The way wages are set is changing

Since we've all got so excited about the weak growth in wages, let me ask you a personal question: How much do you know about how wages are set?

For instance, how many workers are affected by the 3.3 per cent increase in the federal minimum wage, announced by the Fair Work Commission in June?

Some people say the weak wages growth is explained by the efforts to discourage collective bargaining under John Howard's Work Choices and neo-liberalism more generally. Any signs of this?

Wages can be set in different ways. So what are they, and how many workers are affected by each?

These questions are answered by a box on the minimum wage decision in the Reserve Bank's latest statement on monetary policy, issued last week. Many of its figures came from the Australian Bureau of Statistics publication, employee earnings and hours, catalogue number 6306.0, for May 2016.

The bureau finds three main ways of setting the wages of employees: "award only", collective agreements and individual arrangements.

Industrial "awards" are legally enforceable determinations made mainly by the federal Fair Work Commission, which set the minimum pay and conditions for employees in a particular industry or occupation.

They form a safety net for the great majority of employees. Any employer paying less than the minimum wage specified in the relevant award is breaking the law and could be prosecuted.

Every year the commission reviews, and usually increases, the "national minimum wage", which is the lowest amount any adult employee may be paid. In this year's review, the national minimum was increased by 3.3 per cent to $18.29 an hour.

What's less well understood is that, at the same time it adjusts the national minimum wage – the minimum minimum, so to speak – the commission also adjusts all the various minimums for workers in different classifications set out in each of the many industrial awards.

Since 2011, the commission has increased the full set of award minimum wages by the same percentage as its increase in the national minimum wage.

According to the bureau's latest figures, for May last year, about 23 per cent of our 10.1 million employees were totally reliant on the relevant minimum wage set out in their award.

Next on the list of wage-setting methods is the 36 per cent of employees whose wages are set by "collective agreements".

Most of these agreements are "enterprise bargaining agreements" negotiated with employers by a union representing the workers at the enterprise.

Enterprise agreements – which should be registered with the commission – build on the provisions of the employees' award, usually involving wage rates and conditions (such as paid leave) that are more generous than provided for in the award.

That leaves 41 per cent of employees – the largest share – having their wages set by "individual arrangements". But this is a rag-bag group.

It may include some people still on formal "individual contracts" left over from the Work Choices era, and it certainly includes managers and employees in highly paid professions whose wages and conditions have always been set by direct negotiation with the boss.

But there's another, big and interesting group: all those ordinary workers whose "individual arrangement" is that they get the award wage plus $X a week, or plus Y per cent.

This means a lot more workers' pay is protected by the award system than a quick look at the figures would suggest. Similarly, the commission's annual increase in award wage rates has a bigger effect on overall wage growth than you'd think.

So how have the proportions of employees in the three wage-setting categories been changing?

Over the 14 years to the start of 2016, the share of employees covered by collective agreements has fallen by 1.8 percentage points to 36 per cent, while the share of individual agreements has fallen by 0.4 points to 41 per cent, meaning the share of award-only employees has increased by 2.2 points to 23 per cent.

But before you take this as proof that a campaign against collective bargaining has forced more workers back to mere reliance on their award, remember there are other possible explanations.

Changes in the composition of the workforce, for instance. Since most part-time employees are award-only, the slowly increasing proportion of part-time jobs could explain much of the increase in the award-only share.

And remember this: some industries are growing faster than others, but different industries have different degrees of reliance on particular wage-setting methods.

For instance, collective bargaining is most common in public administration (covering 78 per cent of employees), education and training (63 per cent), utilities (60 per cent), and health care (55 per cent). That is, industries dominated by the public sector.

Individual arrangements are most common in professional and technical services (80 per cent), wholesale trade (70 per cent), rental and real estate services (63 per cent), construction (58 per cent) and – get this – manufacturing (55 per cent).

That leaves the award-only method most common in hospitality (43 per cent), admin services (42 per cent) and retailing (34 per cent).

It's true that hourly rates of pay are highest for employees with collective bargaining ($39.60), with individual arrangements next on $38.50, and award-only last on $29.60.

But the gap has been narrowing, with the average hourly rate under collective bargaining growing by 89 per cent in nominal terms over the 16 years to May 2016, while award-only grew by 97 per cent and individual arrangements by 109 per cent.

