Getting it right on industrial relations

This possibility slipped away under WorkChoices (child care workers were among the last to benefit). It needs to be revived, but revived in an innovative way - assessment of work value could be a major task for the AIRC in the award modernisation process, and the resulting templates could have both legal and exhortatory force for employees outside the award system.

The government needs to work with a number of partners to emphasise equity at work not just as an issue of social justice, but also as an economic imperative. It would be very worthwhile, here, as well, to look at the continuing barriers to full time work in the tax-welfare mix - rather than just proceed with the photocopy of Costello’s tax policy after this year’s budget.

Readers may have noticed I’ve not yet mentioned unions - perhaps a surprising omission in an article on industrial relations and the workplace. But that’s a deliberate omission - from a policy perspective, the government should take a truly neutral stance towards unions in terms of the framework for bargaining.

Unions can be useful social partners, and need to focus their efforts on issues of productivity and equity as well as wage justice. But the legislative framework should provide for genuine freedom of association - and genuinely free collective bargaining (which includes an obligation on all parties to negotiate in good faith).

Unions have been in many ways held back by the twin obstacles of nostalgia for the good old days of closed shops and compulsory arbitration and by a perception that they’re not responsive to their members. Neither of those faults is true of the best unions and the most effective unionists - but unions will achieve most when they take control of their own destiny rather than rely on the state for survival.

It’s probably a tad utopian to expect that workplace regulation will cease to be an arena of major political conflict. But everyone would benefit from a more settled and flexible framework, and a major focus of the new government’s efforts should be getting this right.