Everything you need to know about radical plan to change Australian workplace laws – and what it means for your wages

  • ACTU wants a return to ‘multi-employer or sector bargaining’ from early 1980s
  • Secretary Sally McManus repudiated Labor’s 1993 enterprise bargaining design
  • Industry-wide bargaining gave workers double-digit wage rises back in 1981
  • Labor Employment Minister Tony Burke said he’s ‘very interested’ in ACTU idea 

Unions have a radical plan to give workers big pay rises that would involve turning the clock back four decades – and Labor’s employment minister is open to the idea.

The ACTU has proposed ‘multi-employer or sector bargaining’ – effectively a return to industry-wide bargaining that in the early 1980s saw workers receive double-digit pay rises.

It would mean a wage rise in one workplace within an industry would be copied by similar employers – reviving an industrial relations system from four decades ago before unions agreed to wage restraint in 1983.

Ahead of the government’s Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, ACTU secretary Sally McManus has repudiated the existing enterprise bargaining system which former Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s government established in 1993.

‘Our current system was designed 30 years ago where we had a completely different economy with many more large workplaces,’ she said.

‘Our economy is now dominated by services and care industries. 

‘As the economy has changed, our bargaining system needs to as well. 

Unions are putting forward a radical plan to give workers big pay rises that would involve turning the clock back four decades - and a Labor minister is open to the idea (pictured is the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union's Victorian secretary John Setka)

Unions are putting forward a radical plan to give workers big pay rises that would involve turning the clock back four decades – and a Labor minister is open to the idea (pictured is the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union’s Victorian secretary John Setka)

‘People in smaller workplaces and care sectors which are often dominated by women also need access to the collective bargaining system.’

Ms McManus’s proposal for ‘multi-employer or sector bargaining’ is also a plan to return Australia to an era four decades ago before the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Bob Hawke’s incoming Labor government in 1983 negotiated Prices and Incomes Accords to restrain a wage-price spiral.

In May 1981, average weekly earnings surged by 14 per cent and inflation that year reached 11 per cent, Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed. 

The Amalgamated Metal Workers Union, with strike action, had managed to secure a $39 a week pay increase, which flowed through to the rest of the economy during an era when the average, full-time male worker earned less than $300 a week.

Unemployment in June 1981 was still at 5.4 per cent but less than two years later, it almost doubled, reaching 10.5 per cent by July 1983.

Despite the danger of a wage-price spiral, Employment Minister Tony Burke he was open to the ACTU’s idea of reviving industry-wide bargaining. 

Ahead of the government's Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, ACTU secretary Sally McManus has repudiated the existing enterprise bargaining system which former Labor prime minister Paul Keating's government established in 1993

Ahead of the government’s Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, ACTU secretary Sally McManus has repudiated the existing enterprise bargaining system which former Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s government established in 1993

‘I do have to say, I am very interested in what the ACTU have put forward,’ he told the ABC on Thursday. 

‘You can’t get wages moving without getting collective bargaining moving.’

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton blasted the ACTU proposal as a return to the late 1970s.

‘Sally McManus is a throwback from the 70s and she wants a return to an industrial relations system that would cripple families and small businesses,’ he told reporters in Adelaide.

‘The economy-wide strikes she advocates for, the increased taxation on small businesses, the inability for small business to have a final say about employees in their own business – this is an agenda of the Labor Party from the 1970s.’

But Greens leader Adam Bandt, whose hard-left party has the power to block or amend Labor legislation, is backing the ACTU plan.

Despite the danger of a wage-price spiral, Employment Minister Tony Burke he was open to the ACTU's idea of reviving industry-wide bargaining

Despite the danger of a wage-price spiral, Employment Minister Tony Burke he was open to the ACTU’s idea of reviving industry-wide bargaining

‘We are in an inequality and wages crisis at the moment and the cost of living is going up and wages aren’t, and it is particularly hitting the people who work in low paid areas,’ he said.

Wages in the year to June grew by just 2.6 per cent – less than half the inflation rate of 6.1 per cent, which is itself the highest since 1990 when the effects of the GST introduction in 2000 were excluded.

That means workers are suffering real wage cuts, which are set to worsen with both the Reserve Bank and Treasury forecasting inflation this year hitting a 32-year of 7.75 per cent. 

The wage price index has been stuck below the long-term average of 3 per cent since 2013 despite unemployment in July falling to a 48-year low of 3.4 per cent.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Jobs and Skills Summit is being held at Parliament House in Canberra on September 1 and 2. 

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