Employees see the future
- and crave more time.
By Sherrill Nixon, Workplace Reporter
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 10 2003The search for a better balance between work and family responsibilities and the ageing workforce are predicted to mould agreements between bosses and their employees in the year ahead.
With several thousand agreements expiring by mid-year, industrial observers say family-friendly provisions and superannuation top-ups are among the most sought-after conditions now.
Forty-two per cent of federal enterprise agreements contain at least one family-friendly provision, says a federal government report released last year.
One of the best family-friendly provisions - in place since 1984 - is in Victoria, where public school teachers are able to take up to seven years of unpaid leave for child-rearing.
"It was, and remains, a cutting-edge provision," said Mary Bluett, president of the Australian Education Union's Victorian branch.
The construction industry has kicked off its enterprise bargaining round with a claim for a notional 36-hour week.
Renegotiating about 900 agreements covering about 35,000 workers in NSW, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union is seeking an extra six rostered days off a year.
The extra time off would be used to extend long weekends for construction workers, who often work 60 hours in six-day weeks.
"We are concentrating on what the workers told us is a key objective: having weekends to themselves," said the union's state secretary, Andrew Ferguson.
The manufacturing, university and local government sectors join construction as the main fronts in enterprise bargaining this year.
The system of bargaining, introduced by the Keating government in the early 1990s, has taken hold, with about 37 per cent of workers having their pay set by collective agreements.
Slightly more people, including small business owners, come under individual agreements or contracts; about a fifth get their pay based on the industry award.
Collective bargaining is strongest in the public sector, where nearly 90 per cent of workers come under an enterprise agreement, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Agreements certified in the past six months in all sectors have allowed for an average annual wage increase of 4.1 per cent, slightly higher than the average in recent years.
Ron Callus, the director of the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, said the nature of agreements had changed significantly over the past decade.
The first agreements were sold as an opportunity to overhaul work culture. Subsequent deals went back to basics - wages and standard conditions such as hours - while a small percentage of companies chose to annualise salaries by rolling in overtime and leave loading.
Professor Callus is now seeing companies becoming more innovative in response to their employees' needs, with tailored lifestyle clauses.
Examples included career breaks for study and employer-paid gym fees for young singles, more flexible hours or extra time off for parents and extended carer's leave, superannuation top-ups or phased-in retirement for older workers.
Other creative provisions from recent agreements include a year's unpaid leave to care for any member of the worker's immediate family. Another provides for three months' unpaid leave to return to country of origin when necessary.
Barbara Pocock, of Adelaide University's Centre for Labour Research, says it is time to revisit working hours after studies showed Australians working some of the world's longest hours.
She said productivity had risen so dramatically in the past 10 years in Australia, that it would have funded an extra month's leave for workers.
"Time sovereignty really is one area of significant bargaining potential in the future," she said.
©The Sydney Morning Herald
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