verging_on_random

Big fleas have little fleas …

December 23, 2006 on 4:43 pm | In Uncategorized |

Well I got a new telephone number. The bloke who connected me up diagnosed a fault on the line and spent a good 3 hours yesterday finding cables and digging things up. He finished about 5.30 pm. I asked if I was the last call he had scheduled for the day and he said “You are now” …. sorry to whoever was hoping to get connected before Christmas .

Anyway talking to this techie was interesting. See I booked the connection through the Telstra web page. When I rang to confirm the time he was coming, I found out I was talking to Downer, not Telstra. No wonder they couldn’t help with my ADSL transfer. But it turns out the techie wasn’t employed by Downer either. He was a self-employed subcontractor: an ex-Telstra employee who now subcontracts to Downer and gets paid piecework, not by the hour.

I would venture to say that by any normal understanding of the term, he’s ‘employed’ by Downer. He doesn’t work for anybody else and they certainly ‘control’ his work, which used to be the key test of an employment relationship. However, calling him a subcontractor transfers a lot of commercial risk to the individual worker, which is why employers like subbies. It wasn’t their problem that he had to stay back until 5.30 to finish the job - he didn’t cost them any more money than if he’d finished by 3.

Most of the commentary on recent changes to IR concentrates on the obvious, like unfair dismissal and minimum wage rates, but the effects run a lot deeper than that. I’ll be writing about it more next year ….. come back damn you …. no honestly, it will be interesting.

Oh I should mention that Tim Dunlop’s made me a guest contributor at his Road to Surfdom blog. No I don’t know why. But if you didn’t come to me from there in the first place you might like to drop by, there’s a lively and usually well-informed group of commenters.

I think they call that ‘cross-promotion’. Oh BTW if you’re wondering how I’m doing this post I wisely kept an old dial-up account when I switched to broadband. It’s proved a good investment, specially when my Bigpond ADSL account won’t get transferred until next Friday. Lucky I won’t be online much because of the season and all, because dial-up is even slower than I remember.