Self Employed Australia

"Everyone needs an Advocate"

“Everyone needs an Advocate”

Transcribers

Working from Home is making us our own bosses!

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working-from-homeThe Work From Home (WFH) movement has been coming under attack. Office real estate valuations are crashing globally and ‘workers’ are to blame, it would seem.

But what is WFH? It’s nothing more than millions of workers taking advantage of technology that allows office work to be done anywhere, anytime. Effectively ‘we’ workers are acting like consumers and exercising our individual choices as to how we earn our incomes. In truth, we’re witnessing the crashing of market forces (millions of people making billions of individual choices) into the labour environment. To real estate moguls I say: ‘suck it up’ and adapt!

WHF goes further. It’s challenging the underpinnings of labour law and management, at least in the office setting. It is a moment in time, a revolution!

Even if you’re legally tagged an ‘employee’, in fact working from home takes on more of the features of self-employment (being your own boss) than employment. Progressively more and more WFH people will become formally self-employed.

I discuss this in greater length (in between putting on a load of washing – I work from home as a self-employed person!) on my Substack site. You can link here (it’s free).

But there’s another angle I don’t discuss on Substack—the gig economy. Quite often substantial aspects of WFH involve gig work. Think of WFH translators, transcriptionists and private tutors. They almost exclusively work from home, sourcing and managing their work through gig platforms. And they are almost universally self-employed. Yet the federal government’s agenda is to attack these people.

You’ll probably be well aware of our campaign to attempt to have this agenda blocked in the Australian Senate. The WFH movement adds further weight to our argument that the government’s agenda is nonsensical and defies the choices that workers (people) are making to have control of their own working lives. This is a ‘movement’ of individual choices by huge numbers of people.

Here’s the summary of our other reasons for opposing the government’s anti-gig, anti-worker agenda.

And a quick campaign update for you…

  • We’ve been in contact now with all of the seven independent Senators’ advisers. Discussions have been very professional and constructive. At this stage of advocacy our experience is that it’s necessary to engage with the Senators’ policy staffers.
  • There’s no legislation at the moment, but when it appears we’ll be doing further analysis and briefings.
  • We need the Opposition and six of the seven independent Senators to oppose any legislation in order to block it.
  • So far, we’ve conducted three trips to Canberra to meet Senators’ policy staffers in person. When the legislation appears, the pace of this will pick up. Phone calls, emails and Zoom chats have been frequent.

Touch base with me if you’re interested in more information.

Full campaign details here.

Albanese plan to smash Australia’s 2 million self-employed

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election-2022-smashThere’s now clarity on what Albanese’s Labor intends to do to self-employed small business people if elected. Labor intends to attack us.

The ALP Secure Jobs Plan says:

“Labor will extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include ‘employee-like’ forms of work…” Labor intends to attack “…new forms of work such as gig work.”

Last Monday (2 May) this was further made clear at an Albanese street-walk rally in Brisbane. The Australian Financial Review reports from the rally that Labor will legislate to invent new law that says that self-employed people are a ‘little bit’ an employee, like being ‘a little bit pregnant’. It’s clear that the policy is directed at giving unions control over gig workers and any other self-employed person they choose to target. Hairdressers, for example!

The policy is a direct lift from the Californian law called AB5, introduced in early 2020. It was a job killer which hit the most vulnerable self-employed people. Think of single mums running their own transcription business from home! Closed down! There are thousands of examples.

The United Kingdom has an old 1986 ‘little bit pregnant/employee’ independent contractor law. This was used by the UK transport union in 2021 to attack gig ride-sharing. It’s thrown commercial contracts into chaos in the UK.

Albanese’s Labor says it wants to do ‘nice’ things such as giving ‘little-bit-employee’ self-employed people access to collective bargaining, superannuation and the minimum wage. But this is a beat-up.

Self-employed people (us) already have easy access to collective bargaining authorised under competition laws. Superannuation is clearly required when an individual, self-employed persons (not structured as a P/L company) works for a business. The Independent Contractors Act requires that independent contractors should not be paid less than employees.

The truth is that self-employed people are protected under commercial law regulations. Think of the unfair contract laws. Albanese’s Labor wants to drag us into the mess of union-controlled industrial relations law. Forget it!

And quite recently the Australian High Court reaffirmed that self-employed people operate under commercial law. The Court also stated that UK-type (little-bit-employee) laws are not part of Australian law.

