In the consensus spirit of dear departed Bob Hawke, Anthony Albanese is hoping it will be all sweetness and light at this week’s jobs and skills summit. And, to give them their due, the industrial parties have been doing their best, looking to realise John Howard’s maxim: “the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us”.
The ACTU has issued a joint statement with the peak small business organisation expressing their agreement to “come together to explore ways to simplify and reduce complexity within the industrial relations system”.
The ACTU has also issued a joint statement with the Business Council – representing the nation’s biggest companies – and the two biggest employer groups. They all agree that federal and state governments should try harder and spend a lot more money fixing the almighty mess they’ve made of what they call “vocational education and training” but is actually what’s left of TAFE.
And the ACTU and the Business Council have issued a joint statement with the peak community welfare organisation, the Australian Council of Social Service, agreeing that the guiding framework of the summit should be “achieving and sustaining full employment”.
The Hawke government’s consensus summit succeeded because it sought a comprehensive, grand bargain in which each side gained something it wanted, while giving up things the others wanted.
Of course, no one knew more about hammering out a deal between warring parties than Hawke. I hope Albanese can rise to the occasion because, underneath all the smiling goodwill, the parties’ objectives in attending the summit seem diametrically opposed.
The main thing the unions want is a return to industry-wide, or at least multi-employer, wage bargaining because, under enterprise-level bargaining, they’ve lacked the industrial muscle to achieve decent pay rises. In contrast, the Business Council is desperate for a surge in migration to fill the present record number of job vacancies. Why? So big business doesn’t have to pay higher wages to attract the workers they need.
The council agrees that enterprise bargaining is broken, but what it means is that its members are finding it too hard to use the bargaining system to get their workers to agree to changes in the work they do in return for a pay rise.
Almost to a person, the nation’s economists are strong supporters of high levels of immigration. But the Economic Society of Australia’s recent survey of 50 top economists suggests their support has become more qualified.
Asked which of the policies likely to be discussed at the summit they considered to be of most benefit to Australians, only about a third picked “migration”, whereas almost two-thirds picked “education and skills”.
Independent economist Saul Eslake said he was “absolutely not an advocate of reducing our immigration intake” but he “didn’t think we should revert to being as reliant on it as a substitute for doing a better job of equipping those who are already here with the skills which will be required to obtain secure employment and decent wages in the years ahead”.
“Australia’s education system – at all levels – is increasingly failing to equip Australians with the skills required for the jobs of both today and the future,” he said. “As a result of the shortcomings in our education and training systems, we have become increasingly reliant on immigration to deliver skilled workers.”
Well, that’s one way to look at it. I think businesses have tolerated governments’ dismantling of higher education because, as part of their mania for lowering labour costs, they’ve found it easier and cheaper to import the already-trained labour they need.
Professor Sue Richardson, of Flinders University, said she thought that “judicious migration is very beneficial to the economic and social life of Australia”.
But we’ve “relied much too heavily on migration as a solution to any labour supply problem”. This “enables employers and our skills-development system to avoid a close examination of why we do not generate the skills that we need, and what needs to be done to ensure that we do”.
It seems the government is working towards increasing our immigration targets to please business and ease labour shortages, but in return for greater business support for technical training. And for higher wage rates for skilled workers on temporary visas, to limit the scope for undercutting the wages of local workers.
But Eslake suspects immigration may not return to pre-pandemic levels, at least not as quickly as widely assumed. I do too.
As for the wage-fixing arrangements, I think that’s what the ACTU will take away from the summit. Something has to be done to reduce the power imbalance between employers and employees, if the economy is to thrive.
It turns out enterprise bargaining suits big business, but not small business. The unions and the small business peak body have already agreed to explore a move to multi-employer bargaining.
With industry bargaining, firms don’t have to worry about agreeing to higher wages than their competitors are paying. You’d think that, in time, the nation’s big businesses would also see this advantage.
