Employment Minister Tony Burke has directed the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to review the modern award system to assess potentially including a more formal right for employees to work from home.

Business groups are not happy. Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) director of workplace relations Jessica Tinsley said this would affect productivity rates, while Australian Industry Group (AIG) chief executive Innes Willox said the review posed “a clear risk of regulatory overreach and intrusion”, adding that “flexibility and productivity” were also at risk. (This is regarding a measure that would guarantee greater… uh… flexibility about how and where work is done, and which hasn’t been shown to have any real impact on productivity?)

If it all seems a bit half-hearted, it may be from the exhausting level of catastrophising that follows any improvement in employees’ rights, however minor.

Right to disconnect

Most recently, business groups took umbrage with the newly legislated right for employees to “disconnect” after hours by, say, ignoring “unreasonable” requests and messages from their employer after hours. This change was apparently creating “massive complexity and uncertainty about how workplaces operate” for employers.

“There is now the real likelihood of conflict where previously there were agreed flexibilities and trade-offs … disputes over trying to keep a workplace moving are now more likely,” Willox said.

Same job, same pay

The reforms, largely aimed at the gig economy, prevented employers from hiring contractors at a lower rate than offered to an employee for the same job. These changes would “hurt industry, undermine productivity and result in fewer job opportunities as well as higher costs that will potentially be passed on to consumers,” according to the AIG.

“The cost of living for millions of Australians will rise, and the job-creation capacity of businesses will be smothered”, reckoned the ACCI.

It would “impact every business and every worker in Australia”, said the Business Council of Australia.

“The Albanese government has declared war against the Australian resources sector and weakened Australia’s economy,” said the Minerals Council.

Literally any real wage increase of any sort ever

In 2023, with a cost of living crisis raging and (profits-lead) inflation surging, the AIG called on the Fair Work Commission to “exercise restraint and caution” when setting the minimum wage.

“[Our] submission will draw attention to the real risk that an excessive wage rise would tip Australia into recession,” Willox said.

In 2022, “any push for unsustainable wages growth would likely risk the viability of businesses and the jobs they sustain and create,” ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar argued.

In 2021, the Restaurant and Catering Association said any increase in the national minimum wage would be “detrimental to many industry operators, who will be struggling to keep their businesses afloat following the JobKeeper scheme and the increase to the superannuation guarantee”, while the ACCI argued for a 1.1% pay increase, and called the 2.5% the FWC went with “premature and irresponsible”.

But we’re being unfair, surely? The COVID-19 era was a difficult time, and business groups would never be so stingy in the normal run of things. Take 2018, when not only was the nation blissfully unaware of the economic turmoil headed its way, but also the FWC was implementing cuts to the penalty rates previously earned by minimum wage workers in retail, hospitality and fast food.

That year the AIG called for an increase of 1.8% because an “excessive increase would reduce the job security of low-paid workers and reduce employment opportunities for the unemployed and underemployed”.

Parental leave

Then opposition leader Tony Abbott proposed a government-funded parental leave scheme funded by a tax on big business in 2010. It did not go down well.

“The major beneficiaries of a paid maternity leave scheme, the employees, get off scot-free,” said the ACCI. “They pay nothing, but the employers who are far less beneficially rewarded through this scheme end up carrying the full cost. That is unfair.”

AIG called the scheme “flawed, unrealistic and a deterrent to investment in Australia”.

Any minimum conditions of employment

The draconian Howard-era WorkChoices regime, which stripped all but the barest employment protections, seems to be the last time employer groups found nothing to worry about in an industrial relations reform. In 2005, in the lead-up to its implementation, president of the Business Council of Australia Michael Chaney said everyone should just chill: “I think in a year’s time people in the workforce will look back and say: ‘What was all that noise about?’ because life continued as we knew it.”

By 2007, when it was clear WorkChoices could well bring the Howard government to an end, a coalition of 19 business groups shelled out for a $10.5 million scare campaign to keep the laws in place. Memorably, they had to pull an ad featuring union heavies menacing a small business when it was revealed said heavies were played by actual hardened crims.

By 2012, as reported in the then Fairfax papers, business groups were complaining about the Fair Work Act, which replaced Workchoices. “The pendulum” had apparently “swung too far back towards workers and unions” and there needed to be, you guessed it, increased “flexibility” because, oh you know it, the act was “stifling productivity and growth”.

So that’s two decades when there was apparently no greater threat to productivity and flexibility than minor improvements in workers’ rights.