The high stakes dispute comes as the Albanese government raised concerns with Fair Work about the potential for employers to seek to terminate enterprise agreements before it amends laws to stop the practice.
“The government is concerned by the practice of some employers threatening to terminate agreements as a bargaining tactic,” Burke wrote in the letter to Fair Work president Justice Ian Ross.
Commuters at Central Station on Wednesday.Credit:Louise Kennerlet
“I am conscious that there is always the possibility that some employers may seek to terminate agreements prior to any amendments.”
RBTU national secretary Mark Diamond said he hoped the federal government’s move to end unfair terminations would force the NSW Premier to “see reason and withdraw his threat against his own workers and come back to the bargaining table”.
“There is no place for political scheming in enterprise bargaining. Premier Perrottet’s actions are a reflection of a government in crisis that thinks it can gain a political advantage by attacking workers,” he said.
Claassens accused Perrottet of attempting to paint rail workers as villains to ease mounting pressure on his own government.
“You have to wonder why the NSW government is targeting the RTBU when plenty of other industries are taking action like nurses and teachers,” he said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. On Wednesday night,and then again on Thursday afternoon,we were sitting across from the most senior managers on our railway,and they were blindsided by political brinkmanship by the NSW government. It’s like the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”
In its application to the industrial umpire,Unions NSW said the bargaining had been “characterised by widespread and highly publicised disputation”.
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“The substantive matters in dispute between the parties are readily capable of being agreed. However,progress toward agreement has repeatedly been stultified and reversed by[Sydney] Trains’ disorganised,inconsistent and highly politicised approach to bargaining,” the application said.
It argued that the government had breached “good faith bargaining obligations” by publicly threatening to terminate the current agreements if its unilaterally proposed agreement was not approved by rail staff.
It also blamed the breakdown in negotiations on a revolving door of government ministers involved.
The government has also warned unions that its $1 billion offer to modify the state’s mothballed intercity train fleet will also be scrapped if industrial action extends past 5pm on Friday.
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