'A Fair Go All Round': Workplace Relations in the 21st Century

These include attempts to impose stringent “one size fits all” regulations on working hours; to extend redundancy provisions; to entrench a selective suite of entitlements in the name of work/family balance; and attempts to constrain the employment of workers on a casual basis.

Every year the AIRC hears arguments to raise minimum award wage rates by amounts often greater than justified by productivity increases.

The efforts to raise and extend the centrally determined safety net may appear fair and reasonable - at least from the standpoint of a full-time worker in secure employment.  However, that is a very narrow reading of fairness and it overlooks several important dimensions.

It overlooks, for instance, the unfairness for those workers who, as a result of the higher wage rates, are either excluded from a position altogether or are unable to find the number of hours of work they would prefer. It also overlooks the unfairness of the reduced scope for negotiations at the enterprise level.  Such negotiations could be channelled into better addressing the diverse needs of individual workforces for improved training and for more flexible and more family-friendly work design.

If productivity increases are absorbed in raising and extending the minimum standard safety net to fit a prescribed “social norm”, they cannot also be used to meet the diverse preferences of individual workers and workplaces. 

It is true that Australia’s traditional legitimate concerns with fairness require an active approach. Just as an extension of centralism is not the way forward, the trickle-down model is not convincing either.

We require, instead, a new emphasis on the enablers that create and improve opportunities.  We need an acceptance of diversity and we need the flexibility required to cater for that diversity. We need, in short, a richer and deeper policy agenda that allows us to build “a fair go all round” in its most profound, dynamic sense. This must embrace, for example, the role of education and training and the place of the broader social safety net – including income support and progressive taxation – in overall fairness.

Two important changes would help bring such broader perspectives to bear on our workplace relations. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission should have access to expertise that goes beyond the narrow realm of industrial relations to cover a broader range of disciplines. It should also be much more willing to commission independent research to complement the often one-sided research presented by the parties arguing their case as adversaries.

These changes would allow for more rounded and better-balanced considerations of applications.