The first new pay deal that is supposed to get workers’ wages moving amid the ‘cost of living crisis’ sits in limbo as unions squabble among themselves.
Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke’s Trump-ish slogan was that the Albanese government’s workplace law shake-up would “get wages moving again”.
Mr Burke rammed Labor’s retrograde workplace re-regulation through parliament before Christmas last year because he said workers could not wait for a pay rise, and because empowering unions to strike multi-employer deals would reverse the low wage growth that Labor claimed was a “deliberate design” of the workplace system under the Coalition.at the Jobs and Skills Summit did the bidding and served the institutional interests of the union bosses and factional warlords who control the Labor Party.
That danger prompted the Productivity Commission to warn of the potential for anti-competitive practices to flow from multi-employer bargaining, and for former Australian Consumer and Competition Commission boss Rod Sims to suggest that the link between industry-wide wage-fixing and price-fixing raised “tricky” competition issues.
Instead, Labor has moved to put the “IR club” of unions, employer groups, and the third-party umpire back in charge of fixing inflexible one-size-fits-all wages and conditions, and thrown the whole industrial relations framework back to the 1970s and earlier.
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