scriptman

I see what you mean and that's a good and interesting idea.

However, I think while it would be revealing in some areas, it would mask other problems.

For instance, if you look purely at the FTE, you wouldn't see that George had worked 60 hours. That's a problem. Why did George work 60 hours? Was he really productive for all of that time or is he gaming the overtime system by deliberately doing less work within normal hours so that he has to do overtime to complete his scheduled work.

But we're not talking about treating workers badly by any reasonable definition. These are workers that were paid more than the average Australian worker, they got far more Christmas holiday leave than the Australian worker. They weren't living on the minimum wage.

They weren't forced to take a reduction in Christmas leave. They company asked if they could, considering the local and international conditions in their industry. The workers weren't forced, it was their decision and they said no, presumably knowing that the consequence might be that this may be the straw that shuts the factory down permanently.

If the company had made a draconian decision that cut workers pay unreasonably, regardless of the current economic circumstances and pocketed this money, I'd agree strongly with you. But, this isn't what happened. The workers kept all of their conditions and the factory shut down.

There have to be some circumstances where you would see that it would be reasonable for workers to give up some conditions in the industry they are working in if it is under some economic pressure, either internally or externally? They may only agree to give them up temporarily until conditions improve, or make some other offer to help the company to increase output or reduce costs.

The reality is that Australia is an open, market economy. Its companies have to be competitive with the rest of the world in order for those companies to survive.

You say that companies only have an interest in shortening holiday breaks. But if this is the case, how did the holiday break end up as 21 days in the first place? Companies have to compete for workers too - there must have been a time when it was beneficial to the company to attract and retain workers with a longer Christmas break. You point out that some European countries have more workers rights, but this misses the point that the competitive pressure at the time wasn't for workers - it was on total cost of production.

Nobody wants to degrade good conditions and decent pay for workers. However, for many people that work in small business and haven't had a pay rise in several years can only look on with bemusement when highly unionized industries demand 4% pay rises plus extra Christmas holidays and then demand tax payer money when their industries falls over.

It seems like every time a unionized industry is asked to make a small concession that it's seen as a zero sum game, the thin end of the wedge, a race to the bottom and the apocalypse. It's blown completely out of proportion. Most industries go through ups and downs. The inflexible ones go broke.

I think you've moved the goal posts a long way there.

A living wage as defined by the Harvester judgement, which seems to be what you are referencing, was based on begin paid enough money to be able to afford food, shelter and clothing for a family.

In the case I'm referencing the dispute is over whether the workers should have their standard break for Christmas reduced from 21 days to 10 days. I can't think of any other companies within Australia that offer such a generous Christmas break, but maybe there are some; i think it would be a very small number. What they were being asked to give up seemed very generous and the replacement of 10 days instead doesn't seem onerous - it still seems generous compared to many companies.

You'd have to ask the workers that lost their jobs if they are now better off having lost their jobs rather than stay competitive with other places by bringing their conditions in line with what is typical even within the country they live in.

I'm not advocating what you are suggesting. I agree that workers should be paid extra for working additional hours.

I also agree with you that it's important to get an accurate read on how much an employee earned. My point is that there are some people that have an incentive to obfuscate this amount and that I can only see one unambiguous way to avoid this obfuscation.

I think the starting point in these discussions should be what someone was actually paid, not what they might have been paid. Then if that amount can be justified by unsociable hours, extra hours, or whatever, then that's fine. But if the various hours, loadings or whatever seem unreasonable then that's a different discussion.

I wouldn't even normally be interested in what someone's paid - it's not my business. However, the car manufacturing industry is a different case since there was an expectation that tax payer's money should be used to bail it out. In my opinion, tax payers deserve to know what it is that they are paying for, in detail. Particularly in the car industries case since it seemed like every time that the government tipped in more money that it was closely followed by the workers getting a pay rise.

You are right that per FTE is probably a better measure technically, but this just leaves the unions a loophole: they can just classify workers as something other than FTE. They are very clever at finding these sorts of loopholes and exceptions.

What they can't do though is lie to the tax office. That crosses a threshold from being misleading to being illegal.

There is a big incentive for unions to be misleading about what their members are paid. It's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from the public when the average member of the public is paid a lot less than the average union member. That's not to say that this is always the case - the wages, agreements and marketing to the public by the unions varies significantly between unionised industries.

When annual salaries get reported in this context, you have to watch for the pea and the thimble trick where they take the base hourly rate and multiply that by standard hours to arrive at the annual salary, but nobody actually gets paid this amount.

This is because the base rate leaves out all of the various loadings that are applied under different circumstances. There are so many circumstances for loadings that the base rate becomes meaningless.

Overtime is only one way to get paid more than the base rate. Also, overtime becomes a meaningless word when you can get overtime just for working slightly non-standard hours, as opposed to working extra hours.

The agreements are written in a way that makes it really hard to calculate what a worker is actually likely to get paid annually. The only way to be certain is to look at the worker's group certificate for tax purposes.

So, while what Senator Carr said was probably technically correct, it was also meaningless since I would suggest that no worker was actually paid that amount in a year. It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.

Not for me. I think The Fall of Hyperion is my favourite in the series, although it's hard to split it with Hyperion.

The pacing is very different between each book, almost to the point it can feel like each book has been written by a different author. Don't read each book with the expectation that it is a straight continuation of the last as Simmons experiments with different styles and perspectives in the same universe.

I do a select first using the where clause I intend to use to get the row count.

Then open a transaction around the update with that same where clause, check the total number of rows updated matches the earlier select, then commit.

This approach definitely reduces your level of anxiety when working on a critical database.