Via the AFR:
The restaurant and cafe industry has dropped its bid to cut Sunday penalty rates after failing to provide evidence that the cuts would create jobs.
The employer group Restaurant and Catering Industrial was due to be heard in the Fair Work Commission on Thursday over its application to cut rates from 150 per cent to 125 per cent.
But in a last-minute decision, the employer group delivered a statement that it would not proceed.
Restaurants and cafes were one of the few sectors not to achieve cuts to Sunday penalty rates in Fair Work Commission’s decision earlier this year, that reduced the rates for retail, fast-food, hotels, pubs and pharmacy industries.
The commission criticised Restaurant and Catering Industrial at the time for claiming the cuts would boost employment because even its own employer witnesses said they had hired no extra staff after the commission cut Sunday rates for the sectors’ casuals in 2014.
It gave the industry group a second chance to claim cuts provided it filed “significantly more extensive lay evidence”.
Despite repeatedly promising more evidence, it did not file anything six months later. However, it was still insisting the case continue to hearing as recently as two weeks ago.
The hospitality union, United Voice, said the industry group had conceded the current Sunday rates were correct and appropriate and that there would be no need for further review.
I would like to think that they realised that they were also slashing their own clients spending power but I doubt it!
There is a wider point to make here. The whole “trickle down” wages and tax cuts ideology is balderdash. What is required is investment in higher productivity via more efficient labour, taxation and capital.
Not cuts for their own sake which only result in greater inequality and demand deficit.
