Promoting Secure Work: Two Proposals for Strengthening the National Employment Standards

This article highlights opportunities to amend the National Employment Standards (NES) in order to meet the new Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) objective of promoting secure work. We set the scene by summarising the concept of insecure work, its link to weaknesses in labour regulation, and the scope and peculiarities of insecure work in Australia. We argue that statutory regulation for minimum labour standards in the NES provides a good platform for innovative policy proposals. We detail two proposals that can supplement the ideas currently in circulation and make useful contributions to addressing the important problem of insecure work in Australia. Our first proposal applies to the difficult but pressing challenge of casual work and its inferior rights and entitlements. We propose extending rights to paid personal and annual leave to casual employees. Our second proposal is more encompassing. We propose replacing current employer obligations under the NES to provide generic ‘information statements’ to new employees with a new obligation, modelled on requirements in most other industrialised societies, to provide a written ‘statement of terms and conditions’, tailored to the employment relationship between an employer and a particular employee.