Sally McManus says insecure work and low wage growth has led to young people who ‘don’t know what annual leave is like’
“Insecure work and low wage growth, both have crept up on us and actually have happened in such a short period of time; it is really one generation where we have gone from someone [being able to] finish school or university and have a good chance of having a good steady job. You may have changed jobs, but at least you get leave and all the rights everyone fought for,” McManus told Guardian Australia.
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“We didn’t have a problem with low wage growth 10 years ago. Companies would get more productive and wages would go up. And now that is not happening.
“And when they try and get them, they don’t have the tools, because they have been taken off them. We have not acknowledged that the policy settings aren’t right, and you have to change those to enable people in the day to day sense get a share of the wealth which is being created in this country.”
McManus said while the Fair Work Act, put in place in 2009 in an effort to remedy the Howard-era Work Choices changes, was of its time, the situation had changed after the global financial crisis.
“It had new ideas in there, a whole idea about low-paid bargaining and [we thought] maybe this would work,” she said.
“Maybe the Fair Work Act might have worked if we didn’t have the GFC and this huge inequality problem and power imbalance.”
The “Change the Rules” campaign recently launched by the ACTU aims to address low wage growth and the growing issue of insecure work in Australia. The union movement has also said it will target vulnerable Coalition seats as it seeks to rewrite industrial relations protections in Australia.
McManus said while the Turnbull government remained the main focus, given it was in power, all political parties would be facing pressure to commit to better protections, including allowing unions to bargain with governments to set minimum working conditions.
The Fair Work Commission “used to be able to be an independent umpire” who could intervene successfully in cases such as the current dispute between workers and management on Sydney train workers. “But now, workers don’t have the right to strike, and they don’t have the right to get arbitration. All of these things are working together to mean we have low wage growth.
“To change the laws, it is not just an election, it is also the Senate. So, we will be out there arguing with all the political parties.”
McManus said the move was about shifting the power balance towards a more equal footing between workers and their employers, something she said had been heavily bent towards multinationals and big businesses since the global financial crisis.
“What needs to happen is governments need to update our laws recognising that one side has got more powerful, because of outside reasons, and you have to have then labour laws to make sure that working people have strong enough rights and enough freedoms to make sure that people get pay increases again. You have to update them,” she said.
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