HOW MANY pages of legislation does it take to confuse a small business owner? Certainly a whole lot less than the 688 pages that Kevin Andrews tabled in his Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Bill 2005 if the latest MYOB Australian Small Business Survey is to be believed.
HOW MANY pages of legislation does it take to confuse a small business owner? Certainly a whole lot less than the 688 pages that Kevin Andrews tabled in his Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Bill 2005 if the latest MYOB Australian Small Business Survey is to be believed.
Conducted over late November and into early December 2005, the survey revealed that level of uncertainty among business owners regarding the new reforms jumped 10 percentage points from 17 to 27 per cent.
This suggests that the $55 million industrial relations advertising campaign did not gain the understanding from small business owners regarding the recent IR changes. “The Federal Government has some way to go to communicating the changes effectively to small business. No doubt many small business owners are getting mixed messages as both sides of politics are bombarding them with different scenarios and implications,” MYOB Australia General Manager of the Business Division, Andrew Fiori-Dea said.
However, Tony Stevens Council of Small Business Organisations Australia CEO believes the Office of the Employment Advocate will be doing the explaining and that in the meantime, those small businesses in the five states that have their own jurisdiction will continue to operate under State awards.
“What’s happening is that there’s a misunderstanding in the general small business population that the Federal laws apply to them automatically. This is not the case unless you are in Victoria, ACT or the Northern Territory. What hasn’t been fully explained in the debate is that the legislation only applies to companies registered under the Australian Securities Investment Commission,” Stevens said.
The report found more than half of small business owners will not encourage their employees to sacrifice annual leave and sick days in return for better pay, with two out of three small businesses saying they will not require employees to present a medical certificate after one sick day.
A 10 per cent decrease in the number of small businesses planning to employ over the next year is not seen as attributable to the Federal Government’s employment friendly IR reforms for small business. “I think that would be to do with the economic cycle rather than anything to do with the Industrial Relations legislation. The economic cycle is following its usual path and plateauing out, even slowing down in some of the larger cities . . .
“In due course employment rates will once again increase, but in the meantime the overarching skills shortage is increasing in our community because of the impending retirement of people in the baby boomer generation. As they leave the workforce, they are not being replaced by generation X or Y. So skill shortages in the workplace are going to grow quite significantly over the next few years, which is why there is such an issue in the small business sector at the moment,” Stevens said.
