McManus backs worker strike rights in multi-employer bargaining

ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has championed the right of workers to take protected strikes in multi-employer bargaining in a speech to the National Press Club.

IEU members in Catholic education know all too well the shortcoming of the current multi-employer bargaining system, which limits employees seeking better wages and conditions from using industrial action.

McManus said introducing broader multi-employer bargaining without allowing protected strikes would leave workers with "almost zero" leverage in her speech on 28 September.

"If workers have no access to protected action, bargaining power is reduced to almost zero," she said. 

"When this occurs those who sit opposite you at a bargaining table walk into the room knowing you have no options. 

"So, pay offers are low and they are 'take it or leave it'. 

"No one can effectively bargain if they start with no options and the other side knows it. 

"But having the option to take industrial action and actually taking it are two different things. 

"A functioning bargaining system sees more bargains and fairer workplaces as a result." 

McManus said many countries – such as Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden – had multi-employer bargaining without high rates of strike action.

Nine media reports on. the right to strike

She says the current enterprise bargaining system disadvantaged workers in sectors including education, aged care, child care, disability, and community services, entrenching conflict and producing “unnecessary hurdles, legal complexities, and an ineffective independent umpire”. 

It also set back the cause of gender equality because enterprise bargaining “no longer delivered pay rises with productivity growth”. 

"It is a system that is failing workers and failing Australia." 

"It is overly complicated, time consuming and too easily gamed by too many employers to drive down wages."

The Albanese Government has promised new laws on multi-employer bargaining, but employers have pushed back against allowing strikes that can be taken across multiple employers or an entire sector.

"The key thing that needs to change is we need to give the umpire their whistle back. The Fair Work Commission has had their whistle taken off them," she said.

"Our system should be based on bringing people together and facilitating good faith bargaining."

McManus said the Fair Work Act didn’t properly cover newer forms of work.

"The repair to the Fair Work Act must start as a matter of urgency," she said.

"It was drafted before the full impact of the global financial crisis was known, and before the expansion of the gig economy and the other forms of work which have been used to avoid paying employee entitlements."

IEU members make their voices heard at industrial action, 2012.

Anti-union attacks will be like a “rewound cassette” from the 80s

The ACTU boss predicted anti-union attacks would grow as economic challenges build in coming months.

She said “bumper profits” continued, but the legacy of attacks on unions had been "10 years of wage stagnation and now dramatically declining real wages, which low unemployment, increased productivity…".

"In coming months, we will see the Liberal Party and some of its supporters in the business lobby press play on the same old rewound cassette from the 80s: relentless, repetitive, ridiculous anti-union rhetoric.

"Peter Dutton and (shadow workplace relations minister, Senator) Michaelia Cash will try to rely on the caricatures to create something scarier than people not being able to pay their bills." 

McManus said these "old tunes" would include fear mongering about a 1970s "wage price spiral" and strikes hitting "mum and dad" businesses.

Both have never occurred.

She criticised the use of the term "union thug" when 55% of union members in Australia are women and the "average" union member is a 36-year-old nurse. 

She said these anti-union messages began in earnest after the Hawke Government's Accord delivered Medicare and superannuation.

But McManus said Australians would not respond well to this sort of messaging because they want the "politics of division" to end.

-       With AAP and Workplace Express

Joanne Braithwaite’s Archibald Prize entry portrait of ACTU Secretary Sally McManus. (artgallery.nsw.gov.au)