Broader Union Anthony Forsyth RMIT University
Organising for better pay & conditions The industrial & political context of bargaining post - the May federal election IT’S GREAT that we now have a federal Labor Govt, but we are still stuck with the industrial relations legislation enacted by the last one, made worse by a decade of employer gaming and judicial watering down of the already weak provisions for collective bargaining and the right to strike. The focus will now be on the IR reform process - and the Jobs & Skills Summit in September. For unions like ours, it’s going to be a matter of pushing Labor to ‘go bolder’ than its policy commitments (in that respect, the Greens’ strong election result could be very useful). The lesson from 2009 is that Labor cannot buy into business concerns (remember ‘balancing flexibility & fairness’?!) – the first year of this first term is the time to rewrite the Fair Work (FW) Act with the goal of rebuilding collective worker power. So what does that look like, and where might things end up?
nteu.org.au/sentry | Vol. 4 - No. 2
Reform of the bargaining system We don’t have support for genuine collective bargaining in the FW Act – we have a framework of enterprise bargaining, in which employers make agreements with employees, and unions play a role where they are strong enough. Labor’s election policy says it would address some of the glaring problems in the FW Act that employers have exploited to avoid bargaining with unions, i.e.: • ‘small scope’ agreements, where employers do a substandard agreement with a few employees – but with a wide scope clause that enables the agreement to be applied to a much larger workforce (legitimised by the courts in cases beginning with John Holland Construction seven years ago) • unilateral termination of agreements on spurious ‘public interest’ grounds, pushing workers back onto awards & recasting agreement negotiations in favour of employers – pioneered in the higher education sector in the Murdoch University case, of course. • So Labor will knock those two damaging business strategies over and improve the good faith bargaining provisions, with greater access to resolve intractable negotiations through arbitration. As for more fundamentally transforming bargaining – Labor’s national platform says it will improve access to collective bargaining, including where appropriate through multi-employer bargaining. I’ll come to that in a minute – first, let’s consider something that few people are talking about (as far as I’m aware) …
NTEU SENTRY | Aug 2022
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