(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Hold the front page! Bosses of big business don’t want workers to have greater bargaining power!

The impact of the Albanese government’s new multi-employer bargaining laws on productivity and international competitiveness has emerged as one of the single greatest concerns among the country’s most powerful chief executives, The Australian’s 2022 CEO survey has revealed.

It’s harder than usual to justify the “exclusive” tag the Oz slapped on editor-at-large and noted rapper Ticky Fullerton’s 2022 survey of 90 CEOs across the country. “High-profile business figures concerned by greater worker power” is a headline with about the same level of news impact as “Foxes express concern over greater chicken coop security”.

After all, via the uncritical coverage of the Oz and The Australian Financial Review (and others), we know exactly what CEOs and their representatives in employer associations think about industrial relations reform. Going back for well over a decade, any move that could conceivably interfere with “flexibility” is anathema, an outbreak of union militancy, declining productivity and out-of-control wage spirals.

Regardless of the situation, the cure has always been the same — COVID was, according to business, a perfect time to deregulate the workplace further and reform a system “not fit for purpose“.

Turns out, now that Labor has put in place multi-employer bargaining, the old system was working just great:

Boral’s Vik Bansal called it a significant step away from ­enterprise-based bargaining which by definition was focused on the needs of the particular enterprise: employer and employees. “Multi-employer bargaining creates the risk of industry-wide strikes to drive up wages and conditions without any focus on productivity at the enterprise level,” Mr Bansal said.

It’s almost as though the complaints about the Fair Work Act — under which industrial action, union membership and workers’ share of national income all continued to drop, while wages stagnated alongside flourishing wage theft — weren’t really based on any … reality?

But our favourite quote has to come from Lynas chief executive Amanda Lacaze:

We all share a single interest which is the continued success of our business which enables continued high salaries to support our families.

See, it’s not about obscene profits — it’s about families. Lynas’ rare earths operation, the piece notes, “recorded a surge in profits in the last financial year”. Indeed, for all the claims of inflexible working arrangements, we’ve just lived through the first recession where business profits went up.