Darrell Lea operates around 100 chocolate shop outlets across Australia and is now requiring all casual staff to sign an AWA individual contract that overrides the retail industry award and abolishes all weekend and public holiday penalty rates, slashing take-home pay for many employees by $100 a week or more.
The company standard AWA also abolishes paid sick leave, a laundry allowance of $5.85 a week, reduces tea breaks & accident pay and cuts the minimum shift entitlement of workers from two hours to one hour.
The Darrell Lea AWAs contain no specified pay increase for the five-year life of the contract.
"This deal is far from sweet for Darrell Lea workers," said Michael Donovan, secretary of the retail workers' union, SDA (Victoria). Commenting on the loss of public holiday pay for working on the Easter weekend, ACTU President Sharan Burrow said:
"The next generation of young Australians could grow up never having the right to public holiday pay for the Easter weekend. That is a terrible prospect, but an all too real situation for increasing numbers of workers.
The ACTU estimates that more than 2000 young workers are losing protection from the award safety net every month. The Federal Government's own figures show that 73% of new AWA individual contracts reduce or abolish public holiday pay and 36% cut Declared Public Holidays altogether.
What is happening to workers' public holidays is further evidence that what we are seeing under the new IR laws is that pay and conditions are slowly but surely being eroded.
The only way to stop this happening is to get rid of these IR laws at the next election," said Ms Burrow.
ACTU Media release 4 April 2007
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