Further, the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations body, declared in 2006 that national laws should not interfere in the commercial relationships of independent contractors.

The Albanese plan defies international labour rulings and secure (High Court-determined) contract law. It is a repeat of the disastrous Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal introduced by the 2012 Gillard Labor government. This ‘protection’ invention was about to destroy the businesses of 50,000 self-employed truckies before the Turnbull government abolished the Tribunal.

The obsession Labor has with the ‘evil’ gig economy is silly. Only 0.19 per cent of the Australian workforce earned their full-time income through gig work. But Labor is using a near-hysterical, anti-gig campaign as an excuse to attack self-employed people.

It’s clear that if Labor wins government, we (self-employed people) will have a big fight on our hands to retain our right to be self-employed. It’s about our right to decide how we want to earn our living and to control our working lives. Labor wants to attack that right.

Powerful ‘anti’ forces need a bucket of icy-cold water poured over their heads

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Monday, March 04, 2019

According to demographer Bernard Salt, there’s a big cultural shift in Australia towards being your own boss. And it’s a lifestyle thing. In The Australian Bernard referred to:

… profound changes to the way we earn a living…Part … caused by the rise of the gig economy … but part is also due, I think, to the ageing of the population and to a cultural shift in attitudes to work.

Bernard said that there has been a six-fold increase in the sole-trader population since the end of the mining boom. He gives a break-up of the data by state, capital city and regions. He refers to entrepreneurial ‘hotspots’ such as the Melbourne CBD, but also regions such as Kings Meadows in Launceston with a 23 per cent increase. Bernard asks:

What could be better than living in a seachange idyll? Being your own boss in a seachange idyll like Victor Harbor, or Torquay, or Busselton, or Ulladulla, or the Gold Coast.

He concludes that:

A new be-your-own-boss narrative is driving the Australian obsession with lifestyle.

But there’s a problem. There’s a whole bunch of powerful groups who hate this Australian lifestyle urge.

The anti-gig economy thrust is simply an excuse to hit self-employed people, a decades-old agenda.

And a key indicator of what’s coming is the Victorian government’s inquiry into the gig economy intended, in our view, to build a false reason to clamp down. The inquiry’s discussion and approach, however, are full of misleading drivel. And we’ve said so in our lengthy detailed submission, In Search of Unicorns:

  • For more than a century, variants of the same gloomy fiction have been cycled and recycled, almost in clock-like manner. On-demand platform work is the latest variant of a moral fairy-tale that pits the ‘good employee’ against the ‘wicked independent contractor’.
  • …the (Victorian) Background Paper … assumes an air of suspicion about independent contractors.
  • So much of the discourse around both the platform economy and the independent workforce is inflated, overstated and alarmist … [with] … nightmare scenarios of Technological Armageddon and the End of Work.

Oh spare us the idiocy! And we appeal that please—

  • A good bucket of icy cold-water needs to be tipped over the protagonists of this hyperbole. That includes governments.

It looks like we’re in for a long argument with these self-employed haters. But that’s what we’ve been doing for almost 20 years!

The gig economy is exploitation by an evil empire. Discuss!

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Wednesday, August 22, 2018

The supposed ‘rise’ of the ‘gig’ economy is causing much debate on whether its impacts are good or evil for society. There’s much confusion.

The author of a new book, Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work, was interviewed on the USA Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) this week where the social issues were discussed. The four-minute interview can be seen here.

The debate is, in fact, quite old. In my book, Independence and the Death of Employment, first published in 2005, I addressed all the issues brilliantly (of course!) (Um, my book is not on a best-seller list but I’m sure my brilliance will be recognised one day in the dim, distant future!!)

The gig economy is in truth just another model of independence at work. And people who work in the wage-‘controlled’ employment environment have great difficulty understanding true independence at work. This particularly applies to academics, bureaucrats, unions and policy-makers who overwhelmingly work in the ‘controlled’ structures of managerial employment. It’s these people who often generate the debate, accusing ‘work independence’ of somehow being exploitation!

The International Labour Organisation started debating this in 1996. But in 2006 it resolved that self-employment was legitimate. We attended the debates in Geneva and wrote this report on the outcomes.

