WITH THE NZNO/district health board (DHB)
multi-employer agreement (MECA) now expired and DHBs operating under tight financial reins, members will either have to re-evaluate their expectations, or campaign rigorously to secure a satisfactory settlement.
In particular, parties who wish to negotiate and enter into
multi-employer agreements no longer need to convince the federal regulatory agency that a
multi-employer agreement is in the public interest in order to negotiate (the situation after the Work Choices amendments) or register (the situation before the Work Choices amendments) a
multi-employer agreement.
The new work laws have allowed the NSWNA to negotiate a
multi-employer agreement with 47 aged care providers, covering nurses at 220 facilities.
Most commonly, employers can claim (with varying degrees of plausibility) that they are in competition with other employers and that the negotiation of a
multi-employer agreement undermines their market competitiveness.
The 1981 National Maritime Union (NMU) standard
multi-employer agreement for the unlicensed seafarers it represents called for 13 days of vacation accrual for every 30 days worked by the third year of the agreement.
Under the Employment Relations Act, the responsibility now rests with the individual GP employer parties to find an orderly way to bargain with NZNO in the
multi-employer agreement. NZNO will do all it can to support GPs in facilitating a good process.
NURSES, MIDWIVES and health assistants covered by the Lower North Island
Multi-Employer Agreement have voted to accept a revised employer offer.
These entries include single-employer agreements that are heavily patterned on the major
multi-employer agreements and that contain identical language.
Accordingly, Sisson attributes the relatively dramatic decline of multi-employer bargaining in Britain, especially in the engineering industry, to its failure in "neutralizing the workplace," largely because of the country's peculiar "common law" bargaining traditions where
multi-employer agreements are insufficiently detailed in substance for workplace bargaining to be merely supplementary or administrative.
NZNO members could not threaten to take strike action for national or other
multi-employer agreements.
One involved a decline in the number of
multi-employer agreements. The number of
multi-employer agreements had been declining since the 1950s, but the decline accelerated in the 1980s as
multi-employer agreements were replaced by either single-employer or, in some cases, plant-level contracts (Brown and Walsh 1991).
Our contribution has been to accelerate the pace of that journey by taking advantage of a unique set of conditions: a nursing workforce angered by years of restructuring and anti-unionism following a long history of being undervalued; industrial relations Legislation that removed the ban on industrial action for
multi-employer agreements; the biggest government budget surplus in the history of the country; and a Government that said it was committed to advancing pay equity.
