The Financial Services Union (FSU) is to review the enterprise agreements it struck with major employers on retrenchments in the financial sector in the recession of the early 1990s.
FSU policy director Rod Masson said the reviews of the still current agreements would be undertaken on behalf of its 50,000 members to see if they are “properly reflective of the current times”.
“We want to see how we can make slashing jobs a little more prohibitive for these employers so they have to think twice about embarking on a slash and burn approach.”
The enterprise bargaining agreements include redundancy clauses that focus primarily on defining the processes the banks would utilise to implement their retrenchment strategies.
These agreements were negotiated during a period of massive retrenchments in the sector by the major companies resulting partly from the recession of the early 1990s and by advances in distribution.
Masson said the FSU would be “talking to our members about what more should be included in the agreements to reflect what’s occurring in the workplace currently”.
“We are now on the cusp of another round of potentially heavy job losses and we will consequently have a look at those agreements and take these to the relevant employers for negotiation,” he said.
The review will take place against the backdrop of Australian Bureau of Statistics data that found “somewhere near 20,000 finance jobs had disappeared to the end of November last year”, according to Masson.
“Our own figures from employers that are required to provide us with information show that we have lost probably around 5,000 people from the large employers.
“We will also have to contend with the impact of the mergers that will start next year, namely the Westpac/St George and CBA/Bankwest merger,” he said.
