Why IEU members - and all Australians - need industrial relations reform

Big business, led by mining behemoths, is preparing to bombard Australians with messages attacking the industrial relations reforms proposed in the Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill. Get ready for anything resembling a better deal for everyday workers to be portrayed as the end of the world by company executives receiving exorbitant bonuses from companies recording record profits as inflation soars.

Opponents of the legislation are opponents of fixing the wage crisis. There are huge problems with the current system, including low wages; broken bargaining, which covers only one in seven workers and offers them almost no leverage; and the gender pay gap.

It is little wonder that those who benefit from restricting the bargaining power of employees are resisting reform.

ACTU President Michele O’Neil laid out the facts at a Senate Committee Hearing on 4 November: “Company profits went up by 28.5 per cent in the last 12 months and CEO pay by 41.6 per cent in 2020-21. Even before then, wages have been stagnant for 10 years. This is an unbalanced system where profits grow, productivity rises, CEOs get obscene pay and yet ordinary workers do not get the benefit of the hard work that they're putting in”.

“Workers' share of the national wealth they create is now at the lowest-ever level.”

IEU General Secretary Deb James also addressed the Senate Committee. She called the process of bargaining a multi-enterprise Agreement “long and intractable”.

“We want to play by the rules, but we just need rules that are actually fair,” she told the Senators.

“Employers have all the power in this set of bargaining and employees have none. In pursuit of this multi-employer Agreement that they're seeking to make—and it's their decision to have the Agreement this way; we don't get a say in that—we don't have any rights in respect of protected industrial action.”

Deb said IEU members who take actions as minor as wearing a campaign badge in their workplace face fines for taking unprotected industrial action.

“Under the current legislation… the minimum amount of money that could be deducted from an employee's pay packet for doing a 15-minute ban on a meeting, for example, would be four hours.

“This legislation really needs to change because it's simply not fair for employees. There's no balance. Employers have all the power… It's up to them whether they come to the table or not. They could walk away from the table. You can't go to Fair Work to get any support or conciliation at Fair Work.

“And the legislation, as it's been proposed, I think would give far greater protections for members like my members out in schools in terms of negotiations with their employers.”

The IEU’s current bargaining deadlock with Catholic employers is an example of why our current multi-employer bargaining laws must change.

At the commencement of bargaining with a group of 34 employers, representing 25,000 Victorian Catholic school staff, we asked employers to seek a ‘single interest authorisation’, which would have meant that all normal bargaining rules applied. This is how Catholic education in other states operates – and it makes sense as they are (by and large) centrally funded as one and operate as one, relying on centralised systems.

They refused (which the Fair Work Act allows them to do) and insisted on continuing with a multi-employer Agreement.

This has resulted in our members being denied the right to take protected industrial action – so any action they do take leaves them vulnerable to disproportionate pay deductions, fines or potentially prosecution. It also means we can’t progress bargaining through the Fair Work Commission, which cannot arbitrate a bargaining dispute for a multi-employer Agreement.

When the IEU took recalcitrant Victorian Catholic employers to the FWC for conciliation, they (in our view) simply disregarded the advice of the Commissioner and failed to follow through on the agreed outcome, leaving overworked teachers waiting even longer for a deal on workload measures agreed to in every other Victorian school months ago.

As a result of this major power imbalance, negotiations have seriously stalled. We’re approaching the end of the school year, and staff are not clear on what their conditions will be next year. Principals in over 500 schools are struggling to plan for 2023 or to recruit staff in a time of worker shortages.

IEU member Heather Macardy, a primary school teacher in the Catholic primary sector, told the Senate Committee staff working in Catholic schools are “absolutely exhausted”.

“We feel so undervalued by the disregard from our employers after 18 months to even get an Agreement happening that addresses our workloads, our wages, our conditions, and equality issues such as flexible work arrangements, and also that expectation on teachers of all the out-of-hours, unpaid work that we do that has just become some expectation that we do daily.

“We need to get wages moving. This is so critical because getting our deal through is affecting people's lives. It is affecting our lives. We need the negotiation process to hurry up. It is too slow. It is far too slow.”

Heather said employees don't want to take unprotected action.

“It's hard for staff. It's risky for staff. We don't want to strike. But, at the end of the day, after 18 months of all these stalling tactics, we are finding we need a voice. We need a voice and we need the right to have that voice. We shouldn't have to worry about fines or sanctions against us. Teachers and education support staff need to be able to get help and we need to have our workers heard. This legislation is a way to change things and make things better for employees.”

ACTU President Michele O’Neil with IEU member Heather Macardy after the Senate Committee Hearing

Renowned employment lawyer Josh Bornstein told The Age lobbyists who successfully campaigned for laws that suppressed wages since the 1980s are already fearmongering, saying that if multi-employer bargaining is introduced, “jobs will be lost, the country will be beset with nationwide strikes, and unemployment will spike”.

The reality is that single employer bargaining only works well in “large, blue-collar companies with predominantly full-time employees; in particular, male-dominated factories that were prevalent in the period after World War II”.

“The system is now outdated, having ossified while business has radically restructured. Small and medium enterprises employ over 45 per cent of employees and those workers lack the capacity and power to bargain collectively for better conditions.

He says single employer bargaining doesn’t work for women working in feminised industries including childcare and aged care or for casual employees.

“It has evolved into a low wage growth system.”

He says Senate crossbenchers and the Australian public should “assume the brace position in advance of a sustained blitz from big business lobbyists”.

“When the politicians in Canberra are inundated with lobbyists seeking to block what is in reality a very cautious attempt to stimulate wage growth through limited multi-employer bargaining, they should ask the lobbyists one simple question; when are you going to share some of your record profits with your employees?”