Council workers battle to bargain together

Thousands of local government workers in Melbourne have signed on to bargain collectively, across 10 councils, for better pay and conditions. This is an early test of recent changes to the Fair Work Act by the federal government that should enable unions to more easily bargain—and take legally protected industrial action—across multiple employers.

According to Tash Wark, secretary of the Australian Services Union (ASU), “this is the largest worker-initiated multi-employer agreement proposed in Australia”. The ASU intends to use an industrial and political campaign across multiple councils to put pressure on the state Labor government to modify or scrap the neoliberal “rate capping” policy that limits council budgets.

In response, local government employers have gone on the offensive. From Brimbank to Darebin to Yarra to Port Phillip, employers are launching sham (non-union) single enterprise “negotiations”. These are designed to pave the way for non-union ballots to keep bargaining at a council level, thus avoiding multi-employer bargaining. Employers are also mounting legal challenges against the ASU, despite similar challenges losing at the Federal Court earlier this year.

Local government workers provide a wide range of essential services that keep our communities running. From removing waste, cleaning streets and beaches, maintaining parks and roads, to running libraries, immunising and educating children, and providing in-home care for elderly and disabled community members.

But over the past few years, these essential workers have been falling behind—their wages consistently failing to keep up with inflation. Since 2021, council workers across Melbourne have lost anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the real value of their wages. The vast majority of us are now hundreds of dollars a fortnight (thousands of dollars a year) worse off than we were in 2020.

There’s one exception to this: senior council executives. Council CEOs across Melbourne typically earn more than $400,000 a year. That’s on par with federal government ministers ($403,000) and the Prime Minister of the UK (£172,153 or $360,335). Last year, it was revealed that Alison Leighton, CEO of the City of Melbourne, pockets a whopping $534,000 annually—almost as much as the prime minister. These are the same people crying poor and threatening job cuts in response to workers’ demanding a liveable wage.

In the face of real wage declines, increasing numbers of local government workers have been going on strike. Despite heroic efforts from workers, gains have been minimal. This is partly because a few hundred workers in a single local government area have limited industrial power. The Victorian government’s rate cap also provides an excuse for management to cry poor. And previous bargaining strategies of the ASU have failed to challenge these limitations.

Multi-employer bargaining represents, at least potentially, a means to change all that. There’s certainly sentiment for a fight. At a packed meeting of council workers from across Melbourne recently, one worker put it this way: “We are the ones who run this city. If we stop work, the city stops: bins overflow, services disappear, streets and beaches get trashed, parks and sporting fields become overgrown. Imagine what we could achieve if council revenue begins to dry up, if small businesses start to suffer, and if state infrastructure projects grind to a halt.”

Council workers are coming together to demand a 22 percent pay rise over four years—consisting of a 10 percent “recovery payment” in the first year and 4 percent in the following years. This will go some way to redressing the decade-long decline in council workers’ real wages. Most of us haven’t seen a pay rise of more than 2 or 3 percent for 10 years—since the re-introduction of rate caps in 2016. That’s why, as part of this round of bargaining, we’re gearing up to rally against the Victorian state government’s neo-liberal rate capping policy.

The rate cap dates back to the Kennett government of the 1990s. Liberal premier Jeff Kennett directly copied this neoliberal measure from former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who used it to coerce local councils into implementing local austerity, regardless of the wishes of the people who elected them. Compulsory competitive tendering of all council services, with councils legally obliged to accept the lowest bid, was used by both Thatcher in the UK and Kennett in Victoria as a way of cutting workers’ wages and essential services to the bone.

Though rate capping was abolished when Kennett was thrown out of office in 1999, it was reintroduced by Daniel Andrews’ Labor government in 2016. The current system limits councils’ ability to raise revenue, including through measures such as charging higher rates for major corporations and property developers that are making millions in our communities.

The consequences? As the Australia Institute reported, less than half of Victorian local government workers now have permanent, full-time jobs, as councils respond to the cap by outsourcing and casualising work. For too long, the rate cap has functioned as a wage cap for local council workers—and it’s about time it was seriously challenged.

Multi-enterprise bargaining is the means workers are hoping to use to mount this challenge. Australia’s top CEOs are hostile to it for a reason. If paired with a militant union strategy, they know multi-enterprise bargaining has the potential to put money and power back into the hands of ordinary workers. They say they’re worried about “a return to the 1970s”—a time when wages in Australia consistently outpaced inflation and workers enjoyed a much higher share of national income.

No wonder council employers are doing everything in their power to divide us. They know multi-employer bargaining could help shift the goal posts by giving workers in our sector greater industrial power. Last Friday, Brimbank council won a fierce campaign to get a non-union single enterprise “agreement” voted up before their employees’ multi-enterprise bargaining application could be authorised by the Fair Work Commission.

Workers at Brimbank reported intimidation and standover tactics from management, with managers going as far as calling the police on union officials, censoring communications, and sacking employees for communicating with their co-workers about management’s offer. Thanks to Brimbank council’s dirty tactics, 1400 workers there are likely to fall further behind the cost of living and their colleagues in local government for years to come.

While it’s a disappointing outcome, Brimbank workers never would have received a 4 percent pay rise this year (their highest in 13 years!) if it weren’t for the threat of large-scale industrial action via multi-enterprise bargaining. “I have no doubt in my mind,” said a Brimbank worker, “that once a multi-employer agreement gets up in local government, everyone will want in. We know that taking large-scale industrial action is the only way for us to claw back wages. We just need an opportunity to demonstrate that we can win. It’s up to workers in the nine other councils now to lead the way.”

Like Brimbank, employers at City of Darebin, Yarra, and Port Phillip are currently preparing to put non-union single enterprise offers out to vote in the coming weeks and lock their employees out of multi-enterprise bargaining. Workers at all of these councils need to mobilise members and non-members to vote no to any employer ballot aimed at dividing council workers.

In good news, at Maribyrnong council, a non-binding ballot organised by the employer saw a thumping majority of workers vote for multi-enterprise bargaining, rejecting the employer’s attempt to split the workforce away. And just a week later, on 12 June, news came in that 74 percent of eligible City of Melbourne employees had voted in a non-binding ballot organised by the employer. Management was hoping for a rejection of multi-employer bargaining. Instead, an amazing 80 percent of those who voted wanted to stick with the union campaign. This puts the lie to the managers’ claims that workers are being “tricked” into supporting multi-enterprise bargaining. A majority of workers at Maribyrnong and Melbourne have now voted for it twice!

If Brimbank teaches us anything, it’s that our side needs to be better organised. We need to mobilise our members, we need to be more proactive in countering management’s bribes, scare tactics and misinformation, and we need to patiently explain to our co-workers what’s at stake.

This is not just about cutting better deals in our individual work areas for the next three years. Knocking back employer efforts to keep us divided in our individual councils is an act of solidarity. It’s saying that we’re prepared to use our industrial power to win a solid pay rise for childcare and day care workers, for clerical staff and librarians, for parking officers and garbos all over Melbourne.

Over the coming weeks, the employers will aim to wear us down and convince us that what they’ve got to offer is the best we can hope for. But we know better. Ten thousand local government workers, acting together, have significant industrial and political power.

A multi-enterprise bargaining campaign, paired with an industrial strategy that uses mass action to pressure the state government to loosen its hold on council purse strings, could potentially win a very different outcome. This will not be an easy fight. But we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues and our communities to pursue this course.

After all, if we don’t fight, we lose.