Nick Xenophon has responded to my email (and I am sure emails from others) supporting his private member’s bill on the issue of penalty rates:
Dear Mark
Thank you for your email to me regarding my proposed penalty rates Bill. I appreciate your support on this issue.
In recent months I have spoken to a number of small businesses and, importantly, employees about hours being reduced and jobs lost because of changes to penalty rates.
It is estimated penalty rates have already cost almost 3000 jobs in the hospitality industry. The recent Restaurant & Catering Australia Benchmarking Report also showed 18.2 per cent of businesses were closed on weekends due to penalty rates. More than two-thirds said they would cut the number of staff further if labour costs rose in the next 12 months.
My Bill will only apply to small businesses – those with fewer than 20 full-time equivalent employees in the hospitality and retail industries. Under my Bill, employees will earn penalty rates when they work more than 10 hours in a day or 38 hours in a week.
That way, employees will still be recognised for work they do above and beyond a usual week and small businesses will be able to stay open and keep employing staff for weekend shifts.
My Bill has been referred to the Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committees for an Inquiry.
The purpose of a Committee Inquiry is to critically analyse ideas from all sides of the debate and I would welcome your input into this. You can find out more information about the Committee inquiry here.
Even though both the Government and the Opposition have indicated they don’t support this proposal, I strongly believe this is an issue that needs to be publicly debated because of the thousands of jobs that have already been lost in small businesses.
Thank you for taking the time to write to me on this issue.
We need more newsagents supporting this private member’s bill. We can do it by telling our local members to support the bill. We can also do it by making a submission to the committee.