But questions about the legitimacy of work independence were raised in Australia again late last year (2017) when the ATO decided to deny Australian Business Numbers to self-employed transcribers. We fought successfully to have the ABNs reinstated. Here’s our campaign and we described the policy issues here. We’ve discovered the extent to which the ATO was acting on its social view—namely, that self-employment is bad—and that tax collection was not the issue.

We see this debate now reaching a new fever pitch. The issue is simple. Is managerial controlled wage employment the only legitimate form of work? Or is independence and self-control of work—that is, self-employment—also legitimate and worthy? In many respects it’s a debate about freedom!

It’s the gig economy, stupid!!

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Friday, January 19, 2018

Technology is crushing traditional jobs. The command-and-control factory is being replaced by robots. Banks are rapidly removing pen-pusher jobs by the tens of thousands!!! For those with an economic bent, the Milton Friedman-type assumptions about how an economy operates are dead!

What’s taking over is the ‘gig’ economy. But what is it?  It’s pretty simple really.

Traditional jobs (Friedman assumed) involved an employer having a legal ‘right to control’ an employee. The gig economy does away with this wage-slave-like setup. Instead, the contractual relationships are entirely commercial. The on-line business platforms that facilitate this are many. For example, Uber (ride sharing), Airbnb (accommodation), Amazon (manufacturing and retailing), Airtasker (home and other services) operate like stock markets.

The platforms connect people wanting something (for example, to buy shares) to people delivering something (for example, selling shares). The platforms facilitate and manage the commercial transactions including invoicing, payments and so on. Every transaction is commercial.

If you’re scared of this, well, move over and crawl into a hole!!! Some people claim it’s a crisis and we have to regulate this quickly as if its employment.

But other jurisdictions are being positive:

And, in a major development, the Australian Fair Work Commission has just declared an Uber driver to not be an employee. This makes sense.

The importance of properly approaching the gig economy cannot be underestimated. To fail to embrace it is to be a wrecker of opportunity and an oppressor of people.

This is one reason why we attacked the Australian Taxation Office hard late last year over its removal of Australian Business Numbers from 16 gig economy workers. Yes, we were damn angry with the stupidity of the ATO and succeeded in having the ABNs reinstated. Now that were a bit calmer, we’ve summarized the ‘transcribers’ case here.

And we’ve just added a new piece about how this transcribers case relates to the gig economy.

Remember, this ATO-style attack can happen to anyone. The ATO has gone rabid on this. You need protection. Check it out here.

The ATO thinks the earth is flat. That’s how dumb and dangerous it is!

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I’m sure the ‘employment assessors’ at the ATO are members of the Flat Earth Society. Yes, a ‘flat-earthers’ group actually exists. It was formed in 1956. Its members are not comedians but serious. Here’s their logo and website. Go figure!

The ATO flat-earthers are the high priest enforcers of the ATO’s flat earth bible: its ‘employee-contractor decision tool’. Have a look at its ‘terrible friendly’ video saying how the ATO will help you. But everything on the video and in the decision tool is wrong at law and promotes a dangerous ATO-manufactured myth. In fact, the very decision-tool itself is an instrument of illegality. And it’s not there to help you but oppress you!

In 1600, during the Great Inquisition, the Italian Dominican friar, Bruno Giordano, was persecuted for claiming the the earth was round and the stars merely suns like our own. Today, the ATO is financially persecuting ordinary people for being self-employed. The ATO does this by applying the illegal ‘decision-tool’, ‘deciding’ people are employees, taking away their Australian Business Numbers—thereby destroying their businesses and incomes.

I’ve had a gutful! When small businesswomen break down on the phone with me because the ATO has done this to them, I say, ‘no more Mr Nice Guy!’ When women who were financially proud are now on social security, I say ‘NO More!’

We’ve been on about this since at least 2013. In 2014 we made a submission on this to the Board of Taxation Review of the ATO. The Board’s 2015 recommendations to fix the decision tool have been ignored by the ATO. Some time after this, I had a yelling match with the Tax Commissioner in front of a Federal Minister over the issue, with me saying there was a problem and the Commissioner saying there wasn’t.

But now we’re handling the fallout from the ATO’s conducting mass ABN withdrawals, mostly against work-from-home mums on very modest incomes. We’re helping these people fight the ATO. The ATO is playing with people’s lives, burning them. More specific information will be forthcoming.

The ATO’s decision-making ‘flat earth’ tool must be abolished. Our campaign begins and will continue long term.