Business, unions decide reform is too hard

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Big news: nothing will happen! At New Daily:

Streamlining awards and overhauling enterprise bargaining agreements is worth it for working people, the head of Australia’s largest union says.

Australian Council of Trade Unions head Sally McManus says she will be genuinely listening to employers’ groups.

“We’re going to give it a go and we reckon that’s worth it for working people,” Ms McManus told Nine’s Today show on Wednesday.

The meetings are part of the federal government’s “JobMaker” plan announced on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government would shelve its union-busting Ensuring Integrity Bill as a sign of good faith ahead of the latest effort to reform Australia’s industrial relations system.

Five working groups will look at changes designed to help coronavirus recovery.

They will review awards, enterprise bargaining agreements, casual work, union and employer misconduct and greenfields – agreements that set flat wages and conditions throughout the lifetime of a construction project.

“I think for a long time we’ve been in our corners and seen things through a prism of WorkChoices really,” Ms McManus said.

Mr Morrison said it was time for all parties involved to “put down their weapons”.

“It’s a consensus-based process,” Mr Morrison told the ABC on Wednesday.

But asked if he would guarantee that workers won’t be worse off after the negotiations, Mr Morrison said the debate shouldn’t be so black and white.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said employers were willing to put the past behind them.

“We are all doing this for the people who need their jobs back,” she told ABC.

She welcomed news the government had ditched laws making it easier to de-register unions and ban officials.

“We need to focus on the task at hand,” Ms Westacott said.

So, we’ll see some IR nips and tucks and that’s it. So much for grand reform, not that it was ever really on the agenda:

In short, no structural reform at all. Here’s Koch with Scotty from Marketing over-selling nothing:

We’d better get immigration running very fast, very fast or jobs and growth are cactus.

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David Llewellyn-Smith
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.

He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.

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