Ross Gittins is the well respected Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
"It's getting hard to discover the truth about what's happening to wages and wage setting in our decentralised labour market. Public servants who should be giving us unvarnished facts are now bending the truth to suit their political masters.
Before we moved away from the centralised wage-fixing system in the early 1990s, everyone's wage rise was pretty much the same. But now there's a range of different ways wages can be set: via changes in award rates, via collective agreement (union or non-union) or via individual contract (common-law contract, Australian Workplace Agreement or state individual contract).
What's more, as governments keep changing the industrial relations law and people get used to those changes, the proportions of workers subject to the different wage-setting regimes keep changing.
So these days, if you want to know what's happening in the labour market you have to put a bit of work into it. One reliable source is the Australian Bureau of Statistics' survey of employee earnings and hours, conducted each May.
The other main source is the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, which has long kept a database recording the details of all registered federal collective agreements. Last year it began keeping a database of a sample of registered AWAs.
The department is required to produce a regular report on Agreement Making in Australia. Its report covering the three years to last December was tabled recently. (Note, the report shouldn't tell us much about the effect of Work Choices because that didn't take effect until the end of March last year.)
It's this report that should tell us most about how wage setting is evolving. Unfortunately, you can't always be sure whether you're getting the plain truth or government spin. Public servants aren't the pillars of rectitude they once were."
Click on the link to read the rest of Ross' article.
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