Labor’s employment minister is open to the concept of the unions’ bold proposal, which would include going back forty years and giving employees significant wage increases.
The ACTU has advocated “multi-employer or sector negotiating,” which is essentially a return to the kind of industry-wide negotiation that resulted in double-digit wage increases for employees in the early 1980s.
It would imply that comparable firms would copy a pay increase in one workplace within an industry, recreating an industrial relations system from four decades before, when unions agreed to wage restriction in 1983.
Sally McManus, the secretary of the ACTU, has denounced the enterprise bargaining mechanism that the government’s Jobs and Skills Summit created in 1993 under former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating.
Our existing system was developed thirty years ago, when the economy was quite different and there were a lot more substantial workplaces, she remarked.
The service and care sectors now make up the majority of our economy.
“Our negotiating structure has to adjust in line with how the economy has changed.”
“People in smaller firms and the typically female-dominated care industries need access to the collective bargaining system, too.”
The “multi-employer or sector bargaining” Ms. McManus has proposed is also a move to take Australia back to a time four decades ago, when the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Bob Hawke’s new Labor administration agreed Prices and Incomes Accords in 1983 to stop a wage-price spiral.
According to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, inflation in May 1981 hit 11% while average weekly wages increased by 14%.
In a period when the typical full-time male worker made less than $300 per week, the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union used strike action to win a $39 per week wage boost that trickled down to the rest of the economy.
In June 1981, the unemployment rate was still 5.4%; nevertheless, in less than two years, it almost quadrupled, rising to 10.5% by July 1983.
Employment Minister Tony Burke said he was open to the ACTU’s proposal to revive industry-wide bargaining despite the risk of a wage-price spiral.
He said to the ABC on Thursday, “I do have to confess, I am extremely interested in what the ACTU have put out.”
“Collective bargaining must move in order for wages to move.”
Peter Dutton, the leader of the opposition, slammed the ACTU plan as a throwback to the late 1970s.
In Adelaide, he told reporters, “Sally McManus is a throwback from the 1970s and she wants a return to an industrial relations system that will devastate families and small companies.”
“This is an agenda of the Labor Party from the 1970s,” the author claims, referring to the “economy-wide strikes she pushes for,” the “increasing taxes on small enterprises,” and “the impossibility for small company to have a final say regarding workers in their own business.”
The ACTU idea is supported by Greens leader Adam Bandt, whose hard-left party has the authority to veto or alter Labor laws.
The cost of living is rising but salaries aren’t, and this is especially hurting those who work in low-paying sectors, he said, adding that we are now experiencing a crisis of inequality and wages.
In the year to June, wages only increased by 2.6%, less than half the inflation rate of 6.1%, which is the highest since 1990 when the impacts of the GST’s implementation in 2000 are taken into account.
That indicates that employees are experiencing real pay reductions, which are expected to become worse given that the Reserve Bank and Treasury both predict that this year’s inflation will reach a 32-year high of 7.75 percent.
Despite the unemployment rate reaching a 48-year low of 3.4% in July, the wage price index has remained below the long-term average of 3% since 2013.
The Jobs and Skills Summit, hosted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, will take place on September 1 and 2 at Parliament House in Canberra.