Funds must put members first

Two powerful trade unions urging eight superannuation funds to review millions of dollars of investment in Australia’s third-largest company, CSL, should stick to their day jobs and leave the funds to act in their members’ best interests. The annoyance of the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union about CSL’s plan to shift workers to lower pay, revealed by Ewin Hannan a fortnight ago, is understandable. A nine-page confidential company document showed CSL planned to shift workers on to lower pay and conditions and make them redundant if they refused to move from the biotech giant’s Parkville site to its new $800m hi-tech plant at Tullamarine, in outer Melbourne. The unions have told super funds such as Australian Super and Cbus that CSL’s plan was a “highly irregular” attack on workers’ livelihoods, at odds with the funds’ commitment to invest only in companies with good environmental, social and governance management.

CSL, one of Australia’s most successful companies, is subject, like all employers, to industrial laws. If its employees and the unions that represent them believe unfair treatment is being meted out, the issue can be pursued through established channels. Super fund managers should be judged on the performance of their funds in maximising returns to savers’ accounts. That involves investing in successful companies. Urging funds to act on the basis of industrial relations decisions that unions oppose could result in workers’ retirement nest eggs being short-changed, working against the interests of hundreds of thousands of workers.