Federal political staffers have rejected the government’s pay offer, despite most being employed by the Coalition.
On Wednesday evening the finance minister, Simon Birmingham, announced the proposal to tie staffers’ pay to record low wage growth in the Australian economy had been defeated, 59% to 41%.
Given Coalition MPs and senators are half of parliament and receive a more generous staffing allocation in government, the result implies a strong rejection of the pay offer among Labor and crossbench staff combined with at least a third of Coalition staff abstaining or rejecting their bosses’ offer.
In November the government issued a new bargaining policy that public sector pay rises will be capped at the level of the private sector.
The vote means the government will have to go back to the drawing board for an agreement to cover 2,000 parliamentary staff and signals it will face resistance to the policy in other departments and agencies.
In the first year of the deal, the government offered a pay rise of 1.7% for junior staff including electorate officers, 0.85% for advisers, and 0% for senior staff.
The offer, to take effect in six months, would likely amount to a real pay cut for senior staff given inflation was positive in the September quarter.
In years two and three of the deal, the government offered salary and allowance adjustments equal to the private sector wage price index.
With private sector wage growth at record lows of 1.2% in the year to September 2020, the Community and Public Sector Union has warned this could amount to a real pay cut for all staff.
The union is also concerned the pay offer does not grant staffers superannuation during paid parental leave and would require them to exhaust personal and carers leave before accessing miscellaneous leave in cases of domestic violence.
The CPSU acting national secretary, Alistair Waters, welcomed the “resounding no” vote at the first agency to vote on an offer in line with the new policy.
“With this new policy, the Coalition government shows its disregard for the growing problem of wage stagnation in Australia, when we need to kickstart the economy,” he said.
“But CPSU members have sent a comprehensive message to the government, that no worker should face such uncertainty especially in the middle of a pandemic.
“Government staffers couldn’t stomach their own bosses bargaining policy. This is a clear sign that it will fail, hurting workers and the economy along the way.”
In April the government froze public sector pay rises, an austerity move at the time the Australian economy entered its first recession for 29 years.
Even before the Covid-19 recession, wage growth in Australia was sluggish, with the Reserve Bank warning rises of 2-3% were the “new normal”. The mid-year economic and fiscal update projected wage growth of 1.25-1.5%.
In December the Coalition introduced an industrial relations bill that would allow pay deals that fail the Better Off Overall Test due to the impact of Covid-19 on businesses, prompting Labor to warn workers could face pay cuts of thousands of dollars a year.
