Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week we had a visit to the parliament from people who work in a lot of low-paid industries—members of United Voice, workers—coming to tell us their experience of enterprise bargaining under the current system. It's a simple fact: wage growth is at its lowest since 1991. We have an industrial relations bargaining system equally as old as that statistic.

What we know is that the current system is not working for the majority of workers in our economy. One in four workers relies upon the awards system for their wages. It is barely the legal minimum, and in many cases these workers are earning less than $700 a week—$700 to pay for everything: rent, clothing, car insurance, food, medical bills, energy bills, you name it. Yet what we haven't heard from this government is any plan on how to genuinely lift these workers off the minimum, to empower them to enterprise bargain. They have been locked out of the system, many saying that they feel like they're caged and trapped.

Part of the problem is the nature of work today. Take one example: private contracting. Gamal Babiker shared his story. He's a contract cleaner. He has been working for Spotless cleaning for many years in shopping centres, yet when they tried to organise all the shopping centres' intercollective bargaining, Spotless used the excuse: 'If we paid higher wages, the next time the contract went out for tender we'd be undercut by somebody else because the client wasn't engaged in any way.'

We've seen that happen here with the Parliament House cleaners who did strike higher wages with their contractor. The moment that this government had the chance, they put the contract out for tender. A new contractor came in, paying the award and undercutting the cleaners.

There is a problem when it comes to bargaining for workers in the private contracting industries, like cleaning and security. There is also a problem when it comes to government funded sectors like early childhood education, where they have multiple employers spread across almost every single town in Australia. In early childhood education, there are over 4,000 individual workplaces and therefore employers. To collectively bargain for each of those, one at a time, would take over 4,000 years. It's just not practical.

We need to start working on a better industrial action system that ensures that all Australian workers receive a pay rise. Everyone should have access to the benefits of bargaining. This will help employers, this will help industry, but most importantly it will help Australian workers.