Sue Bolton
Since Labor leader Kim Beazley's announcement that a future Labor government would abolish Australian Workplace Agreements, PM John Howard has repeatedly claimed that workers on AWAs have higher wages than workers on collective agreements.
But you can't just look at AWAs as they existed before the Work Choices legislation was introduced. The federal government's own data show that every AWA that has been signed since Work Choices was introduced has removed at least one protected award condition. In fact, 64% of new AWAs have abolished annual leave loading, 63% have scrapped penalty rates, 52% have removed shift-work loadings, 41% have scrapped public holiday rates and 31% have cut overtime pay.
Before Work Choices, workers who signed an AWA were meant to be no worse off than workers on an award, because AWAs were meant to comply with Howard's stripped-down awards with 20 minimum conditions.
Under Work Choices, however, AWAs have to comply with only five conditions: the minimum wage; four weeks' paid annual leave, of which two weeks can be cashed out; carers' or sick leave; parental leave; and a standard 38-hour work week with the hours averaged over 12 months.
Once the AWA has been lodged with the Office of the Employment Advocate, it is effective immediately. The OEA does not check that the AWA complies with the five minimum conditions.
But even before Work Choices, AWAs were worse for workers than collective agreements. In the June issue of Unions NSW's Workers Online, professor of industrial relations at Griffith University David Peetz referred to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing that non-managerial workers on registered individual contracts received an average of $23.40 per hour, 2% less than workers on registered collective agreements.
He said that for men the difference between earnings under the two systems was not significant, but women on AWAs had hourly earnings some 11% less than women on registered collective agreements.
For casual workers, Peetz said, AWAs paid 15% less than registered collective agreements. For permanent part-time workers, it was 25% less.
It is only for permanent, full-time, male workers that AWAs deliver higher average hourly earnings than registered collective agreements (by just 4%). But even this comparison is distorted, says Peetz, by the inclusion of a tiny number of high-paying, state-registered individual contracts in the mining industry, while the figures on registered collective agreements are dragged down by the inclusion of non-union enterprise agreements, which consistently have lower wage increases than union agreements.
When government ministers claim that AWAs produce higher wages than collective agreements, they choose their figures carefully. For example, they often use weekly rather than hourly earnings, because AWA workers work 6% more hours than workers on collective agreements, concealing the fact that they earn 2% less pay per hour. Pay comparisons are massaged further by including managerial employees, while many of the workers on low-wage individual contracts are excluded.
Howard and his ministers also ignore the downward trend in wages for workers on AWAs — a decline of 11% in 2002-04.
From Green Left Weekly, June 21 2006.
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