By Nick Bonyhady and Jessica Yun
Sam Buchwald, 25, has nothing bad to say about his time at Accenture, the huge international consulting firm that he started working at in 2020. But it didn’t ultimately fulfil the recent biomedical and mechatronic engineering graduate’s adventurous bent.
“I had this inner side of me that was kicking to get creative again,” Buchwald says. And so he quit to start his own small digital agency called Live to Create with a friend.
Sam Buchwald, 25, creates social media content for one of new business ventures since quitting his corporate job in 2021.Credit: Kate Geraghty
While employment statistics don’t show a Great Resignation in Australia like the United States has experienced, where burnt out workers have been taking advantage of a tight labour market to find new jobs in droves, Buchwald still has a safety net should things not pan out.
Unemployment in Australia dropped 0.5 percentage points in December to 4.2 per cent, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Thursday, taking it to a 13-year low and near levels not seen since the 1970s.
Hundreds of thousands of skilled migrant workers, backpackers and international university students missing from the Australian labour market because of border closures have created an environment where wages could be set to climb as employers fight to lure back workers like Buchwald.
Julia Angrisano, the national secretary of the 27,000 member Finance Sector Union, wants to ensure that her members get a substantial wage rise in enterprise agreement negotiations this year. That includes at major banks National Australia Bank and Westpac, as well as smaller institutions.
“Certainly our members on the frontlines that were declared essential ... they need to get their fair share of the profits that have been made,” Angrisano says.
The union will be demanding wage rises “that have a 4 [per cent] in front of it”, she says. That is higher than the Reserve Bank of Australia’s forecast 2.5 per cent average wage rise across the economy this year, but Angrisano says forecast rising inflation and the banks’ profits have to be taken into account.
But it’s not just financial demands that the FSU will be pushing: it wants more transparency to let bank staff discuss their pay with colleagues, arguing that it will expose gender pay gaps where women are paid less than men for the same work.
FSU’s Julia Angrisano says members are looking for a decent wage rise at upcoming EBA negotiations.
“Let’s get some transparency and some clarity into the way in which we pay people, and it will fix that problem,” Angrisano says.
Then there are rules around working from home that the union hopes to impose to ensure that workers have a boundary between their personal lives and work, rather than a change in work driving an increase in unpaid hours and stress.
In its model clause, which the FSU has already implemented through negotiations with some superannuation funds, employers are required to agree to a principle of a “right to disconnect”.
“The employer will actively ensure that employees who work from home will not be required or expected to read or monitor work emails, answer mobile phones or other messaging services outside their effective working hours,” the model clause says.
In a statement, a NAB spokeswoman said the bank recognised the work that its staff had put in during the pandemic, believed in fair pay and flexibility. It does not restrict staff from discussing their pay.
“Colleagues are free to discuss or disclose their remuneration information voluntarily should they wish to do so,” the statement reads. “There is no expectation that NAB colleagues work unreasonable additional hours. We take seriously any instance where workload impacts a colleague’s health and life outside work.”
Westpac declined to comment when contacted by this masthead.
The FSU is clearly up for a fight on wages, with the union on Friday launching proceedings against the Commonwealth Bank for allegedly refusing to grant retail banking staff 10-minute tea breaks during their shift.
It is far from the only union pushing for more pay and better conditions for deal for its members. Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, says even before the pandemic workers had grappled with eight years of record low wage growth.
“They deserve fair pay rises from the companies that they are keeping open,” McManus says.
“Unfortunately the Prime Minister is determined to return to the flawed pre-pandemic workforce as soon as possible, attempting several times to restart and expand temporary migrant worker programs and attacking unions that have been fighting for the rights of essential workers.”
But employer groups argue that many of their members are in no position to offer pay rises and desperately need more workers, including those overseas kept out by government restrictions.
“A good part of the overall wages story is that even when employees or prospective employees seek higher wages, there is simply no capacity for the employer to pay these higher wages,” says Innes Willox, the chief executive of Ai Group, which represents 60,000 businesses.
Consumer spending, curbed by wariness and isolating customers, has hit businesses’ bottom line, resulting in low revenue and margins, he says.
But the picture differs sector by sector. In the technology industry, firms have generally fared better because they were not forced to close and demand for many of their products, such as online entertainment, has grown.
When Mihailo Bozic, a young Perth-based founder who is building an invites app called Envited, shared a file of salary data through LinkedIn recently, he had a strong response from other tech industry professionals keen to negotiate a better pay rate. While the file is down for now after some data issues, Bozic is working on reloading it with his own data, verified from user submissions.
“The focus is to give everyone free access to anonymised and accurate pay stats,” he says in a text. “That way, when people negotiate salaries, they never undervalue themselves.”
Willox argues that pay rises will not necessarily address the current labour crisis because Australia’s workforce participation is already relatively high. Many workers have also been forced into COVID isolation or are caring for sick family members or friends. Another factor driving the staffing shortage is the dearth of skilled immigrants, overseas students and working holidaymakers. Although that is slowly increasing with more than 2000 foreign backpackers arriving in Australia since border restrictions were lifted in mid-December.
“Higher wages will not help boost supply in these cases. Supply is constrained by government limits,” Willox says.
Both Willox and the Business Council of Australia president Tim Reed pointed to productivity, which has not grown strongly in recent years, as the key lever in driving higher wages.
“If we, as a nation, are going to provide Australians with sustained wage growth, the only way to do that is through sustained economic growth – which is underpinned by productivity,” Reed says.
The way to raise productivity is through business investment, which will give workers the tools to increase their output, he says. However, aside from the mining industry, many sectors – such as the travel, tourism and domestic services industry – have struggled to fund that investment because of the pandemic.
“There is a degree of optimism,” Reed says. “Once the health crisis has been met, the economy rebounds quite strongly – we saw that at the end of lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.”
Recruitment experts believe that salary increases are just one of a number of expectations workers have about their jobs. While employees want to feel fairly compensated, and can be drawn away from their current employer by better pay prospects, wage rises are not necessarily a top priority.
“When jobseeking, that’s third on the list,” says Gartner director for research and advisory Robin Boomer. “When people leave their organisation, it’s because of manager quality and work-life balance … compensation is a distant third.
“What’s driving them away is not having their organisation or manager live up to the promise of what the organisation says their work culture is supposed to look like,” Boomer says.
That wasn’t what drove Buchwald away from Accenture, and he still speaks excitedly about his time with the firm, but it is hard to compare to the work he does now, travelling and creating social media content.
“Being in this corporate world trapped me in an atmosphere where if I didn’t get out at the time I’d be stuck for 20 years and have regrets in the future,” he says.
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.