A senior HR specialist from the resources industry has told AMMA's national summit today that employers need to navigate their way through existing IR legislation and not use it as an excuse for declining productivity.
Woodside Energy's HR vice president, Ian Masson, speaking at AMMA's Australian Resource People Summit in Perth today, said his company started building LNG infrastructure when the Conciliation and Arbitration Act was still in place.
"So, we've had the benefits of multiple different pieces of legislation," he quipped.
Masson said that "one thing that is as true today as it was 25 years ago, is that employers make their own luck".
"You've just got to deal with the legislation that exists at the time, and navigate your way through, and not use the legislation as an excuse as to why you can't do things," he said.
Masson told the summit "we could talk for hours" about the limitations of the Fair Work Act, but that Woodside had utilised "staff systems" for 20 years, "well before AWAs".
For some of its workforce, Woodside still operates on enterprise flexibility agreements made under Laurie Brereton's 1994 reforms to the Industrial Relations Act.
They allow the company to provide improvements to wages and conditions through quasi-contractual arrangements, and were first introduced to avoid the coverage of the award that applied to the North West shelf.
"Those staff systems, which provide a basis for productivity in our business, date to well before the current legislation," Masson said.
Masson said there had been a focus on "blue collar productivity", but "it would be unwise to ignore the many other factors that contribute to productivity, whether it's planning, whether it's logistics, whether it's supervision and management, whether it's competency and training".
Sitting on a panel with Masson, Chevron Australia HR general manager Kaye Butler agreed that employers needed to work through the legislative system as it existed from time to time.
Asked what she would change in the Fair Work Act, Butler identified right of entry and greenfields agreements.
She said Chevron had received over a thousand visits from union officials under the Fair Work Act regime. "It's disruptive," she said.
"Where unions represent employees, they should have access to their members. I'm not sure that every man and their dog should have access all the time," Butler said.
She said there needed to be "an easy way" to conclude greenfields agreements, to guarantee investment on big projects.
Masson said the absence of "effective alternative agreement making options" and unions' "monopolistic rights" in the bargaining process was something he'd like to see fixed.