The union movement will seek a new deal on wages for millions of workers at next week’s jobs and skills summit with a bold plan to allow entire industries to negotiate the same pay and conditions despite business fears about the cost of the change.

ACTU national secretary Sally McManus will call for major changes to workplace law to make it easier for many companies in the same industry to sign up to a single enterprise bargaining agreement and deliver efficiencies and pay rises for all their workers.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus: “We’ve got to reset the whole discussion about productivity.”Credit:Eddie Jim

Airing her frustration at shrinking incomes, McManus told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that workers were angry at missing out on the gains enjoyed by executives and would not accept a bigger intake of foreign workers when salaries were falling in real terms.

“I can tell you that there’s a simmering anger and a growing resentment among working people that they know that they have been contributing to the success of the country and businesses as well,” she said.

The ACTU’s new plan makes it clear to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the political and business leaders at next week’s summit that any discussion on migration must accept that lifting wages is the priority if Australia is to fill the labour shortages.

The union movement’s workplace plan would allow unions to negotiate enterprise bargaining agreements across sectors such as aged care and childcare with employers as small as a single nursing home or early learning facility, dramatically extending the workplace regime currently dominated by big employers like Woolworths and Coles.

At stake is the relative power of employers and unions in hard-fought negotiations under a system that is crucial to getting deals that make companies more efficient and therefore boost productivity and economic growth.

With only 14 per cent of workers covered by enterprise bargaining agreements because the system is mainly used by big employers, the ACTU proposal would dramatically extend the system to smaller employers by allowing them to negotiate together as a single industry.

Behind the push is the ACTU’s argument that real wages have risen only 1 per cent over the past decade while productivity has increased 13 per cent and that this proves most of the gains have gone towards profits and executive salaries rather than workers.

“We’ve got to reset the whole discussion about productivity in our country because at the moment workers are hearing that it means working harder for less and they’re not getting anything out of it,” McManus said in an interview.

“Now, productivity isn’t about working harder for less. It’s about working smarter, adding better value, all of those things.

“Absolutely that means that people have to start sharing in those gains. And if we continue to go down a path where workers don’t share in productivity growth, they don’t share when they see the profits going up and they see CEO pay increases instead, that is not fair.

“I don’t believe that is a sustainable situation for our country and it’s not a fair one.”

McManus said the concerns over wages explained the new findings in the latest Resolve Political Monitor, published yesterday, showing that only 20 per cent of Australians believed a bigger migration intake should be one of the priorities for the summit to fix labour shortages.

“We’ve got a labour shortage, and employers say it’s their number one issue, but at the same time we’ve got savage real wage cuts,” she said.

“So I don’t think it’s at all surprising that your average person is saying: ‘hang on a minute, the priority has got to be to get wages moving’.

“Of course there is scope to be trying to reach agreement on migration. We’ve been very careful about those calls because there are some employers who are basically saying they want to return to a system where they can bring in whoever they want, and we know where that leads – to massive exploitation.

“If you just decided tomorrow that we’re going to change all the migration settings and you did nothing to fix wages, that would be a bad outcome for the country.”

The ACTU came close to an agreement on workplace reform with the Business Council of Australia at the height of the pandemic two years ago but the deal was blocked by the Master Builders Association and others who thought it gave too much power to the unions.

McManus is seeking to build on those talks at the jobs and skills summit by making a renewed attempt to overhaul the enterprise bargaining rules so unions could negotiate pay and conditions across industries with small employers.

Several unions could be party to the agreements with employers across an entire industry, meaning a small business could sign up.

Unlike pattern bargaining, she said, the multi-employer enterprise bargaining rules would make sure all employers were part of the unified negotiation.

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