Queensland’s Liberal National Party (LNP) government is proposing to cut construction workers’ pay and conditions and restrict their right to organise as part of its attack on the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Employees Union (CFMEU).
The proposals, which are part of the LNP’s bid to amend the state’s Building and Construction Code, go well beyond the limits already in place under federal industrial relations laws.
Unions counter that resourcing regulators of existing industrial relations, and health and safety laws, would resolve disputes in the building industry. But their ability to mobilise their members to protect their interests against the LNP and employers’ attacks is hamstrung by the federal government’s imposition of administrators on the construction division of the CFMEU. The administrators have taken power away from the union’s delegates and removed the elected officials.
The LNP commission was set up to investigate the construction division. However, it is impacting the building industry broadly.
It is proposing a new building and construction code to replace the former Labor government’s Best Practice Industry Conditions policy, which the LNP paused soon after being elected. It wants the new code in place before negotiations on enterprise agreements begin over infrastructure building for the 2032 Olympic Games and other major infrastructure projects.
The proposed code would cover state government-funded projects costing as little as $2 million, but its reach would extend to “related entities”, subcontractors and private contractors. It means that companies signing up to the code will be corralled into attacking union-won conditions to be able to show improved productivity and reduced costs.
Construction company owner online publication The Good Builder sums up the proposed code as “a rebuild of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, at state level”. The commission document justifying its proposal largely relies on testimony from Nigel Hadgkiss and Wayne Jenkinson, former leading anti-union ABCC figures.
The purported productivity gains will come from further work intensification in this dangerous industry; the federal government body SafeWork Australia has recorded more than 300 deaths in the construction industry from 2015 to 2024.
A Queensland unionist told the commission of inquiry into the CFMEU that, where the union had an enterprise agreement on site, “it’s been over 17 years since there’s been a fatality”.
Reducing the power of the unions on the job, as the proposed code will do, will put the lives and limbs of building workers at even greater risk.
Should the LNP’s code be implemented, the changes would allow all-in pay arrangements, which tend to eliminate overtime and allowances.
It would also ban:
• Limits to labour sources, opening up jobs to labour hire;
• Ratios for the employment of apprentices and trainees compared to other workers;
• Fixed rostered days off; and
• “Last-on, first off” redundancy arrangements to allow employers to decide who to sack (including union activists).
Several measures in the proposed code directly attack union organising. It intends to ban payments linked to industrial action, such as “employ[ing] a non-working shop steward or job delegate”. This would limit the ability of a experienced senior delegate, or workplace health and safety representatives, to go on site with delegated time to perform their duties.
The code also proposes to restrict union training and a union’s right of entry to workplaces to the bare minimum as required in federal law. This means that only current delegates in companies with more than 15 employees, will be able to have union training and union officials will struggle to get on to building sites.
The code would also require employers to clarify union coverage for sites. This is undoubtedly aimed to restrict the construction division’s coverage in favour of the historically less militant Australian Workers Union.