‘Gladiatorial battle’ in 1987 wage round?

Press, 27 December 1986, Page 6

‘Gladiatorial battle’ in 1987 wage round?

PA Wellington Employers and unions could expect to face the same gladiatorial wageround battle next year that they fought this year, says the advocacy director of the Employers’ Federation, Mr Steve Marshall.

He expected a repetition of the industrial disruption that plagued the first three months of the 1986 wage round regardless of any wage-fixing law passed before the start of the new wage round next September.

He said the Government was transferring the worst elements of the existing wage-fixing system into the new labour relations reform package.

"There is no doubt the system we have needs change. Unfortunately, the way in which the Government is approaching it is the wrong way,” Mr Marshall said. “It has retained the concept of occupational blanket coverage awards

and has picked up the philosophy that a worker should only be covered by one agreement.”

While the latter was a slight improvement, there would be no real reform until the Government and the trade union movement accepted that there should be only one agreement covering any one work place. Next year, there would be a lot of prancing about reforms and their effects, but in practical terms “we will be negotiating in pretty much the same environment,” Mr Marshall said.

The wage-round guideline probably would have settled “marginally lower” than the 7 per cent level which finally emerged if the Government, employers and unions had negotiated the centralised wage round proposed this year by the Federation of Labour, Mr Marshall said. But, in hindsight, it was probably in everybody’s best interests that the cen-

tralised deal did not succeed because New Zealand did hot need any return to centralisation.

“I think employers were correct in discussing it. The fact that negotiations took place with some publicity was of asssistance in creating more realistic wage expectation levels,” he said. The Government’s release of its Green Paper on industrial reforms in December, 1985, helped the Employers’ Federation considerably in promoting a new wave of employer consultations. “Not only did it help us organisationally, giving us the background for writing a submission on the Green Paper, it also gave us the basis for planning an employers’ approach to the wage round,” he said. Detailed consultations, with- employers throughout New Zealand on future wage-fixing reforms, rather than any new employer militancy,

resulted in the federation’s unified wage-round policy. This prompted the Employers’ Federation to take a slightly different approach from previous years.

“Instead of simply reacting to Government and trade union movement positions, we went in with our own,” Mr Marshall said. In the absence of industrial reforms, the federation was determined to use the tripartite wage conference as a forum for alerting people to the needs of industry and for examining, in practical terms, the impact of wage bargaining on the economy.

“This approach was a success and on a practical level we were able to get people talking about the effects of the wage round,” he said. "Consequently, expectations started to change, and that was a very useful introduction to the wage round.”