What is the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill?
The Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill is a current piece of legislation that was introduced to amend the Fair Work Act. This bill seeks to address long-standing issues related to job security and wage growth in Australia to create a more equitable and balanced industrial relations system.
These are the most significant changes in 20 years and follow a decade of anti-worker, anti-union, conservative governments.
Let’s take a look at what this means for Australian workers.
What are the main changes in the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill?
The Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill proposes a series of amendments to the Fair Work Act to further improve workers’ rights and conditions. Key changes include:
Enhancing job security: New workplace rights on disclosing pay and conditions, prohibiting pay secrecy, and making certain job ads unlawful. It also protects workers from insecure employment, including the introduction of new rights for casual and gig economy workers.
Promoting gender equality: New protected attributes in the Fair Work Act, including; breastfeeding, gender identity, and intersex status.
Strengthening wage growth: Addressing stagnating wage growth by improving how the minimum wage is determined, ensuring workers are paid fairly.
Expanding collective bargaining: Strengthen the role of collective bargaining, empowering workers to negotiate for better pay and conditions with their unions.
Reforming enterprise agreements and enterprise bargaining: Addressing the termination of enterprise agreements after their nominal expiry date, sunsetting of ‘zombie’ agreements, initiating bargaining, and dealing with errors in enterprise agreements.
Abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) and the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC): Simplifying regulatory oversight in the industry.
A brief history of industrial relations reform in Australia
Industrial relations reform has a long political history. The introduction of John Howard’s WorkChoices reform to the Workplace Relations Act represented a shift in politics, where the Coalition attempted to suppress workers’ wages and worsen income inequality.
WorkChoices was an anti-worker policy that attempted to deregulate Australia’s labour market, giving employers more flexibility in setting wages and working conditions, allowing them to erode workers’ rights and undermine the role of trade unions.
The backlash against WorkChoices led to the development of the Fair Work Act in 2009, which sought to balance the interests of both employers and employees. This legislation, introduced by the Rudd-Gillard government, established a more robust and inclusive industrial relations system.
The Workplace Relations Act 1996 was replaced by the Fair Work Act in 2009. The new legislation aimed to create a more equitable workplace relations system. The Fair Work Act introduced several significant changes, such as the establishment of the Fair Work Commission, the implementation of the National Employment Standards, and the modernisation of the award system.
Over the following decade, conservative governments have consistently attacked working people and their trade unions, while putting the interests of big businesses first.
Anthony Albanese and Labor’s election win last year has created an opportunity to undo the damage of the Coalition and reform the broken industrial relations system. The Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill is the first step. Even after ten years of deliberate attempts to keep wages low, every single Liberal and National MP voted against this new bill.
The Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill represents a huge step forward in the ongoing campaign to create a more equitable and inclusive industrial relations system.
The amendments are staged over a 12-month period. See the schedule here.