The Albanese government’s new regime could shake up wage growth and the workplace. Some who remember unions “going through the phone book” are getting worried.
″It starts with the big guys, but it always filters down to the bottom,” Eric Guilly says.
Bargaining across employers hasn’t been done on a significant scale since the 1980s, after which the Keating government made the move to enterprise bargaining.not only significantly expand the scope for sector-wide deals but introduce strike rights across unconnected employers for the first time.Guilly, an industry veteran for 10 years, has started winning work from tier-one construction contractors after growing his business over the years and increasing his staff to 13 from three.
For the past few months, business groups have waged what unions have branded a scare campaign that has raised fears of sector-wide strikes and a return to “1970s-style” industry bargaining. “Unions would go through the phone book and identify employers - often hundreds of them in the relevant industry - and file an application to rope them all in,” said Stephen Smith, industrial relations veteran and principal of Actus Workplace Lawyers.“An employer would have to show up at the commission hearing and argue that they should not be roped-in for a valid reason. If they did nothing, they were roped-in and the award applied to them.
University of Sydney Associate Professor Chris F Wright, who has researched multi-employer bargaining regimes overseas, believes it’s unlikely the commission would extend a deal to an employer if it would ruin their business or if they had a history of enterprise bargaining. But it will depend on what precedent cases emerge.
“Employers like it because it creates certainty,” he says. “It takes a lot of the administrative burden out of every single business wanting to do an enterprise agreement. “There’s less of a need to get a wage rise if wages are set at a level that are more fair or more reflective of workers’ value,” he said. “The extent of churn in the labour market is not a good thing. It might reward individual employees, but it leads to higher turnover that negatively impacts productivity. The cost of training, recruitment, time to be productive in a new role - those things hinder productivity.
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