But Burke and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus both disputed business predictions of more strikes,with Burke arguing “we have low rates of strikes. We’ll still have low rates of strikes”.
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The construction division of the CFMEU is excluded from multi-employer bargaining because of its law-breaking history.
Introducing the Secure Jobs,Better Pay bill on Thursday,Burke said the government was open to revising multi-employer agreements to make sure they were “fair,democratic and workable,and occur at the enterprise level”.
In provisions designed to stop a repeat of the Sydney Trains strikes,the minister argued that compulsory conciliation before a strike,in which employers and employees must sit down together first to resolve a dispute,would encourage deals to be struck.
“Compulsory conciliation will have a different impact when you’ve potentially got arbitration at the end. You know,if you go into a meeting being asked,‘can you all agree and if you don’t there’s no consequences’,you’re less likely to get agreement. When you’ve got arbitration[by the Fair Work Commission] at the end,it doesn’t mean you end up with the commission making the decisions;usually it means the parties sort issues out more quickly,” he earlier told ABC radio.
McManus said:“We don’t want to see more strikes,we want to see more pay rises.”
She said the reforms would encourage firms to strike deals rather than facing compulsory arbitration by the commission.
“It will mean that there will be more bargains reached and there’ll be,hopefully,agreements and more efficient bargaining. We note that it’s actually extremely hard to even access protected[strike] action,extremely hard,” she said.
In his budget reply speech,Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the new laws would be “a throwback to the 1980s”.
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“Labor’s changes will impose industry-wide,‘one size fits all’ conditions which empower unions,” he said.
University of Adelaide industrial relations expert Professor Andrew Stewart said he was surprised to see complex multi-employer bargaining provisions brought on so quickly.
“There are a lot of questions to be raised about the multi-employer bargaining provisions in the bill but the one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that,even if these provisions are introduced,they are not going to lead to widespread industrial action,” he said.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable said industry-wide bargaining allowed unions,with the Fair Work Commission’s approval,to force bargaining on “any number of businesses that meet a broad common interest test” that can bind employers by location or type of business.
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“Bargaining is no longer voluntary,and it enables industrial action in relation to multi-party agreements,” Constable said,comparing the bill to the Coalition’s controversial industrial relations reforms.
“This runs the risk of being Labor’s Work Choices. This is unnecessarily rushed. A promise has been made to the unions to pay back the unions for their support.”
The bill also makes changes to the ‘better off overall test’,a legal threshold that ensures workers do not go backwards when negotiating pay rises.
As the government had already flagged,the bill abolishes the Australian Building and Construction Commission,makes job security and gender pay equity explicit goals of the Fair Work Act,prohibits sexual harassment and pay secrecy in the workplace and enshrines the right to request flexible work hours with recourse to the Commission.
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