Everyone get infected: business reveals its plan for dealing with raging COVID

In case you’re wondering how irrational Australia’s business leaders are, consider the current position of business lobby groups on the simultaneous surges of COVID and flu.

The context: widespread sick leave is stretching a job market already plagued by worker shortages across most industries. Employers are being warned that raging respiratory illnesses will inflict growing rates of absenteeism.

The response from business: workers must be prevented from working from home and prevented from wearing masks. As they lined up to tell Nine newspapers: the inevitable Jennifer Westacott of the Business Council thinks working from home would “stifle our recovery and cripple small business”. Australian Industry Group Victoria thinks working from home would “undermine the really good effort that employers and employees have made”.

As for mask mandates, they would “be absolutely counter-productive”.

So, keep going to work, and no mask mandates at any cost. A recipe for everyone to get infected at work, because employers still have the command-and-control mentality that views working from home as an assault on productivity and teamwork — one that will in turn lead to higher rates of absenteeism, which in some cases may force businesses to close.

Better sick workers working where you can see them to healthy ones working from home, evidently.

Meanwhile Home Affairs continues to struggle to process temporary worker visa applications despite swinging more resources to the task amid massive delays.

The Grattan Institute proposed a straightforward solution in March: open up all jobs to temporary worker visa categories as long as they’re paid more than $70,000 a year, indexed, with the visas being portable from employer to employer; and a dramatic simplification of the requirements, paperwork and costs of sponsoring a visa, including the abolition of the labour market testing requirement. Visa holders above a certain income level would be offered a path to permanent residency.

A key driver of that report was that widespread concerns about temporary visa categories being used to exploit workers and push down the wages of Australian workers had led to a highly regulated and bureaucratic temporary worker visa system, but exploitation of temporary migrant labour was still occurring — the worst of both worlds.

Grattan’s solution was to remove low-income work from the temporary visa system altogether. This would reduce exploitation of low-paid temporary migrant workers and also reduce competition for low-income Australian workers, particularly when employers could access easily exploited foreign workers, often unaware of their industrial rights and unable to access protections.

Under the existing system, ever more industries claim to be short of workers and need to be added to the list of critical skilled occupations, no matter how non-critical they might be, in an endless attempt to game an overly complex bureaucracy — one that can’t keep up with demand as it is.

With surging respiratory infections and businesses demanding their staff come to work and maximise their chances of getting infected, the time to fix a creaking temporary visa system might be closer than everyone thinks.