Unions
Taking the bargaining out of collective bargaining
“An aggressive and wide-ranging agenda for changing Australia’s labour laws” has been quickly assembled by the Morrison government and its business supporters, says the Centre For Future Work.
In a new report, the think tank’s senior economist Alison Pennington has compiled the various proposals advanced by employers, and shows that together they would constitute a thorough reorientation of Australia’s collective bargaining system.
“The end result would be a situation – very similar to the Work Choices regime of the late 2000s – whereby employers have unilateral power to determine terms and conditions, wages can be locked in for very long periods of time and the scope for true workplace negotiations is compressed,” the report says.
The main findings of the report include:
- The share of private sector workers covered by enterprise agreements (EAs) has now been halved since 2013, to only 11 per cent.
- This decline reflects three simultaneous negative trends: declining agreement renewals, almost no new agreements being negotiated, and high rates of agreement termination.
- Employers are aiming for a collective “bargaining” system that has little room for actual bargaining – it would instead be characterised by employers with increasing power to unilaterally set the terms and conditions of work.
- The loss of wages resulting from that slowdown in (already weak) wage growth could cost an average private sector EA-covered worker over $2000 in lost income over just the first three years.