Lee rebukes TWU’s monopoly

Unlike the ACTU, which thinks the CFMEU should be allowed to break laws it doesn’t like, The Australian Financial Review supports the rule of law in all cases. That applies to Uber’s $272 million settlement of the class action brought by a Labor-aligned law firm on behalf of Victorian taxi drivers and licence holders.

In shades of the CFMEU, Uber’s business model for entering new markets amounted to ignoring the existing legal barriers and paying for the consequences later. Contrary to the CFMEU’s law-breaking business model, however, Uber’s innovative platform-based but “unlicensed” business model generated cost and convenience benefits for consumers by competing against the shoddy service of the taxi industry’s regulatory monopoly. It has injected the sort of business “dynamism” that some in Labor, such as Assistant Competition Minister Andrew Leigh, complain is in short supply, even while Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke seeks to crack down on the “gig economy”.

Meanwhile, Qantas is back before the Federal Court to determine the compensation to be paid to the baggage handlers whom the High Court ruled the airline illegally sacked. The High Court found Qantas had “sound commercial reasons” for emulating its competitor airlines by seeking to outsource its baggage handling, but had breached the highly prescriptive Fair Work Act because its strategy would prevent workers from taking protected industrial action in the future.

Yet the reality was that any commercial decision to outsource baggage handling would have inevitably led to the Transport Workers’ Union flexing its industrial muscles to maintain its legalised labour monopoly. Yesterday, the feisty Justice Michael Lee rebuked the TWU for sending out self-congratulatory tweets about representing its members while having “sat on your backside” and failed to file the paperwork for its claim for compensation for lost union dues. It makes the point about monopolies, in this case a labour supply one.