Legislation is expected to be drafted imminently as Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government to act on dozens of outcomes from the summit this year,but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not say what boundaries would be applied to multi-employer bargaining.
“We’ll work through that,but I think there has been a great deal of commonality. There’s not unanimity,there’s a difference between the two things,” Albanese said. “But there is a common interest that says this,enterprise bargaining isn’t working at the moment”.
Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus insisted the summit made clear the urgent need for multi-employer bargaining as the government committed to an overhaul of pay negotiations to give workers more power to forge agreements across several businesses at once.
McManus said that without change,real wages would continue to go backwards. “The summit has made clear the urgent need for action to make bargaining simpler,fairer,and more accessible,including with new multi-employer bargaining options,” she said.
But Westacott said the BCA didn’t believe multi-employer bargaining “is a solution to the problems of low wages,particularly in the[publicly] funded sector,and sectors dominated by women”.
“We believe that we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t solve one problem and create 50 others,” she said,agreeing with other business groups that they didn’t want to allow the possibility of wide-scale industrial action by allowing broad,uniform agreements across enterprises.
Unions want to see multiple-employer agreements in the care industries,which are low-paid,and dominated by women. But BCA president Tim Reed said women would get higher wages through innovation and productivity increases within businesses,“not across industries”.
“The industrial relations system therefore needs to remain focused at the enterprise level,” he said.