RETAILERS have urged Tony Abbott to propose allowing employers to strip back minimum employment conditions.   

They also want to reduce penalty shift payments and lock workers into individual deals for up to four years.   

In the wake of the Opposition Leader ruling out a return to individual contracts, the National Retail Association said the Coalition should devise a workplace policy that substantially changed Labor's system of individual flexibility arrangements.

Gary Black, the association's executive director, said the Coalition should scrap provisions permitting workers to opt out of the arrangements with four weeks' notice.

Mr Black said employers should be able to strike deals that allowed them to pay lower or no penalty rates to employees who wanted to work, for instance, on a Sunday and not other days.   


"The greatest concern to the retail sector is the modern award itself, which dictates over time the terms in enterprise agreements," he said.

"The current IFAs in modern awards serve a political purpose. They are mere window-dressing. They do not deliver any additional flexibility and they are completely impracticable and not workable."

Mr Black said the opt-out clause provided to workers was "ridiculous".

He said employers should be able to offer IFAs as a condition of employment to new employees.

Asked if workers would face a "take it or leave it" approach to potential employment, Mr Black said: "In a flexible labour market, that's exactly the way it should be.   

"Why should employers, if you like, not be able to negotiate those sorts of outcomes at the time of engagement?"

He said the current test, which says workers have to be better off overall under an agreement, should be changed to "avoid unworkable prescription".

Under his proposal, the arrangements would be governed by a core set of conditions that guaranteed leave arrangements and overtime.

Meanwhile, former Liberal deputy leader and industrial relations spokesman Neil Brown has unleashed a blistering attack on what he calls the "Work Choices-lite brigade", saying the push for industrial relations reform could "provide a lifejacket for the foundering Labor Party".

Writing in The Spectator Australia out today, Mr Brown says a debate on workplace reform will divert attention from the issues Mr Abbott has successfully promoted.

"Work Choices' problem," the Fraser government minister writes, "is that it is a concept . . . so discredited that any hint of its return or anything that looks like it will unleash a maelstrom of criticism.

"The dispirited Labor Party and union movement, wandering directionless as they are, will be given the cause they desperately need."

Mr Brown, now a Melbourne QC, says Mr Abbott has "wisely kept the lid on the enthusiasm of some his colleagues for advocating a robust free-market policy".

His comments come as senior Liberals say their colleagues are agitating on workplace relations to destabilise Mr Abbott.

"It's just a proxy for the leadership," one said yesterday.

Quote:



Hmmnnn....I was wondering why all the renewed confected interest in the Lab leadership - and now we have the answer: distraction from Tony Abbott's own leadership woes!