Election 2022: Bosses and unions seek grand bargain for all

Big business has pledged to work with the union movement to fix the failing enterprise bargaining system, using Labor’s employment summit to kickstart a co-operative agenda.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott says the summit, expected by September, was an opportunity to discuss how to start ‘rescuing and improving’ the bargaining laws. Picture: Toby Zerna

Big business has pledged to work with the union movement to fix the failing enterprise bargaining system, using Labor’s employment summit to kickstart a co-operative agenda to deliver higher wages and productivity growth.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Business Council Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said the summit, expected by September, was an opportunity to discuss how to start “rescuing and improving” the bargaining laws.

“We have got to make progress. We have been in a stalemate for a decade on this,” Ms Westacott said. “I would encourage us to break through. In the history of industrial relations you can’t get progress if there’s not agreement between unions and business. You might do things but they don’t stick.

“And I would encourage all of us to go to the job summit with an open mind and try and see the bigger picture, which is we want that EBA system working, functioning, we want the issues corrected, and the unions are entitled to turn up and say, ‘we agree with that, but we want to see some safeguards for workers’. We have got to start with those principles.”

Getting broad agreement from employers and unions would help the new government introduce the legal changes needed to ­revitalise the enterprise bargaining system, potentially resulting in higher pay rises and increases in productivity. ACTU secretary Sally Mc­Manus told The Weekend Australian that “everyone agrees that there’s a big problem” with the ­enterprise bargaining system, and there was a “lot of common ground in terms of people wanting a simpler and a fairer system, an accessible system”.

Ms McManus said unions wanted to start with first principles, including the goal that ­workers are “sharing in the productivity, sharing in the prosperity of the country, and they’re not at the moment”.

“We want to have constructive discussions. We want to fix that (bargaining) system,” she said. “Everyone can see that it’s failing. That’s common ground. The number of bargains that are now reached and how low that is. In fact, it’s just basically failing on every measure. It’s got to be fixed so we should all look for this ­opportunity to make it work.”

Anthony Albanese on Friday reaffirmed the government’s ­effective support for a 5.1 per cent increase in the minimum wage in line with the inflation rate. In a submission to be made by June 7, the government will tell the Fair Work Commission that the ­nation‘s lowest paid workers cannot afford a cut in real wages, but will not name a figure for the rise.

As a workplace relations policy priority, Labor will implement all the recommendations of the ­Respect@Work report, including legislating a positive duty on ­employers to safeguard their staff from sexual harassment.

Labor is expected to separately tell the commission that it backs 10 days’ paid family and domestic violence leave being enshrined in the National Employment Standards. The Weekend Australian understands the government will this year also seek to ­introduce changes criminalising wage theft.

In separate interviews, Ms Westacott and Ms McManus said the employment summit would allow constructive dialogue about how to start fixing the enterprise bargaining system.

“It’s an opportunity to bring people together around some common principles and … in our view, the first conversation has got to be about rescuing and improving the enterprise bargaining system, which we see at the centre of higher wages, higher sustained wages growth,” Ms Westacott said.

Ms McManus said unions wanted to start with first principles, including the goal that workers are “sharing in the prosperity of the country”.

During the pandemic, Ms Westacott and Ms McManus ­developed a historic joint proposal to rewrite the enterprise bargaining laws. It was presented by then industrial relations minister Christian Porter to employer and union representatives in September 2020 but dropped after uproar from rival industry groups who threatened to campaign against the government on industrial relations.

Ms McManus said the agreement with the BCA could “definitely be part of the mix”, but unions wanted to have a broader discussion about making sure that wages were growing. Ms Westacott said the agreement with the ACTU retained the Fair Work Act’s better-off-overall test but sought to improve its ­operation.

On the union movement’s ­relationship with the Albanese government, Ms McManus said: “We expect and we know there will be respect for the voice of working people from the Labor government and I’ll just say that that’s good for the country.

“It won’t be just us, they’re listening too. They listen to a whole range of voices.

“You think back to the brief time where Scott Morrison did that and that’s when he was at his best. That’s when he introduced JobKeeper because he listened to more voices than just the business lobby. Then he just shut all of that down and it went back to how it was. I don’t think the best outcomes happen for a country when everyone is not listened to. We’ll be another seat at the table and a respected voice.”

She said the former prime minister lost the election as “there was a very strong dislike of him across the electorate and we knew about this for awhile”.

“He was at his most popular when he was seen to be bringing people together, the national cabinet, and about listening to everyone and being that type of leader,” she said. “When he abandoned that, what people saw was arrogance and bullying and deep disrespect for women, disrespect for workers and people were sick of being shouted at.”