With days left until the government’s Jobs and Skills summit, business and unions have been emphasising the common interests and points of agreement between them on the skills shortage and enterprise bargaining reform.
It is everything else that will become the focus of discussion in Canberra next week.
Questions relating to the overhaul of the existing system for determining wages, and just how much migration will be needed to fix a chronic skills shortage are shaping as the most contested areas.
The two-day event starts on Thursday in Canberra and brings together representatives from unions and business, civil society and state and local government.
The jobs summit will have three streams of focus – industrial relations reform, skills and training reform, and migration.
Haggling over bargaining
A proposal to strike agreements to cover more than one employer across an industry has generated the most discussion.
“We have not seen real wage rises in this country for 10 whole years now,” ACTU secretary Sally McManus said.
Backers say the move would provide smaller and medium-sized businesses flexibility and an alternative to highly technical and slow enterprise agreements.
But Business Council of Australia (BCA) chief Jennifer Westacott expressed hesitation on Sunday about what she styled as unintended consequences, including the potential for employers in one part of a supply chain to face pressure to grant concessions they could not meet but which had become a standard after they were agreed to by businesses in other parts of an industry.
“At an industry level, we [could] try to fix one problem and end up with a lot more,” she told the ABC on Sunday.
“My next concern is industry-wide strike action. Don’t forget before the 1983 [Hawke government national economic summit] we lost 1.3 million days in strike action.”
Ms McManus said that industry-wide bargaining had produced pay rises, not industrial action, where it had been implemented overseas, but that it was also workers’ rights to withdraw their labour.
The ACTU head said agreements across multiple workplaces would redress an imbalance in bargaining power that had worked against workers.
“In a childcare centre, the idea that you can bargain with individual management … and improve wages for yourself, let alone all childcare workers is obviously not practical,” she said.
Migration
The Coalition has been calling on the government to act immediately to approve the BCA’s call to increase the migration cap to 220,000 to compensate for the shortfall during the pandemic.
But on Sunday Treasurer Jim Chalmers said migration should not be seen as a solution on its own.
“We can’t fall in the trap of saying migration is a substitute for training. We need to move on both fronts in sensible ways,” Dr Chalmers told Sky News.
“We can do something sensible (with immigration), we can have more appropriate settings for our economy at the same time as we train more of our people for more of these opportunities.”
Ms McManus said Australia had a gender-segregated workforce and women’s labour was undervalued in child care, aged care and disability care.
“We’ve got to change the laws to allow those jobs to be properly valued,” she said.
The BCA and the ACTU, Ms Westacott said, were on a “unity ticket that we want people to be paid more and those wage increases sustained”.
A statement broadly calling for investment in skills and training across the workforce was released on Sunday and signed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Ai Group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the BCA.
