Wesfarmers employs more than 100,000 workers across enterprises including Bunnings, Kmart, Target, Officeworks and Priceline.
Big business is on a collision course with unions at the Jobs and Skills Summit, after the second-biggest private employer warned that the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ push for multi-employer pay deals would hurt investment and wages, as Labor ministers openly consider the proposal.
The conglomerate unveiled an annual profit of $2.35 billion, down 1.2 per cent. Business, economists and the Reserve Bank of Australia are increasingly confident wage growth will pick up to around 3 per cent in the second half of this year., and left companies vulnerable to union-friendly industrial relations changes under Labor.
“Increasingly, employers are abandoning the higher productivity-achieving enterprise bargaining system in favour of awards,” Mr Chaney wrote. A business source said there were growing concerns that elements within the Albanese government, such as Mr Burke, were pushing a “Whitlam-esque” industrial relations agenda from the 1970s when wage rises for unionised and public sector workers exacerbated inflation.
“We need to make sure that we have the right protections around it, but that we do not constrain flexibility for people so they can choose how to best balance their lives.”
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