Proposed reforms to Australia’s industrial relations laws are likely to support higher coverage for collective bargaining in the national labour market, and provide a boost to stagnant wage growth according to new research from the Centre for Future Work.

The report reviews historical data on the erosion of collective bargaining in Australia, and its close correlation to the slowdown in wage growth visible after 2013. The authors find that the decline of collective bargaining coverage (which fell by almost half in the private sector since 2013) explains over 50% of the change in wage growth during that same time.

“Restoring collective bargaining is vital to any strategy to get wages growing again in Australia,” said Dr. Jim Stanford, co-author of the report and Director of the Centre for Future Work.

“International evidence indicates that requires the ability to undertake bargaining at a multi-employer level.”

Key Points from Report:

• Each one percentage point loss of bargaining coverage has been associated with a reduction in annual wage growth of 0.15 percentage points.
• There is a clear and predictable relationship between countries which support broader multi-employer bargaining, and the level of bargaining coverage which they achieve.
• The reforms contemplated in the Secure Jobs, Better Wages legislation would incrementally restore collective bargaining coverage in Australia: by relaxing current restrictions on multi-employer bargaining, and supporting bargaining through other measures (such as limitations on employer termination of enterprise agreements, stronger dispute settlement provisions, and streamlined processes for approving new agreements).
• These reforms would elevate bargaining coverage in Australia toward a level typical of other countries where most bargaining still occurs at the enterprise level (as would be true under these reforms), but supplemented by some multi-employer bargaining and broader coordination. The OECD has identified a group of these countries, with an average bargaining coverage rate of 33%.
• That would reverse most (but not all) of the loss in coverage experienced over the past decade.
• Considering the observed correlation between bargaining coverage and wage growth, this would lead to an improvement in nominal wage growth of 1.6 percentage points per year.
• Just one year of wage growth at this faster pace would boost annual earnings for a worker with average full-time wages by $1473. That increment would expand to $8300 by the fifth year of (compounded) faster wage growth. On a cumulative basis over the first five years alone, the average worker would receive additional income of almost $24,000.
• The 1.6-percentage-point increment in annual wage growth would boost aggregate wage incomes by $15 billion in the first year, and $75 billion in the fifth year.