Again, however, this is likely to be explained more by the changing structure of industries and occupations – for instance, a higher proportion of high-paid managers and professionals in the individual arrangements category – than by campaigning against collective bargaining.

Statistics – especially these broad averages – can be misleading. But ignoring the stats and listening only to anecdotes will leave you with a much more distorted picture of reality.

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Why electricity prices are high and going higher

It's never my policy to feel sorry for any politician, so let's just say I wouldn't like to be in Malcolm Turnbull's shoes when he meets the electricity retailers he's summoned to Canberra on Wednesday.

His hope is to persuade them to do more to help their customers find the best prices on offer, so that any savings customers make reduce, to some extent, the further big price rises that are on the way.

Trouble is, it's long been the practice of many big businesses – telcos, internet service providers, electricity retailers – to make it as hard as possible for their household customers to find the "plan" that meets their needs most economically, and also to take advantage of any trusting customer on a more expensive plan than they need.

So, whatever noises they make after their meeting with the Prime Minister, I can't see the likes of Energy Australia, Origin Energy and AGL – which between them have about 70 per cent of the retail market – volunteering to help their customers pay less.

Turnbull seemed to begin the year hoping to shift the blame for high electricity prices to Labor – which, federal and state, certainly has contributed to the problem – but it finally seems to have dawned on him that, if further big price rises are coming through right now, voters are likely to lay most of the blame on whoever happens to be prime minister at the time.

And, after all, it was Tony Abbott who sought election in 2013 on the claim that the big rise in power prices was caused almost solely by Ju-liar Gillard's price on carbon, and that abolishing the tax would fix things.

In truth, the story of why retail electricity prices have risen so far – doubling over the past decade, even after allowing for inflation – is long. But let me summarise.


About the first 30 per cent of the retail price is accounted for by the wholesale price – the cost of generating the power.

This component didn't contribute greatly to the price doubling of the past decade, but is now the chief source of the recent price rises of 15 to 20 per cent in some states, with more to come.

About the next 40 per cent of the retail price comes from network distribution costs – the cost of taking electricity from the power stations and transmitting it, first, through the high-voltage power lines and then through the poles and wires that distribute it to our homes.

It's this component that explains the great bulk of the doubling in the real retail price.

Because the distribution network is a natural monopoly, the prices the privatised or still government-owned distribution companies are allowed to charge are controlled by the Australian Energy Regulator, using a cost-plus formula.

Trouble is, with connivance by the NSW and Queensland governments, which retained government-owned distributors, the companies soon found ways to game the formula.

They claimed they needed to spend big on strengthening their networks to ensure that the spike in demand for power on just a few hot afternoons each year could be met without blackouts.

There were much cheaper ways to reduce the risk of blackouts – such as by rewarding some users for cutting back on those few days of peak demand – but these wouldn't have been as lucrative for the companies.

After years of big price rises to pay for this "gold-plating" of the network, the regulator finally woke up and tried to wind back some of the increase.

The NSW Coalition government, anxious to maximise the sale price of the poles-and-wires companies it was about to partially sell off, took the regulator to court and got the price roll back stopped in its state.

This brings us to the final 30 per cent or so of the retail price accounted for by the electricity retailers' margin.

Price control over these margins was lifted some years ago in the belief that competition between retailers would keep their margins in check, but it hasn't really worked.

This is partly because the companies try to avoid competing on price, and partly because not enough people use the government website, energymadeeasy.gov.auhttps://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au, to check every few years that their existing supplier isn't taking advantage of them.

But now the formerly stable wholesale generation part of the market has begun producing big price increases, with more to come.

This is partly because very old power stations are being closed and not sufficiently replaced by new generators, thanks to uncertainty about how the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is to be managed.

Having abolished Labor's carbon tax, the Coalition has so far failed to replace it with any other mechanism because of opposition from its climate-change deniers.

But also partly because miscalculations by one of the three gas companies permitted by the previous Labor government to build big gas export facilities in Queensland has pushed gas prices way above even the higher export-parity price.

Apart from crippling some industries, this has greatly reduced the ability to use gas-fired power stations to cover the "intermittency" of wind and solar power, pending the arrival of adequate storage technology.

Turnbull has threatened to use the feds' export powers to reserve sufficient gas for domestic use, but we're yet to see this have its effect. Much potential price pain lies ahead.

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