Competitive pressures, new technologies and changing consumer demands mean employers and employees are continually looking for greater workplace flexibility.
The BCA has long promoted the links between workplace flexibility and productivity.
It has long highlighted the importance of improving the quality and outcomes of workplace relationships, in particular through legal, institutional and industrial frameworks that allow and encourage genuine enterprise-level bargaining.
The BCA supports:
- Enterprise-based agreement making as the core of the workplace relations system.
- The availability of a wide range of options for agreeing employment terms and conditions, including statutory individual contracts.
- A national system of workplace relations regulations.
- The adoption of an appropriate safety net of minimum conditions and allowable matters.
- A simplified and rationalised system of awards.
The current challenge is to ensure the federal government’s ‘Fair Work’ system enables productivity and high levels of employment.
In August 2009 the BCA launched a discussion paper, Embedding Workplace Collaboration: Preventing Disputes, which warns that, without a strong focus on productivity, Australia risks slower economic growth.
The paper argues that Australia should take the opportunity to give Fair Work Australia or the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman a stronger role in preventing disputes. Failure to do so will represent a missed opportunity to help workplaces and boost economic growth over the years ahead.
In January 2010 the BCA released a second discussion paper on the subject of workplace collaboration, which focused on good faith bargaining.
The Embedding Workplace Collaboration: Good Faith Bargaining paper emphasises the need for clarity on how good faith bargaining should be approached under the new Fair Work Act.
The BCA is consulting with members and developing case studies on the operation of the new system and its impact on workplace productivity.
The BCA will continue to push for changes to the way in which workplace relations are pursued to enhance productivity.
BCA Secretariat contact: Ruth Dunkin, Director Policy