Minimum Wage

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CEO gets $22 million bonus while award workers get real pay cut under WorkChoices

By the ASU - fighting for your rights at work

The fact that Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo will get a $22 million pay packet this year while one million working families will get a real pay cut of up to $800 shows the unfairness of the Howard Government's WorkChoices IR laws said the ACTU.

ACTU President Sharan Burrow said:

"CEO pay bonuses like this one for Telstra boss Sol Trujillo are obscene.

"Australian working families are struggling to cope with interest rates rises and the effect of WorkChoices.

"Last week Professor Ian Harper, the head of the Howard Government's new wages setting body confirmed that real wages for more than a million low paid workers have fallen by up to $15.67 a week or $814 a year under WorkChoices this year.

"This is another sign that WorkChoices is taking Australia down the United States path of large numbers of workers earning poverty-level wages while a small number of executives earn outrageous multi-million dollar bonuses.

"John Howard and Peter Costello keep telling us that Australia's economy is doing well but under WorkChoices working families are not seeing the benefits of this prosperity," said ACTU President Sharan Burrow.

100 year anniversary of the ‘Sunshine Harvester’ wage case

The 100 year anniversary of the 'Sunshine Harvester' wage case decision today, Thursday 8 November, is also a timely reminder for Australian workers of the damaging effects of WorkChoices said the ACTU.

"The legal requirement for fair minimum wages, along with Australia's unique independent umpire and award safety net have been major features of Australia's IR system for the past 100 years until they were overturned by the introduction of the Howard Government's unfair WorkChoices laws," said Ms Burrow.

In response to a union pay claim in 1907 Justice Higgins of the Industrial Relations Commission ruled that employees deserved a wage guaranteeing them a standard of living reasonable for "a human being in a civilised community".

The 'Sunshine Harvester' case was the first of its kind in the world and resulted in Justice Higgins setting a minimum wage for unskilled workers of 7 shillings a week -- around $1.40 a week -- which he deemed "enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort".

Australia's minimum wage is now $522.12 a week or $13.74 an hour. The minimum wage would be $50 less a week if the Howard Government had got its way in previous minimum wage cases.

Minimum award wages – real change Dec 06 to Oct 2007

• CPI rose 2.0% over the ten month period from the Fair Pay Commission's last pay rise in December 2006 to its most recent rise in October 2007.
• In real terms, the table below shows that workers on the federal Minimum Wage (C14) had a real pay increase of just 6 cents a week -- effectively a wage freeze in real terms.
• All other minimum award workers received a real pay cut - from 28 cents a week to as much as $15.67 a week.
• As there are only about 100,000 workers on the FMW (C14), this shows that around 1.1 million award workers on C13 and above, received a real pay cut.