Easy does it

Judging from the response to yesterday’s story The five things you must know about the new industrial relations rules, we’re tipping that there are quite a few businesses still coming to terms with the latest round of changes to Australia’s industrial relations regime.

And fair enough. Not only are the changes quite numerous, Fair Work Australia is still sifting through hundreds of requests to change the new Modern Awards the Government has brought in, which means things are still in something of a state of flux.

That’s a point that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has been very quick to make.

“Small business has to comply with rules that still have not been finalised. Inevitably there are going to be some breaches and I think that the Government has got to go easy with firms that are in this position,” he told reporters.

This morning, he’s taken it one step further by calling for a six month ban moratorium on prosecutions under the new rules by the workplace watchdog, the Fair Work Ombudsman.

The idea isn’t a bad one and there’s no doubt the Ombudsman should really be going very, very easy on companies who inadvertently breach the new rules in the first few months they are in operation.

Because to put it bluntly, the level of confusion and lack of knowledge is clearly still quite large.

And the Fair Work Ombudsman, Nicholas Wilson, knows it.

He said this morning his hotline was getting 4,000 calls a day in the lead up to Christmas, which is as good a sign as any that people are struggling to get their heads around the new laws.

Wilson and his workplace inspectors are planning to conduct 50,000 visits to small businesses in the next year, although Wilson says the focus will be on education and encouraging “voluntary compliance”.

“We are very serious about our job of building knowledge and fairer workplaces and are strongly focused on ensuring the community understands its workplace rights and obligations,” he said this morning.

The Government would never actually agree to a moratorium on prosecutions (particularly one suggested by the Opposition) but secretly it wouldn’t be unhappy to see the Ombudsman take a relatively soft line over the next few months.

A series of prosecutions that turn SME employers against the Government in an election year would not be a great look.