AWAs and Individual Bargaining in the Era of WorkChoices: A Critical Evaluation Using Negotiation Theory

Abstract

The Howard government's WorkChoices legislation appeared set to irremediably remake industrial relations in Australia by prioritising individual agreement making (through AWAs) at the expense of Australia's traditional award systems based on collective bargaining. That government explicitly intended these changes to reduce labour market rewards to, and protections for, low paid and more vulnerable employees. Yet, it also deployed a rhetoric of individual choice in advocating these changes, promoting, in particular, a notion that individual bargaining and agreement making under WorkChoices empowered individual employees by opening opportunities for integrative (mutual gains) bargaining. This article asks what these changes really meant for bargaining between individual employee and employer. We analyse crucial elements of WorkChoices to highlight how its main structural mechanisms intensified employee bargaining weakness in individual bargaining. As well, we use negotiation theory, especially in relation to integrative bargaining, to evaluate the government's own published advice to individual employees on how to bargain for an AWA. We find that the government explicitly sought to disempower employees through WorkChoices' additional legal and institutional impediments and also through the concerted attempt at coaching employees to choose a losing path in their AWA negotiations.

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