Enough talk on industrial relations bill, say unions

Sally McManus says further government concessions to business over Labor’s industrial relations bill would jeopardise attempts to get wages moving.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

ACTU secretary Sally McManus says further government concessions to business over Labor’s industrial relations bill would jeopardise attempts to get wages moving.

Ms McManus, speaking on ABC television, said the ACTU did not want further changes to the bill’s small business threshold.

“We are not organising multi employer bargains in small businesses. We’ve never had high union membership in small businesses even when we had 60 per cent union membership and we’ve got 14 per cent now; it is not going to happen. And what this is really is a scare campaign.

“Nothing will happen to small businesses, these laws will pass. Life will go on for them. It’s just a scare campaign that’s been run because big business don’t want to face up to the fact that they really need to give people pay rises.”

Employment Minister Tony Burke has left the door open to further changes to get the bill passed by the Senate in coming weeks.

ACT senator David Pocock, whose vote is critical, wants the proposed single interest multi-employer bargaining stream amended or carved out and delayed until next year.

Ms McManus said unions did not want further concessions.

“We think already there’s all of those carve outs,” she said. “The whole construction industry carved out as well. There’s been a lot of concessions made to business over the last two weeks and they went through in amendments yesterday.

“It’s going to make it actually very, very hard to access those new parts of the Act already and so more changes, we think, will just jeopardise our ability to actually get wages moving.”

She said business lobbyists were trying to portray the bill as complex.

“They’re throwing up everything they can because they don’t want the laws to pass,” she said. “(It) wouldn’t matter if you spent like years and years – which actually we have been negotiating with them over needing to fix the broken wages system – (they are) still never going to agree.”

Centre for Future Work director Jim Stanford said wage growth in Australia in the past decade had been abysmal. He said the multi-employer bargaining expansion in the supported and single interest streams was part of a cautious package of changes to try to rebuild collective bargaining.

He said the modest changes did not justify the extreme fearmongering by critics of the bill.