At next week’s jobs and skills conference, the union movement will seek a new wage agreement for millions of employees, with a daring plan to allow whole industries to negotiate the same pay and conditions, despite industry concerns about the expense of the change.
Sally McManus, national secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, will push for fundamental reforms to workplace legislation to make it simpler for several firms in the same industry to join up to a single enterprise bargaining agreement and achieve efficiency and pay raises for all their workers.
McManus expressed her dissatisfaction with dropping earnings, telling The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that employees were furious at missing out on CEO bonuses and would not support a larger intake of foreign workers if wages were falling in real terms.
“I can tell you that there’s a simmering rage and rising dissatisfaction among working people who realize they’ve contributed to the country’s and corporations’ prosperity,” she added.
The ACTU’s new proposal makes it plain to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the political and business leaders meeting next week that any conversation on migration must acknowledge that raising salaries is the goal if Australia is to address labor shortages.
The union movement’s workplace plan would empower unions to establish enterprise bargaining agreements with firms as small as a single nursing home or early learning center, significantly expanding the workplace regime presently dominated by large employers such as Woolworths and Coles.
The relative authority of employers and unions is at risk in hard-fought talks under a system critical to obtaining accords that make corporations more efficient and hence improve productivity and economic development.
With just 14% of workers covered by EBAs since the system is mostly utilized by large businesses, the ACTU plan would drastically expand the system to smaller firms by allowing them to negotiate as a single industry.
The ACTU’s position is that real wages have climbed just 1% in the last decade while productivity has increased 13%, demonstrating that the majority of the gains have gone to profits and executive compensation rather than workers.
“We need to recalibrate the whole productivity narrative in our society because right now people are hearing that it means working more for less and not getting anything out of it,” McManus said in an interview.
“Productivity is no longer about working more for less. It’s about working smarter, adding more value, and all of that.
“That absolutely means that individuals must begin to share in those advantages.” And it is not fair to continue along a road in which workers do not share in productivity development, do not share when profits rise, and instead see CEO compensation rises.
“I don’t feel that is a sustainable or fair arrangement for our country.”
McManus said pay worries drove the new findings in the current Resolve Political Monitor, which showed that just 20% of Australians thought a larger migrant intake should be one of the summit’s goals to address labor shortages.
“We have a labor shortage, and companies claim it’s their number one concern, yet we’re also seeing sharp real salary cuts,” she explained.
“So it’s not unexpected that the typical citizen is saying, ‘Wait a minute, the focus has to be to get wages moving.'”
“Of certainly, there is room to attempt to achieve an agreement on migration.” We’ve been extremely cautious about making such calls because some companies are effectively saying they want to revert to a system in which they can hire anybody they want, which we all know leads to huge abuse.
“It would be a poor consequence for the country if you just decided tomorrow that we’re going to modify all the migration policies and did nothing to repair wages.”
At the height of the epidemic two years ago, the ACTU was close to reaching an agreement on workplace reform with the Business Council of Australia, but the proposal was stymied by the Master Builders Association and others who believed it gave unions too much authority.
McManus hopes to build on the conversations at the jobs and skills summit by renewing efforts to change the enterprise bargaining laws so that unions may negotiate wages and conditions across industries with small companies.
A tiny firm might sign up since several unions could be parties to agreements with employers throughout an entire sector.
She said that, unlike pattern bargaining, the multi-employer enterprise negotiating procedures would ensure that all employers were included in the united negotiation.
Originally published at Melbourne News Vine
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