The lowest-paid public servants will receive a special salary boost under a plan to reduce pay gaps across the Australian Public Service (APS).
The Public Service Commission tabled a proposal on Tuesday to fix "pay fragmentation" — large differences in salaries among staff employed at nominally the same level.
The Labor Party pledged to address this problem during last year's election campaign.
It noted that the worst-affected staff were often Indigenous — such as those who worked in Aboriginal Hostels and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies — as well as staff in cultural institutions, such as museums.
As present, the pay gaps for the most common job levels are as high as $27,265 for APS level 6 officers and $34,168 for executive level 1 (EL1) officers.
These gaps have slowly widened since the 1990s, when then prime minister Paul Keating ended whole-of-government pay deals and made agencies negotiate their own enterprise agreements with staff.
Today, the best-paying government workplaces tend to be Treasury and other central agencies with economic and financial responsibilities.
'Meaningful first step' to close gap
The commission's proposal involves creating a new minimum base salary at each job level, which is higher than the current minimum salary.
Staff whose salaries fall below the new minimum would receive a top-up increase this year, in addition to the proposed APS-wide pay rise of 4 per cent.
The head of the commission's workplace relations bargaining taskforce, Peter Riordan, said this first step would reduce average APS pay fragmentation from 26 per cent to 18 per cent.
He warned that pay gaps would "take time to address".
"Pay fragmentation that has emerged over decades affects employee attraction, retention and mobility," Mr Riordan said.
"We're confident this proposed approach takes an important and meaningful first step."
However, the proposal would affect relatively few staff.
At the APS6 level, 17 workplaces have base salaries under the new proposed minimum ($86,018). The largest of these are the Department of Home Affairs and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
At the EL1 level, only six workplaces fall under the new minimum ($105,011). All are small agencies, with the exception of the BOM.
Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Melissa Donnelly said the proposal needed to go further.
"We need more substantial progress towards pay equity this round [of negotiations]," she said.
"It's a big job to undo the pay inequity that's opened up across APS agencies, but we have to make real progress in this round and we would like to see a more ambitious proposal."
The government made its first pay offer to about 160,000 APS staff earlier this month. It proposed to increase their pay by about 10.9 per cent over three years.
If the government's forecasts are accurate, that would represent a pay rise of about 2 per cent after future inflation is taken into account.
However, staff would still be earning less, in real terms, than they were last year.
