Fate of MFB under United Firefighters Union is a warning to CFA

IF the CFA wants to see how life might be under the UFU, it should take a close look at how things are working out over at the MFB, writes Michael Angwin.

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WHILE Premier Daniel Andrews and the United Firefighters Union struggle to put their management-busting EBA in place at the Country Fire Authority, they are already living the dream over at the MFB.

The MFB’s enterprise agreement is the model for the UFU/Andrews Government ambitions at the CFA.

The rot sets in early with a clause committing the MFB and the UFU to bargaining collectively “in relation to any matter” whether arising from the agreement or not.

The MFB is already living the dream of life under the UFU.

Let’s be clear about what that means. It means that any decision the MFB management wants to take is potentially negotiable with the UFU, if the UFU wants to exercise the right to bargain given to it by agreement of the MFB.

And it does exercise that right with considerable enthusiasm.

The agreement hands to the UFU the power to determine or veto how the MFB operates. In effect, the UFU has displaced the management of the MFB, which remains accountable but with no effective authority. Why successive leaders of the MFB have agreed to that kind of provision is a mystery.

Hinton & Associates industrial relations adviser Michael Angwin.

The MFB agreement starts with a list of objectives.

It reads like the preamble to a company’s HR policy manual, which, after all, is what the agreement really is. In fact, the agreement is a fully fledged manual for running the MFB. The constraints on the MFB’s managerial leadership are made explicit in the second section of the agreement.

An MFB/UFU consultative committee is established to “facilitate” implementation of the agreement and ongoing workplace reform. That is an absurdly optimistic remit. Everything that follows impedes the ability of MFB management to manage the MFB and make it great at fighting fires.

Claiming, as the agreement does, that tapping the expertise of employees is a purpose of consultation does not make me believe that extreme constraints on managerial decision-making are the best way to ensure the personal and property risks due to fire are being well managed.

On the contrary, the destruction of managerial accountability puts fire safety at risk.

The agreement establishes a consultative committee with the role of making recommendations (to whom is not clear but, presumably, management) by “consensus”. Without a recommendation, management cannot make change. Without a consensus, the committee cannot make a recommendation. This is the first of five explicit constraints on managerial decision-making.

The second is the restriction that no change can be made to MFB operations or human resource practices without the change first being considered by the consultative committee.

The third constraint is that any proposed change, even one agreed by consensus, may also require the endorsement of UFU members.

The CFA just needs to look at the MFB to see how things may look under the UFU.

The agreement makes explicit a fourth set of constraints involving some specific matters, as if the requirement to bargain collectively “in relation to any matter” was not enough to make the point to MFB management about the hollowness of its decision-making capacity.

The specific matters include:

Any change to the employment relationship. That could mean anything; any change that constitutes “continuous improvement”. It’s hard to see how any change could be continuous if it has to be negotiated; any technological change. New hoses, maybe; change due to changes in Victorian government policy, with the outcomes of the Bushfires royal commission cited explicitly.

The fifth constraint is the two sets of dispute resolution procedures. One is the Consultation Officer, whose role looks to be to keep the MFB “consulting” under threat of a dispute about consultation being referred to the Fair Work Commission for arbitration.

The other, a complex disputes procedure, applies to any matter whether covered by the EBA or not. Ultimately, the procedure can result in arbitration by the Fair Work Commission. Even then, any FWC decision can be appealed.

In short, there is a requirement to reach a consensus about any matter of any kind affecting the MFB’s operations; and, in the absence of consensus, there is arbitration by the FWC.

There are no decisions MFB management can take that are not subject to UFU veto or, at best, a compromise forced on the MFB by Fair Work.

Why is that so wrong? For two reasons. Because the continuous bargaining contemplated by the EBA is a poor use of management time, costly and an extreme constraint on managerial authority; and because management cannot be held accountable as it has no final authority for any decision affecting the MFB. All decisions are negotiable or arbitrable.

This disaster did not happen overnight. It took much political inattention, poor governance and weak management.

How to fix it? There are two possibilities: drag back managerial leadership and accountability under the guidance of political leadership; or appoint the secretary of the UFU to the board, where he can accept accountability for the decisions he is currently making.

Michael Angwin works at Hinton & Associates advising companies on industrial relations

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