It is not compulsory to be in a union in Australia. That's why the membership rate has plummeted.
The Fair Work Commission has allowed a bunch of EBA's to be cancelled in the last decade. The workforce is more casualised than ever before.
Now casual workers are losing their penalty rates as well.
How many unions do we have in the agricultural industry ? And yet, we have to import workers because Australians simply won't do the sheet jobs.
One of the main reasons we don't have manufacturing here e.g. auto industry , is because we simply can't compete on costs or scale.
Everyone wants to have great safety, environmental and social standards in Australia. All that comes at a cost. You will never compete with countries that can pollute their environment, pay their workers very little and treat them harshly.
Australians won't even pick fruit any more. And that's because they don't have to. Australian society has permitted that situation to exist when it didn't previously. Got nothing to do with unions .
Australians need to own the situation they are in rather than blame everyone else.
Don't believe me ? Go work in Asia or the US for a while and see how it really is. You'll appreciate Australia much more and probably stop whinging about it afterwards.
