When minimum wage negotiations begin in March, the Australian Council of Trade Unions will push for a rise of $30-$40 a week. The current minimum wage is $543.78 a week, or $14.31 an hour.
This will be the first minimum wage case to be heard by the Fair Work Australia Minimum Wage Panel. The outcome of the case will be a test of how different the Rudd Labor government's new industrial relations system is from the hated Work Choices system of the former Howard Coalition government.
Under the Work Choices Fair Pay Commission, incomes for those on the minimum wage fell by $15-$80 a week in real terms. In 2009, citing the global financial crisis, the Fair Pay Commission ruled against the ACTU's claim for a $21 a week rise. It decided on no rise at all in the minimum wage.
In pushing for justice for minimum wage workers, unions "highlighted the unfairness of company executives receiving big increases in pay and bonuses in recent years with the average pay for top CEOs rising to now almost 50 times average weekly earnings", the ACTU website said.
ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence told ABC radio's AM program on February 8 that the decision would apply to "about 1.3 million workers who are dependent on awards still and that means industries such as cleaning, security, childcare, some smaller businesses in retail, some of the community sector.
"These are areas which are predominately service sector but also predominately women and non-English speaking workers so there are those workers in the community who are on minimum wages and [have] less bargaining power than lots of other workers."
Meanwhile, Transport Workers Union national secretary Tony Sheldon hit out at the federal ALP's new industrial relations system. For the fourth time in six months, the Fair Work Ombudsman began prosecuting the TWU for breaching Howard-era Work Choices laws, which remained in effect until July 2009.
The prosecution relates to a stop-work meeting in February after the sacking of a truck driver at K&S Freighters in Western Australia. The company had not followed agreed dispute resolution procedures in sacking the driver, but this was not investigated by the Fair Work Ombudsman.
Sheldon told the February 8 Age: "Fair Work Australia is not living up to its name. The Ombudsman's office is merely a cut-crystal finger bowl whose function appears to be trying to wash the raw prawn off the hands of some employers."