The company building the national broadband network has become the first federal government employer to strike a staff wage deal under the Coalition's tough bargaining policy.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The government lauded the breakthrough as a win for both the workers and the employer. However, one union that advised against accepting the proposal said staff were "starved" into voting yes.
NBN Co, a taxpayer-owned business with about 3000 employees, began filing enterprise agreements with the Fair Work Commission this week. Fewer than one in four staff are covered by the deals; the rest are on individual contracts.
The company offered a 2.5 per cent pay rise in the first year of the deals, followed by 1 per cent raises in the second and third years.
Its call-centre workers, technicians and administrative officers, each of whom are employed under separate agreements, voted to accept the deals. However, its engineering and IT professional rejected a similar proposal.
The staff were not asked to give up any significant conditions, which has proved the biggest hurdle in other government workplaces.
Public Service Commissioner John Lloyd, who is overseeing government-wide pay negotiations, said the deals delivered "wage increases for employees and improved productivity for NBN Co".
"This demonstrates what can be achieved when employers and employees work together for a mutually beneficial outcome."
Mr Lloyd said the deals were approved despite strong union opposition, and urged unions to bargain "more constructively" on behalf of other government workers.
However, one union that represents NBN technicians, the Communications Workers Union, said the ballot outcome was unconvincing: only 59 per cent of the relevant staff had voted "yes".
Its assistant secretary, Ken Hardisty, told Fairfax Media he believed the workers had been "starved" into accepting the deal because their old agreements expired about 10 months ago.
Another union, Professionals Australia, whose members voted to reject the offer, said they did so because the deal discriminated against some staff.
Its director, David Smith, said the offer "
higher than 2.5 per cent, with back pay, to employees on common-law contracts.
"This has created a distinct divide in the workforce and between workers doing the exactly the same jobs. Our members are just being asked to be treated fairly and with respect."
A spokesman for the company, Andrew Sholl, said it had tried to offer pay rises worth 7.5 per cent over three years but that initial proposal was scuppered by the Public Service Commission.
"I think staff accepted this agreement because it was a good offer ... and there were meetings right around Australia between workers and our senior executives explaining that this is the best deal we can get," Mr Sholl said.
"And, as the staff under the professionals deal have now discovered [after rejecting their offer], it's back to the bargaining table for them and there's no retrospectivity, there's no back pay."
and "was likely to represent a real wage freeze ... or even a real wage decline over the period".
Wage deals covering about 150,000 public servants expired almost a year ago and, until this week, no government employer had successfully negotiated a new agreement for its workforce.
Under the Abbott government's bargaining policy, agencies must fund any proposed pay rises through administrative savings or by "cashing out" staff benefits.
