Transport Workers Union leader backs multi-employer bargaining strike rights

TWU leader Michael Kaine backs the right of workers to legally strike in support of multi-employer bargaining claims.

TWU national secretary Michael Kaine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Influential national union leader Michael Kaine has backed the right of workers to legally strike in support of multi-employer bargaining claims, saying an inability to take protected industrial action would unfairly favour employers.

Mr Kaine, who has been re-elected as national secretary of the Transport Workers Union, said the current system had been ­exploited by ­employers fragmenting their workforces and pitting ­companies against each other.

Mr Kaine, an ACTU vice-president, said multi-employer bargaining was necessary to reconsolidate markets “so that workers can bargain with companies that have some commercial capacity to move their wages”.

“It’s not about an uncontrolled upward spiral of wages and conditions,” he said.

“It’s about saving the economy from complete fragmentation where workers have no power (and) where the companies that engage them have no commercial power to dictate their future.

“That’s not good for economic growth. It’s certainly not good for making sure workers are getting a share of the economy.”

Employment Minister Tony Burke is devising changes to repair the nation’s “broken” enterprise bargaining system, including widening access to multi-­employer agreements and making the Fair Work Act’s better-off overall test “simple, flexible and fair”.

Mr Kaine said unless workers had the right to take industrial action - “a basic human right in international conventions” – then multi-employer bargaining became “an academic exercise and often meaningless”.

“Companies will simply say too bad, so sad, on your bike,” he said. “If you are going to have a multi-employer bargaining stream that’s meaningful, you need to have the right to take industrial action.”

Pressed on whether workers should be able to strike simultaneously across companies in support of multi-employer claims, he said: “I think it follows that if it’s multi-employer bargaining, you need the right to take industrial action.”

Figures released on Monday by the Fair Work Commission showed average wage increases in new enterprise agreements in Aug­ust were 3.3 per cent; 33 agreements struck across the building, metals and civil construction industries had average pay rises of 3.6 per cent, while 23 deals across manufacturing and associated industries contained average wage increases of 3.5 per cent.

The commission said 31 proposed agreements lodged by a union contained average annual pay rises of 4.4 per cent. The agreements covered 263 employees.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics at the end of September showed consumer prices rose 7pc in the year to July, with the rate easing to 6.8pc to August.

Mr Kaine said as a general proposition, workers would find it harder to keep their heads above water unless they were achieving wage outcomes at least in line with underlying inflation.

“The real question is how do you ensure the companies that engage workers, their direct employers, have the economic where­withal to be able to support good wage growth,” he said. “Not whether workers or unions seek wage increases that assist them with the cost of living but how do you reform the system to ensure companies that engage workers … have the economic wherewithal to support meaningful increases?

“That’s why people are talking about multi-employer bargaining. And that’s why people are talking about the current system needing to be reformed because it allows companies to push workforces away from them so they don’t have to bargain with them and yet they get the economic benefit of their labour.”

Mr Kaine and TWU national assistant secretary Nick McIntosh said they would focus their term on “taming the Amazon effect smashing road transport supply chains, training all union officials on holding gig arrangements to account, and building from the thousands-strong action taken last year and upcoming legislative opportunities to improve job security, pay and conditions”.