What are work choices, awards and collective agreements?

Question

when are they aplied? what are the differences.

you can answer briefly.

Answer 1

New Work "Choices" arrangements are no more since the Labor government banned them earlier this year. They are/were a compulsory set of working conditions imposed on individual employees by an individual employer and usually involved employees losing certain existing benefits in return for something from their employer. WC was banned because a very large number of employees were deemed to be worse off under Work Choices than under their previous awards. Under Work Choices, employees lost things like penalty rates and were supposed to be financially compensated for that loss. In practice, many workers in the least powerful and lowest paying positions were not adequately compensated. Unfortunately, the banning of Work Choices was not retrospective, so many workers are still subject to existing arrangements.

Anyone who wonders if WC benefitted workers or employees should consider that employers loved them and the vast majority of employees hated them. QED

Awards are agreements, usually negotiated by unions, that determine the pay and conditions for particular workers in a given state (or they can be national awards). You might have something like the Retail Workers award which will determine normal working hours for all workers in that category, what and when penalty rates are paid, holiday, sick leave and long service entitlements, if and under what conditions maternity or parental leave is paid, etc. Because unions are involved in the setting of award conditions, employees rights are usually protected (unlike with Work Choices).

Collective agreements arise when the workers of a particular employer, group of employers or industry, or class of employee get together (usually but not always with the guidance of a union) to decide what conditions they should work under and then get the agreement of all involved employers to abide by the agreement. A CA is much the same as an award, but applies only to those employees involved in the CA, rather than all employees in a state or industry.

Answer 2

things unsuccesful people talk and worry about

Answer 3

Work  choices is dead and buried. It was a system of individual workplace agreements for each individual in a workplace. A sort of unfair divide and conquer agreement, which is why it was kicked out by the new Labor Gov't.

Awards are a set of minimum standards for pay, holidays, work hours, sick leave, long service leave, etc. for each industry and job classification.

Collective agreements are award type agreements for particular industries covering similar aspects as awards, but are agreements by workers in a particular workplace covering all workers in that workplace.