Like never before, the post-pandemic economy will rely on productivity improvements to rebuild GDP growth and employment. But that strategy will be stymied by the broken enterprise bargaining system which is the centrepiece to the national industrial relations system.

The Hawke-Keating governments envisaged enterprise bargaining as a means to releasing productivity squirrelled up in awards and the poor work practices they embodied. They were right. Awards are congealed productivity: they regulate the types of employees an employer may engage and how labour is utilised and moved around in the workplace, in what circumstances and conditions and within what spans of hours, along with a panoply of employee entitlements (allowances, penalty rates, overtime rates, public holiday rates and casual rates of pay).