Council of Trade Unions media release

17 July 2010

The Labour Department has refused a CTU request for a copy of the methodology and questionnaire used in its research on the impact of the 90 day trial period.

“This suggests the survey could be a set up, designed to support Government plans to extend the scheme”, Helen Kelly said.

The CTU understands the report will be released just following the Prime Minister’s announcements on Sunday and is therefore bound to support the extension of the scheme.  Given the skepticism of workers that the scheme does anything but remove employment rights and the dodgy “evidence” provided to date by both the government and employer organisations, it is entirely reasonable that before Government is able to spin its own policy, the methodology and survey questions of the report can be analysed.  This would take nothing away from the findings which of course the Government is free to disseminate as they wish.

We anticipate that on Sunday or Monday a report fully supporting the scheme will be produced and by the time any real analysis is able to be done of the methods, the story will have run.  If the methodology were sound, the Department would presumably have been very happy to have it scrutinised so that any findings are beyond suspicion.

The CTU will be interested in evidence of real job creating including for those marginalised in the workforce.  The CTU also knows that the Department had trouble locating workers willing to be interviewed about the law resulting in only about 13 being included in the survey.  Given the views of these workers are likely to be heavily outweighed by the views of employers it will be interesting to see how the report addresses this imbalance.