'Ordinary workers aren't getting a fair go': Labor to urge watchdog to 'do the right thing' on wages
Labor has promised to encourage the nation’s industrial relations watchdog to “do the right thing” to lift wages for millions of workers, signalling a desire to give the independent commission a new set of priorities.
Labor finance spokesman Jim Chalmers said the Fair Work Commission would “share the priorities of an incoming Labor government” to act on the problem of low wages growth.
“It’s obvious to any objective observer of the workforce right now that ordinary working people aren’t getting a fair go,” Mr Chalmers said.
“We, as the Labor Party, it’s in our DNA, we will always do what we can to level the playing field when it comes to negotiating fair wage increases.”
The comments raise expectations for an extensive Labor policy on workplace relations, as Opposition Leader Bill Shorten argues the coming federal election will be a referendum on wages.
Mr Chalmers listed several Labor policies to help lift wages, including a halt to “dodgy visas” for foreign workers, but hedged on the key question of how a new government would force a different outcome from the independent regulator.
The Fair Work Commission is an independent tribunal that rules on minimum wages, workplace awards, enterprise agreements and industrial disputes under the Fair Work Act legislated by the Rudd government in 2009.
Mr Shorten has vowed to intervene in the commission’s ruling in June 2017 to scale back penalty rates in the hospitality and retail sectors, but is yet to reveal how it would force wider changes to pay rates.
Mr Chalmers said Labor would reverse the cuts to penalty rates, crack down on sham contracting, address the gender pay gap, crack down on “dodgy visas” and prevent labour hire being used as a means to reduce wages and conditions for the rest of the workforce.
“That’s the wages story, but on top of that we need to prioritise tax relief for people who work in this country,” Mr Chalmers told the ABC’s Insiders program.
“All of those things together do give us a good chance of shifting the needle on wages.”
Mr Chalmers said the Fair Work Commission had a “role to play” on the minimum wage, given Mr Shorten’s argument that the minimum wage is not a living wage, but he was not clear on how this would be achieved.
“It’s partly a function of the Fair Work Commission… would share the priorities of an incoming Labor government to deal with what is a wages crisis in this country,” Mr Chalmers said.
Asked whether a Labor government would persuade the Fair Work Commission to take a different approach or intervene with regulations, Mr Chalmers was also unclear.
“We need to lead on it and we need to make submissions as we do at the moment, we need to encourage the Fair Work Commission to do the right thing – that’s obviously part of it,” he said.
“Working together, the Fair Work Commission, the government and others, we can start to turn around what has become what has become the defining anxiety in the community and the defining problem in today’s soft economy under the Liberal Party.”
Mr Chalmers ruled out pattern bargaining, in which unions seek common terms to be included in two or more industrial agreements with different employers, a practice employers oppose.
“We’re not contemplating pattern bargaining,” he said.
“We’ve said that we would consider making the enterprise bargaining system fairer. We’ve said there already exist some industry-wide bargaining that hasn’t necessarily been perfectly implemented for people on low wages, but we’ve said that we’re prepared to look at other ways we might be able to apply that.”