Australian Workplace Agreements: how ironic that the individual workplace instruments unions spent a decade vehemently attacking should now become the benchmark for wage parity in workplace negotiations over terms and conditions.
It is clear that higher rates of pay in individual agreements will increasingly set the standard for general wage increases as part of collective negotiations.
How did this happen? Well, it goes like this. When the Rudd government started to introduce its industrial relations regime, it began by stopping employers and employees from entering into any further AWAs. Existing AWAs could continue and transitional arrangements allowed some individual agreements to be made in limited circumstances.
Then, early this year, the government introduced the transitional framework by which existing workplace arrangements would gradually move into the new system now regulated under the Fair Work Act.
Part of this transitional framework allows employers and employees to terminate existing AWAs under certain conditions. The termination of AWAs is an outcome the government very much wants and the new framework imposes few hurdles to their demise. In another irony, however, its policy, while hostile to the concept of AWAs, was amenable to the need for individual statutory contracts known as individual flexibility arrangements.
Specifically, if an AWA has not passed its nominal expiry date, the parties can agree to terminate it. If the AWA has passed that date, either party can unilaterally apply to Fair Work Australia to terminate the AWA, although this takes about four months. So here's how it all comes together.
Many employers negotiating upcoming workplace agreements with unions under the new regime are trying to transition AWA employees across to existing collective agreements in anticipation of having all employees covered in the new deals that will eventuate.
In order to elicit the early agreement of their employees to come off their AWAs and on to the collective agreement, employers are often agreeing to maintain relativities between the rates of pay AWA employees received as part of the flexibility they accepted when entering into their AWAs and the present rates otherwise payable under the existing collective agreement.
So, for example, an employee who entered into an AWA might have accepted greater flexibility in hours and duties in exchange for a rate of pay fixed at 5 per cent higher than the corresponding rate in the collective agreement. In order then to persuade that employee to come across to the collective agreement without the employer having to wait for the nominal expiry date and then apply over a four-month period to Fair Work Australia, the employer will offer to maintain the differential over time. AWA employees are, as you would imagine, quite happy to maintain their wage relativities.
Enter the unions.
What we are seeing under the new system is unions exploiting this process by campaigning for wage parity between those on collective agreements and AWA employees coming from AWAs on to collective agreements.
The refrain is: why should two people "doing the same job" receive different rates of pay? The solution? Everyone should receive the AWA rate in addition to the normal percentage increases over the life of agreements.
Forget that this completely ignores the fact that two people can occupy the same role but perform it differently or within different parameters. That's precisely what higher AWA rates were intended to buy in the first place.
There is no explanation from unions on the grounds of productivity, whether by way of greater flexibility or some other quid pro quo.
For an instrument so maligned, AWAs seem to be playing an important part in the unions' case for higher wages, which are not at all controversial if justified and neutral on jobs.
Perhaps you can now see why under the new industrial relations system the more prudent union negotiators will not hamper the use of individual flexibility arrangements by employers wanting to use them to pay higher rates.
This is why the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union's opposition to the use of these arrangements at Campbell's Soup earlier this year made little sense and did not serve the interests of its members in the longer term.
Let's finish remembering what this is not about.
Committed and passionate union advocacy to advance the interests of their members is perfectly legitimate.
What we should deprecate is the hypocrisy associated with criticisms of the very flexibility that is now being relied on to campaign for higher wages.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment