Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd says he won't be swayed by a union demand that new Australian Workplace Agreements be banned from January 1.
Mr Rudd, who will be sworn in as Australia's 26th prime minister on Monday, also played down concerns of an early double dissolution election if coalition senators block his planned changes to industrial relations laws in the upper house.
A day after being shown around The Lodge by outgoing prime minister John Howard, Mr Rudd said he was determined to introduce his election promises in full.
Unions are concerned that unscrupulous employers could take advantage of the lag time before any new laws come into effect by forcing workers to sign up to long contracts, which will remain in force until they expire.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) says workers are being forced to sign new five-year AWAs while Howard government laws still apply.
New AWAs will be barred under Labor's industrial relations transitional legislation, but that is unlikely to come into effect before March at the earliest.
The CPSU and Unions NSW want those laws to be retrospective to invalidate any new AWAs signed after January 1.
But Mr Rudd said he was not going to break his election promise about the transitional laws.
"I've got one answer to all of that. And it's this: no," Mr Rudd told Southern Cross Broadcasting.
"What we took to the people before the last election, about our program for forward with fairness, and the timetable for its implementation over time and the transitional arrangements, they will be implemented entirely consistently with the timetable that we put out to the Australian people before the election."
The defeated Liberal-National coalition will control the Senate until June 30, when senators elected in last weekend's vote take their seats.
Mr Rudd warned coalition senators against using their numbers to block the changes, and played down the prospect of a double dissolution election.
"I would hope in a country like Australia where we've just been through the electoral process that reason would prevail," Mr Rudd said.
"I would be exceptionally disappointed if our political opponents were so insensitive to what the community has just said through the ballot box that they thought they could just run away and do their own thing.
"I don't believe that the Australian people like politicians having elections at the drop of a hat.
"I would be exceptionally disappointed if the Liberals and the Nationals were still so out of touch with families across Australia that they ignored what those families said in the ballot box on Saturday."
Newly-elected Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson has refused to be drawn on whether the party will support Labor's laws, but conceded that voters had made a statement about Work Choices.
"We do recognise that Australians did take into account what they thought Work Choices was about when they made their voting decisions last Saturday," Dr Nelson told reporters in Sydney.
"We respect it but it's very important that we do not do anything to undermine job security."