CBA has been caught red handed using IFAs or ‘contracts’ unlawfully to distance thousands of employees from their EA entitlements.
They say they “bought out” your leave loading, RDOs, Overtime and penalty rates and gave you a higher bonus potential, but many thousands of CBA workers were never given the genuine choice that is their legal right and went on to learn they had been worse off than the bare minimum in the EA for years.
Now, rather than change their approach to comply with what they always should have been doing, they want employees to validate that practice by writing it into the agreement.
They made these annualised arrangements unlawfully with IAs and now they want your help to make them lawful. CBA’s proposed contracting provisions would carry on the practice of “rolling up” entitlements in a way that the FSU does not feel offers enough protection from what went wrong with IFAs. We have been clear with CBA that with adequate protection and choice, we could sign off on an annualised contracting clause. But CBA aren’t interested in that. They want all the power to keep doing what they’ve been doing.
Here are some of the protections we sought:
- Annualised Salary Packages should be available by offer and acceptance only. CBAs current proposal allows them to just ”employ you” on a package. A key ingredient in what went wrong with IFAs.
- People who are offered an annualised salary package (New IFA) must be told in writing the monetary value of each entitlement being “bought out” (eg. Leave loading is incorporated in this salary at 1.7% or $x)
- People offered an annualised package must be told what assumptions are built into their rate. EG: How much overtime is built in?
- People who are offered an annualised salary must be offered a demonstrably equivalent EA offer, not just the EA minimum for the same grade. If someone is offered a package, they must also be offered an EA salary that is demonstrably equivalent to the package offered. So: $package offered – Value of entitlements rolled in to the package = EA Equivalent offer
- Annualised Arrangements should only be offered to people whose salary is relatively high. This would ensure that it is less likely these arrangements will fall behind like the IFAs did. The union’s view was $115,000 but we indicated that we would also consider moving to $85,000 is satisfied with protections.
- The annualised arrangements interact with CBA’s other proposal to strip entitlements from those who get paid more than 117,640 and 153,000 (read more about that here) It is our view that having the ability to do annualising arrangements is enough and CBA should not automatically be able to strip people’s conditions just because they deem their salaries high enough to roll those in.
- CBA must keep a record of start, finish times and any breaks so that they can be confident the comparisons they’ll undertake to the applicable minimum rate are accurate.
- Employees must be able to unpackage to a demonstrably equivalent rate of pay, not one at CBA’s discretion.
These are the things the Bank will not do. They want you to vote for more of the same dodgy contracts. They want to make it easier to keep doing what they’ve always done, and they want to reduce great parts of the EA, like the ability to take RDOs. They’re weakening the rules and watering down the entitlements and they expect you to agree. They’re acting like there’s nothing to see here, but why is it so difficult for them to include the protections that the FSU has sought?
The IFA history/issue explained in more detail: