Church Continues Fight For A Fair Minimum Wage
By Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv
It is important to remember that many people – even people who are in full-time employment – can work hard, yet still struggle to provide for their families.
The Church employs more than 220,000 people across Australia, so it has an important role in this debate as we are both a substantial employer and a Church with concern for the most vulnerable.
That’s why the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference through the Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations (ACCER) has made submissions to national wage cases for decades, because the minimum wage is all that many people have.
ACCER Submission to the Annual Wage Review 2020 – 2021
27 July 2021
The Fair Work Commission has announced a 2.5 per cent increase in the minimum wage and related award minimum wages, which will mean an extra $18.80 a week for Australia’s lowest-paid full-time workers. Source: ABC News.
This will take the minimum wage for Australia’s lowest-paid workers to $20.33 an hour, or $772.60 a week for full-time workers.
Fair Work Commission president Justice Iain Ross said this year’s economic circumstances were very different to those at the time of last year’s 1.75 per cent minimum wage increase, announced at the height of the pandemic recession.
He said there was a broad consensus among Fair Work Submissions that the “economic recovery is well underway”.
The Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations, which has been making submissions on the minimum wage for decades on behalf of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, had called for a 4 per cent increase in the minimum wage and other award rates.
Its submission to the Fair Work Commission argued that existing rates “do not create an effective safety net for the low paid”.
Peak union body the ACTU had been pushing for a 3.5 per cent minimum wage rise, while many employer groups had been arguing for a smaller increase than that which the FWC delivered.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry had been arguing for a 1.1 per cent pay increase, describing a 2.5 per cent rise as “premature and irresponsible”.
Read the full submission: ACCER Wage Case Submissions 2020 – 2021
ACCER Post Budget Submission to the Annual Wage Review 2017 - 2018
11 April 2018
The Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations has told the Fair Work Commission that the minimum wage is “manifestly inadequate” and hundreds of thousands of families are living in or threatened by poverty.
The ACCER has told the Fair Work Commission that its view on wage levels is based on Catholic social teaching, which holds that workers “have the right to wages that will support themselves and their families at a decent standard of living”.
It has argued that this right is an internationally recognised human right and that it is also recognised in the minimum wages provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009, under which the national minimum wage and award minimum wage rates are set.
The national minimum wage, as it is currently set, is not delivering that standard of living and low-income families are suffering as a result, ACCER explained. Evidence presented in the ACCER submission shows that a full-time job on the national minimum wage in the average two-parent family with children leaves the family in poverty and that the average sole-parent family is left even worse off, because most sole parents have to work part-time.
“The level and depth of child poverty in working families is scandalous,” the ACCER submission says.
Read the full submission: ACCER Post Budget Submission to the Annual Wage Review 2017-18
The Australian Catholic Bishops Confrenece issued a media release expressing the views of the ACCER.