Industrial Relations bill needs substantial, not rhetorical, changes

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke’s move to ditch the “same job, same pay” label (a term used by Anthony Albanese as recently as three weeks ago) from the government’s ­second tranche of IR changes will not in itself improve the substance of the legislation. The rhetorical change appears to be a response to the national advertising campaign led and funded by businesses large and small. They would be more impressed by improvements to the detail, such as reaffirming the flexibility to employ labour-hire and casual workers as needed, at mutually agreeable rates.

Business leaders have told The Australian they are concerned about the fact the proposed laws are aimed at ensuring ­labour-hire workers are paid at least the same as permanent ­employees. A week ago, BHP chief executive Mike Henry warned “same job, same pay” would be a “productivity killer” that would cost the company $1.5bn a year and create an economic drag on the nation. Mr Henry told a Business Council of Australia forum in Adelaide that Australia needed to address labour productivity and regulation if it had any hope of competing for investment on the world stage. He appealed to the political class to “stop doing more harm”. “It’s all going to be about productivity – how quickly, how low-cost can we get a project built?” he said. “How can we ensure that the workforce is as productive as possible once the facility is actually up and running?”

If the Albanese government is to show it is serious about improving productivity, which is vital to provide the revenue Australians need to fund defence, the care economy and much else, it will revisit the substance as well as the rhetoric of the upcoming workplace legislation. BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott is correct when she says it makes no sense that a newcomer to an organisation should immediately be granted the pay and conditions of a seasoned employee. The integrity of the enterprise bargaining system set up by the Hawke-Keating government could be undermined by “same job, same pay”, she says, which would leave the broader economy worse off. “The enterprise agreement system developed by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating is the system that has driven and given us labour productivity,” Ms Westacott said. “And it has given us co-operative workplaces, it has given us innovation.” That is a good reason to revisit and update that system for current conditions. But the new regime risked EBAs being seen as too difficult and risky, she said. “If it’s an ideological thing about getting the unions into the gig economy or running some agenda on ‘same job, same pay’, that is not the answer to our problems.”

What was being proposed, Ms Westacott said, was that “every single person, irrespective of whether they’ve been there for 10 years, two weeks, two days, is going to get exactly the same conditions and pay as someone in the host employer. If I’m an engineer but I’m working on an extremely complex thing in BHP and I’ve got 15 years of experience, someone comes in for a couple of months and they get exactly what I get. They get the same things that I’ve negotiated in an enterprise agreement: bonuses, childcare, extra things that people put into their enterprise agreements”.

In a briefing last Friday, Mr Burke is understood to have told members of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia that the government’s IR legislation would refer to the ­labour-hire loophole rather than “same job, same pay”. Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable, a leader of the industry campaign, said: “Whatever the policy is called, the consequences will be the same. It will reduce fairness in the workplace and Australian workers’ reward for hard work and experience.” The focus, she said, “should be on what boosts productivity to meet the challenge that ­Australian business and workers face together”.