Upheaval of work rights inevitable

The pandemic has opened our eyes to the way business and industry pay wages.

You don’t need a union to get an enterprise agreement and that you don’t even need an enterprise agreement to get a pay rise.

Complicated, confusing and excruciating: this was Christian Porter describing our enterprise bargaining system this week. It is refreshing that the federal Attorney-General and Industrial Relations Minister has seen the light. He has mapped the processes required for workplace agreement and has seen for himself why everyone is walking away from it.

Perhaps the penny has dropped, too, that if a company simply wants to give workers a pay rise, they can simply hand it out at their discretion. The idea that workers must vote to accept a pay rise is peculiar, and so perhaps we can add the descriptor “mostly unnecessary” into the mix.

The flaws in our workplace relations system are many, but we can view them with an eye on our history and how it influenced the design of our structures.

Our system is held back by legacy issues, constructed on an organised and disciplined collectivist concept. There is a red team and a blue team: workers’ unions, which represent all workers, and bosses’ unions, which represent all bosses.

Every time a decision needs to be made, the workers’ unions and the bosses’ unions can be put into a room to hammer out a deal, which all workers and bosses in the industry will swallow. If the negotiations fail, then an “independent umpire” will jump into the mix, and again, all workers and bosses will accept the outcome.

Bargaining in workplaces, where it occasionally does need to occur, is not like that. I like to think of it as inviting a friend for dinner. The individual resident and cook, if they want, if they have the time and money, can extend an invitation. The individual guests, if they like and trust the cook, can accept.

Resident representatives and guest representatives can meet and agree all they like, but at the end of the day their agreements count for nought. No one can force any individual to extend an invitation to dinner and no one can force anyone to attend.

This reality was illustrated this week in the university sector, which is in great strife. The employers’ union and the workers’ union have hammered out an industry-wide deal, which includes pay cuts of up to 15 per cent in return for job security guarantees. The agreement counts for nothing, though, because around half of the universities have rejected it publicly and won’t be offering it to their workers, and no court in the land can force them to do so.

So this is where it all falls down. In the past, in the era where everybody bought a newspaper every day and read it on the train on the way to work, and everybody went to church on Sunday and considered the priest coming to morning tea during the week a huge honour, employers would do what their employers’ group told them to do, and workers would vote the way unions told them to vote. Life is not like that any more, so our bargaining system is like an old key that won’t open a new set of locks; as Porter has said, simply not fit for purpose.

For those wondering what the hell the government is up to now, sometimes in the workplace relations space it is best not to pre-empt outcomes. Sometimes it is best to begin a process and see what happens. Turn someone upside down, give them a shake and see what falls out of their pockets, if you like. After that, the way forward becomes clear. And usually the picker-upper of the person cannot lose either way.

This may be where Porter is coming from with his working group idea. In any case, the government has nothing to lose by facilitating a set of discussions between people in the industrial relations space. Of course, if they invite the same old dinosaurs to roar and scratch themselves around the same old table, then the process will become a spectacle of tragic hilarity. But if they look outside the box for participants, as they have promised to do, then maybe something good may occur.

The word from insiders is that big-bang reform is not desired, nor is is seen as possible. Instead, there is an understanding that there are some simple, practical changes that can be made that will make life easier for both employers and employees.

If the talks succeed, then reforms can be put to the parliament, and the crossbench will feel obligated to allow them through. If they fail, the government can shrug and say that it tried, and put some changes to the parliament anyway for the good of the country. The crossbench can block them and this can become a platform for the next election.

In a perfect world, every boss has a profitable, viable business, with a secure customer base, that provides a growing income. Every worker has a secure job with good wages and conditions, a safe workplace, and a 4 per cent pay rise each year.

Life is not like that though and, broadly speaking, Australian workers understand a few truisms. They understand that you don’t need a union to get an enterprise agreement and that you don’t even need an enterprise agreement to get a pay rise. Now, because of the pandemic, they also understand that to have job security and get a pay rise, above all else you must work in a viable and profitable business, and that scenario cannot be taken for granted. No contribution to profit and enterprise is ever too small and it is everyone’s responsibility to strive towards.