The little-known loophole Aussies are already using to work four days a week without taking a pay cut
The ACTU is using next week's Economic Reform Roundtable in Canberra to push for a four-day work week, with the union movement's president Michele O'Neil arguing fewer hours mean better productivity.
'Shorter working hours are good for both workers and employers,' she said.
'They deliver improved productivity and allow working people to live happier, healthier and more balanced lives.'
But Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth said existing laws on flexible working arrangements already enable employees to ask their boss for a four-day week.
'When it comes to flexibility in the workplace, our legislative changes that we made last year actually allow for the request of employees to make flexible working arrangements and requests to work flexibly,' she told reporters in Canberra.
'That includes compressed hours in four days – I know that a number of organisations have entered into enterprise bargaining where they've looked at four days.'
The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act 2022, introduced by the Albanese Government, allows full and part-time staff to request flexible working arrangements if they have been with the same employer for 12 months or more.
But workers have to be a parent with a school-aged child or baby, a carer, someone with a disability, a pregnant woman, an older worker aged 55 or older, or someone enduring domestic violence.
'We want to make sure that the industrial relations framework allows employers and employees to work on flexible arrangements, as long as people don't go backwards in their pay,' Rishworth said.
France legislated a 35-hour full-time work week in 2000 but last year started piloting a four-day working week.
Unions are pushing the idea of more workplace flexibility with Australia in the grip of a productivity crisis.
Hourly output per worker fell by one per cent in the year to March.
That's a far cry from the 1990s and early 2000s, when productivity grew by an average of two per cent a year, back when the debut of the internet enabled each worker to produce more.
With unemployment still low at 4.3 per cent, weak productivity means businesses often pass on the costs of higher wages to customers.
In some sectors, this has kept prices higher, with service inflation still running at 3.3 per cent, despite headline inflation easing to just 2.1 per cent in the June quarter.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to boost productivity, but a new Reserve Bank report released on Tuesday cast doubt on that happening anytime soon, because workplace software is still too expensive.
'Many firms also flagged the ongoing fast pace of growth in software prices as a challenge to fully capturing productivity gains from new technology investments,' it said.
The ACTU on Wednesday argued Australia's poor record on productivity was the result of lacklustre investment in new capital and new staff, instead of employees being too lazy.
'Unions want all Australians to benefit from higher productivity – not just those with money and power,' Ms O'Neil said.
'A fair go in the age of AI should be about lifting everyone's living standards instead of just boosting corporate profits and executive bonuses.'
Rishworth said enterprise bargaining arrangements could be used to boost productivity, with the government's multi-employer bargaining laws allowing wage rises to be replicated across a sector.
'We will continue to work across the board when it comes to reinvigorating enterprise bargaining,' she said.
'That is where so many productivity gains can be made in the workplace - that's what our laws have been about, that's what we'll continue to focus on.'
The Albanese Government's industrial relations laws were a rebuke to former Labor prime minister's Paul Keating's Industrial Relations Reform Act of 1993, which aimed to stop wage rises being automatically copied.
Rishworth hailed the Albanese Government's changes for encouraging more workers to bargain via collective agreements.
'Of course, one of the key areas that our government has been focused on is getting enterprise bargaining moving,' she said.
'Enterprise bargaining is good for employees, it's good for employers, and it delivers real wages.
'The most recent enterprise bargaining data shows that we have the largest number of employees covered by enterprise bargains since the inception of this enterprise bargaining, came in 1991.'
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