On Monday you may have seen the email and petition we sent out about ANZ planning to deduct the increase to the Superannuation Guarantee from the wages of those on a TEC packages.
The issue gained a lot of traction and was mentioned in the Australian Financial Review yesterday.
This is the most damning part of the article:
“The decision puts ANZ and Macquarie bank staff on a worse footing than their colleagues at other major banks, who will speared from a take-home pay cut next month.
A spokesman for Westpac told the Financial Review it paid superannuation on top of employees’ base salaries, meaning it did not have the option to fund the super increase by lowering take-home pay.”
A NAB spokesman said the bank’s staff already received 10 percent of their salary in superannuation, meaning there will be no change to their packages on July 1. Yesterday ANZ responded to our campaign.
ANZ have been in touch to accuse us of misrepresenting your rights at work in our email yesterday. They even took the time to remind us that they could sue us for that! We don’t think that we misrepresented anything, in fact, we think that ANZ are just upset because we outlined the cynical, greedy approach they’re taking to workers’ retirement savings.
ANZ don’t think that we can fairly describe what they’re doing as utilising a “loophole” because the approach they’ve taken is technically legal and is contemplated in the Enterprise Agreement and the TEC packages.
It is our view that just because the legal ability to do something was put in place, that doesn’t make it the fair thing to do.
In fact, we think the practice of constructing a legal mechanism to avoid paying any future increase in the superannuation guarantee can very reasonably be described constructing a loophole.
If you have not yet signed the petition to tell ANZ to reconsider – please do that here.