Wright, Sally and Buchanan, John (2013) Award reliance. Sydney : FairWork Commission ; Commonwealth of Australia. (Research report).

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Abstract

The centralised establishment of minimum wages and the role of awards in determining the wages of employees across an industry or occupation have long been central features of Australia’s wage-fixing system. One key change has been the greater prominence given to bargaining (most recently under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (Fair Work Act)) at an enterprise level. The federal tribunal responsible for the role of national wage-fixing has undergone a number of major changes including the rationalisation and modernisation of awards to apply nationally, that is, across former federal and state jurisdictions. In the Annual Wage Review 2009–10,1 the then Minimum Wage Panel noted the need for research into the composition of the award-reliant workforce. The Minimum Wage Panel recognised that an understanding of award reliance is essential to the minimum-wage setting process, stating in its decision for the Annual Wage Review 2009–102 that to inform future reviews it was seeking research to explore the extent and composition of the award-reliant sector. This project on award reliance was conducted to examine these issues. It was undertaken by the Workplace Research Centre, University of Sydney Business School (WRC) in collaboration with fieldwork company ORC International (ORC) on behalf of the Fair Work Commission. It was supplemented by two other projects, one of which considered incentives to enterprise bargaining among a range of industries in Australia, and the other being a qualitative study of professionals and other employees on higher award classifications. The focus of the Award Reliance Survey was to
quantitatively investigate award reliance across and within Australian organisations, and to identify the mix or ‘categories’ of award-reliant employees and their location on award classification scales. The project had two main objectives. The first was to identify the incidence of award reliance across all non-public sector organisations and employees at the organisational level. The second was to identify the nature of award reliance across all non-public sector award-reliant organisations (i.e.
organisations paying at least one employee exactly the award rate) in order to: identify award-reliant employees, and professional and other award-reliant employees on higher award classifications (including the characteristics of these employees); investigate explanatory variables for award reliance in professional and other higher classification award-reliant employees; and explore explanatory variables for award reliance at the organisation level.

Item Type:	Report
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Institute for Employment Research
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Wage bargaining -- Australia, Australia -- Wage fixing, Labor supply -- Australia, Minimum wage -- Australia
Series Name:	Research report
Publisher:	FairWork Commission ; Commonwealth of Australia
Place of Publication:	Sydney
ISBN:	9780987493576
Official Date:	December 2013
Dates:	Date Event December 2013 Published
Number:	Number 6/2013
Number of Pages:	231
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
Funder:	University of Sydney. Workplace Research Centre (WRC)
Related URLs:	Organisation

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