ACTU bid for sector-wide pay claims at jobs and skills summit

Unions want power to strike across industries including childcare, small business under major reworking of workplace laws.

Sally McManus says ‘allowing workers to band together across workplaces to bargain is an essential way of getting wages moving again after a lost decade’. Picture: Jane Dempster

Unions want the power to strike in support of multi-employer and sector-wide pay claims across industries including childcare and small business under a major reworking of the nation’s workplace laws to be pushed at next week’s jobs and skills summit.

Declaring stagnating wages growth could not be addressed without fixing collective bargaining, ACTU secretary Sally McManus said unions would press to have the new bargaining rules included in the industrial relations bill to be introduced into federal parliament by the Albanese government later this year.

Ms McManus said the proposed changes should include “as a last resort” the ability of workers across workplaces to simultaneously take protected industrial action in support of multi-employer or sector-wide claims.

Labor is seeking to use the summit to achieve a level of consensus between unions and employers on changes to the bargaining laws, with Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke saying proposed industrial relations legislation to be introduced later this year would be “informed” by the summit’s outcome.

But employers last night slammed the ACTU push, with Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox declaring “we have been down this dead-end road many times before since the end of centralised wage fixing in the 1980s”. In an interview with The Australian, Ms McManus also said unions could seek to “uplift” elements of a landmark proposal with the Business Council to rewrite the bargaining laws – which included fast-tracking the approval of agreements reached with unions – “and might be able to do even better”.

She expressed confidence changes could be made to the Fair Work Act’s better-off overall test to make it “much easier and much simpler” to get agreements approved without exposing workers to cuts to pay and conditions.

Ms McManus said the new bargaining rules could apply “wherever it makes sense”, nominating the childcare and aged-care sectors, as well as small businesses.

“Allowing workers to band together across workplaces to bargain is an essential way of getting wages moving again after a lost decade of flatlining wages and real wage cuts,” she said.

“It should be unacceptable to all of us that real wage cuts are projected year upon year. It has been the task of every generation to respond to their particular challenges and take action to address them so that the living standards of Australians rise.

“We believe this is what the jobs and skills summit is about. Without modernising our wage bargaining system, real wages will not grow. Wages are not growing with productivity, profits or low unemployment; we need to take action to fix it as a matter of urgency”.

Mr Willox said the proposal equated to industry-wide “pattern bargaining” which, if adopted, risked significant damage to the economy. “We already have awards that set a safety net at an industry level,” he said.

“Bargaining needs to occur in the context of individual enterprises. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work.

“If we want the bargaining system to deliver the kind of improvements in productivity that enable sustainable wage increases, we need to focus on making the system easier for employers, and smaller employers in particular, to navigate. We have to fix the unworkable minefield of technicalities and rules that currently stifle bargaining.”

Unions will have a significant presence at next week’s summit. As well as Ms McManus and ACTU president Michele O’Neil, the leaders of the country’s most influential unions are attending, including Christy Cain from the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union; the Transport Workers Union’s Michael Kaine; Daniel Walton from the Australian Workers Union; the United Workers Union’s Tim Kennedy; Electrical Trades Union acting national secretary Michael Wright; and the head of the shop assistants union, Gerard Dwyer.

Ms McManus said the enterprise bargaining system had been developed in the 1990s and had to be updated. “Our current system was designed 30 years ago where we had a completely different economy with many more large workplaces,” she said. “Our economy is now dominated by services and care industries. As the economy has changed, our bargaining system needs to as well.

“People in smaller workplaces and care sectors which are often dominated by women also need access to the collective bargaining system.”

Mr Burke has said he hoped Labor’s pre-election promises on workplace relations, including the criminalisation of wage theft and abolition of the construction union watchdog, would be introduced into the House of Representatives as a ­single bill by December. Mr Burke has said “bargaining is on the agenda” and Ms McManus said unions would press to have bargaining changes included in the bill.