Unions destroying prosperity

Nobody in Australia wants to see construction workers doing backbreaking work in tough conditions paid the slave-like wages many of those building China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s biggest hydro­power project, take home.

“Construction workers in China would not dare ask for ‘mental health’ days, double time for working in the rain or a $140-a-day camp allowance – just some of demands being made by the Australian Workers Union-supported Snowy workforce,’’ North Asia correspondent Will Glasgow reports from Yichang.

Ongoing strikes delaying the Snowy scheme underline the failure of the Albanese government to use its relationship with the union movement to improve productivity, as the Hawke-Keating governments did 40 years ago. Industrial Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth must use Tuesday’s summit between employers and unions to achieve a win-win for workers and employers through productivity growth.

In the first major IR dispute since the government’s re-election, unions are pushing for pay rises of more than 30 per cent over four years, threatening ongoing strikes on the nation’s largest renewable energy project. The cost of the trouble-plagued project, initially forecast by the former Coalition government to be about $2bn and to be completed in 2021, has been revised twice to almost $6bn, and then $12bn, Ewin Hannan wrote last month. Unions representing fly-in fly-out employees earning more than $200,000 a year (only top executives on the Chinese project receive as much) told The Australian that industrial action in support of pay rises, 15 per cent superannuation, better food, higher overtime and an increased “productivity” allowance was “inevitable”. The productivity gains being proposed by unions in return for such significant lifts in pay and conditions are not clear.

In another sign that Labor’s second-term IR agenda is already off track, Transport Workers Union boss Michael Kaine has threatened to “shut down Australian transport”, including airline flights, saying unions must seize on the government’s landslide victory to pursue the “largest co-ordinated industrial campaign” in the sector’s history. Such a campaign would cripple productivity across the economy, to the detriment of productive enterprises, profits, government revenue and, ultimately, workers, exacerbating the effects of the fall in private capital expenditure.

If the slide in living standards is to be reversed, Ms Rishworth has a major role to play in fostering productivity not in a third term, as Jim Chalmers has foreshadowed, but this term. The minister has a lot on her plate, including the Fair Work Commission’s annual minimum wage decision on Tuesday. And she needs to clarify the confusion after her statement on Sunday that politicians on defined benefit super schemes, such as Anthony Albanese, would be “treated differently” over when they would pay the government’s new tax on unrealised gains.