The Pendulum's swing.

It is amazing to view the changing battle lines in the battle for hearts and minds over Australian Workplace Agreements ( AWA's ). The Labor party and the unions have been successful in running an intense media campaign to demonise contracts between employer and employee. It was a powerful scare campaign - and as a result Labor polls are running in favour of an ALP victory.
The government countered this by introducing a safety net. Legislation will ensure that those earning less than $ 75,000 a year will be protected from bargaining away overtime, public holidays or any of the entitlements under the old order without comparable compensation pay.
Now it is the turn of Labor to give ground. The mining industry and it's employees love AWA's. The work crew get more money in their pockets and without the restrictions of union imposed job specifications multi-skilling is allowing the industry to go ahead in leaps and bounds. Without AWA's the boom could not continue.
Julia Gillard has back tracked. She now says that if employees in mining want AWA's an elected Labor government would allow them to remain - " For the present time ". This is a thinly veiled threat that Labor has not backed away from it's promise of return to union backed collective bargaining.
In all fairness it is probable that the Liberal pendulum swung a little too far to the right, but the Labor response is to swing that pendulum too far to the left.
Industrial relations badly needed reform - but that reform simply had to remove the dead hand of the unions from the levers of power. The unions and Labor are synonymous and it is difficult to envisage a Labor party without it's union base - but that is the way the world is heading.
Unions were important when the labour force was mostly uneducated people who could be manipulated by well educated bosses. Today the work force can make up it's own mind on issues and over the past few decades union membership has been dropping. The present battle is one of survival for the unions. For that reason they are firing every gun and spending every dollar they own. We will not know who wins the war until the election later this year !