Speaking recently on The Lawyers Weekly Show, Maurice Blackburn principal and head of employment law Josh Bornstein reflected on what he sees as being a concerning and increasing level of power and control that corporations now have over the private lives of their employees.
These matters formed the basis of his recently released book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech.
In recent decades, Bornstein mused, the labour market has become “radically deunionised”, and as a result, terms of contracts that come across his desk have begun to contact “increasingly oppressive” provisions, he said.
Such provisions have purported, he explained, to “exercise an extraordinary control over the lives of employees”.
“These are contracts that were signed without any bargaining, that required employees to sign up to comply with various policies, often policies the employees hadn’t read. And, they effectively required all employees, when you considered the contract and the policies as a whole, not to say or do anything controversial, that brought the organisation into disrepute either at work, or outside of work,” Bornstein said.
This, he submitted, is a powerful form of censorship “that no democratic government would ever seek to impose on its citizens”.
When asked how Australian workplaces got to this point, Bornstein suggested that the process of deunionisation, which has occurred in recent decades, has seen the transfer of wealth and power away from...
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