AMMA chief executive Steve Knott said the Fair Work Amendment (Bargaining Processes) Bill 2014 introduced into federal parliament yesterday morning would discourage “premature” strike action, particularly where trade unions got involved.

“It’s widely acknowledged that Australia has a major productivity challenge that is impacting on the competitiveness of our workplaces and our industries,” Knott said.

“Business leadership has an important role to play in addressing this, and employers do not shy away from their responsibility to make their individual enterprises more productive and more competitive.

“However, for too long employers have battled an ineffective and uncompetitive workplace system that creates barriers and distractions to leadership, innovation and productivity.

“This is particularly prevalent where trade unions are involved in bargaining, forcing employers to process a phone book of union claims, effectively excluding any real opportunity to look at ways to improve the competitiveness and productivity of the business.”

He said the current system left employers under a “constant threat” of strike action, the impact of which went beyond the limited data captured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and created industrial uncertainty and “very real risks” to doing business in Australia.

Knott claimed the amendments provided much-needed measures to start reversing the “dangerous direction” Australia’s workplace bargaining system has been heading in over the past five years, and to help sustain Australia’s economic growth, living standards and employment.

AMMA said the resource industry had been one of the key sectors impacted by unions seeking to strike over excessive claims, including the recent case of well-paid Port Hedland tugboat employees threatening to halt $150 million of daily iron ore exports in pursuit of further pay increases.

AMMA said the Bill would improve the system by:

• Ensuring bargaining parties have sufficiently progressed their claims, and that those claims are not ‘manifestly excessive’, before a union’s application to strike can be approved; and
• Ensuring productivity improvements have been properly discussed and considered before the Fair Work Commission approves a new enterprise agreement.

Knott noted that the World Economic Forum rated Australia’s “pay and productivity” at 125th in the world and its “co-operation in labour-employer relations” at 109th in the world.

“Clearly our nation can no longer afford to pay lip service to productivity or be known as a ‘strike prone’ nation,” he said.

Australian Unions said the changes to the Fair Work Act were the first step in Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s “plan to reduce working people’s living standards by destroying our rights at work”, and returning to the unpopular Work Choices reforms of the Howard era.

It noted that the fate of the laws depends on the votes of eight Senators – recently gone-rogue Jacqui Lambie, her former Palmer United colleagues Glenn Lazarus and Bob Day, Nick Xenophon, Ricky Muir, John Madigan and David Leyonhjelm – and just three needed to be convinced of the union’s claims to stop the laws passing.