Local govt agreement on wages wanted

Press, 17 May 1984, Page 6

Local govt agreement on wages wanted

Parliamentary reporter National industrial agreements for local government are being pushed hard by the Government.

The Minister of Labour, Mr Bolger, reiterating statements made last year by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, and the Under-Secretary for Local Government, Mr Thompson, said the objective should be to have the new structure in place in local government, and functioning, before the next wage rounds when wage t irgaining resumed in 1985.

Local government employees, therefore, had the rest of the year in which to decide what the most effective structure of the new organisation might be. The Government’s main concern was with pay leadership in the local government sector, he said.

One of the processes by which this had come about was through the same union playing off one local author-

ity employer against the other, so ratcheting wages up. National agreements, by definition, would make it much more difficult for this to happen, Mr Bolger said.

There was a chicken and egg situation about whether the first steps should be made by the employers or the unions. It was axiomatic that

unions would always push for what they believed employers would concede, so the primary responsibility for ensuring wage moderation rested with the employers, he said. Unions also had a duty — not only to act in the narrow interests of their members, but to take the wider issues into consideration as well.