The purpose of industrial relations reform as I understand it is to improve productivity. I haven't seen more recent figures but productivity for calendar year 2011 was 3.9%, double the long term trend. Unless someone can produce productivity stats for 2012 (they're not easily found) showing it fell off a cliff, whatever productivity problems existed in Australia from the late 1990's have been resolved. The ambition of people spruiking IR Reform in this country is not to improve worker output, it's to reallocate money from labour to capital.
