Julia Gillard is certainly capable of a sophisticated negotiating strategy, and it’s been interesting to observe that the process of formulating the legislation to implement Forward With Fairness and replace WorkChoices - while managed largely behind closed doors - was accompanied over the year by a fair bit of crowing from business that they’d extracted more concessions than in the two documents released before last year’s election. However, the ALP caucus and the ACTU also belatedly secured more of what they wanted - particularly in last resort arbitration, multi-enterprise bargaining for low paid workers, good faith bargaining and union entry and records inspections rights. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such changes were always contemplated, and certainly explicit attention to the needs of workers with poor bargaining power spread across a number of work sites (for instance cleaners or employees in light manufacturing) was part of the election policy. What is entirely predictable is the tenor of the business reaction, which you can get a sense of quickly by reading this story from yesterday’s Australian. Unions are back and the sky will fall in! In fact, the points business objects to really just serve to underpin bargaining. There’s an element of balancing equity with efficiency, which has always been part of the IR framework in Australia, but we certainly haven’t “gone back to the future”. In many ways, the legislation could legitimately have gone further in redressing some of the imbalance of power in the bargaining process.
If, although as one would imagine there’s some equivocation going on, the opposition allow the laws to pass substantially unaltered, the business whining will be futile. That in itself may push the opposition into a more negative stance. The passage of the laws through the Senate early next year could get interesting.


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