Assessing the Impact of Employment Regulation on the Low-Paid in Victoria‪.‬

Introduction In March 2006, significant changes in Federal industrial law came into effect in Australia. These changes prompted the further decentralisation and fragmentation of bargaining. Under the title WorkChoices, the Howard Liberal-National Coalition Government claimed the changes gave greater freedom to individual employers and employees to determine the type of instrument to regulate employment conditions. Debate continues as to whether increased 'choice' and 'flexibility' for employers and employees was a reality or whether the outcome was an overall deterioration in employment conditions (Saville, Hearn-McKinnon and Vieceli 2009). In particular, under the new legislative regime, individual employees, at their employer's behest, could opt out of collective agreements and awards and onto individual agreements with inferior conditions. Awards were effectively replaced by five minimum statutory entitlements, providing a much more restricted safety net for those Australians on minimum pay and conditions. Although WorkChoices has been replaced by the Labor Government's Fair Work Act 2009, some have argued that the effects of WorkChoices will linger, particularly for the low-paid (Pocock, Elton, Preston, Charlesworth, MacDonald, Baird, Cooper, and Ellem 2008).