WorkChoices legislation ‘has little impact’ on jobs creation
Recent changes to the unfair dismissal laws seem to have had minimal impact on creating new jobs in a selection of local businesses, Southern Cross University researcher Ashlee Bryson has discovered.
Ashlee, a Bachelor of Business graduate, has just completed her qualitative research into the effect of the implementation of the new unfair dismissal exemption provision within the WorkChoices legislation, on nine businesses with less than 100 employees in the Richmond-Tweed area.
The Lismore woman recently won Southern Cross University’s $5000 School of Commerce and Management Honours Scholarship, which she used to undertake her research.
She interviewed managers to gain their views and opinions on the old unfair dismissal laws and the new unfair dismissal exemption. She also examined their human resource policies and practices to see how these laws had influenced past and future job creation in their businesses and to see if these policies had changed as a result of the new laws.
Even though many business owners within her sample had held a negative view of the old laws, those laws had not significantly affected their capacity to create new jobs, Ashlee found.
Similarly, although many participant businesses believed they would be better off under the new laws, there did not seem to be a likely creation of jobs in the short term as a direct result of the unfair dismissal exemption.
While some businesses flagged their intention to create new jobs within the next 12 months, this was more a result of other factors rather than the changes to the unfair dismissal laws, Ashlee found.
Ashlee said her long-term ambition was to get to the top within the Australian public service and to have a say in the making of Australia’s fiscal policy.
Next February she will take up a position as a junior policy officer with the Department of Treasury in Canberra, having been accepted into their graduate entry program.
“I like the idea of being a public servant, and would like one day to be in a position to help shape Australia,” she said.
“At first I thought I wanted to be the Federal Treasurer but I soon realised that public servants design public policy, and I want to be one of those people.”
