As you will recall, the view of many is that enterprise bargaining in Australia has run its course. Essentially the view is that there’s little incentive for an employer to bargain (beyond avoiding harm to the business through a tumultuous bargaining campaign) nor for employees who, for some time, have only managed to extract very
Lots has been said recently in the press about enterprise agreement making and the approval process by the Fair Work Commission (FWC). In short, the numbers of agreements being made is down and approval times are “long”. The graph below, recently cited in an AFR article, demonstrates a possible link between approval times slowing and
In a previous blog, we’ve mentioned the decline of enterprise bargaining in Australia.
Some data to support this follows in this blog. Both agreement numbers and employees covered by in-term agreements are in decline. Point 7 and 8 highlight the challenges faced by parties making agreements and the Fair Work Commission in processing agreement
So what’s the outlook for enterprise bargaining in Australia? Here’s the top 7:
The genesis of enterprise bargaining in the mid 1990’s lay in its potential to generate productivity gains at a time when workplaces were strangled by terms and conditions set for whole industries and occupations, divorced from the particular
“It has become increasingly difficult to make
One observation was the importance of “patience“ – with which we would wholeheartedly agree.
So it got us thinking about ingredients for success.
Here are some key ones, borrowed from our
A key tenet