Commonwealth Bank faces union action

CBA talks break down with FSU

Commonwealth Bank faces union action

Australia’s largest bank has told the Financial Services Union that it wants to go directly to its 32,000 employees with a proposed new agreement that will attempt to stop rostered days off, and to allow it to make individual agreements more easily.

The FSU has reacted angrily, with its national secretary taking an aggressive public stance.

"The FSU won’t stand by and allow CBA to pressure its workers to accept a defective enterprise agreement that seeks to legitimise and perpetuate the practices which caused the massive wage theft uncovered in 2019,” she told the Australian Financial Review.

“CBA’s proposed agreement would effectively refit the rules to allow the bank to continue the unlawful behaviour of the past without consequence.”

CBA senior executives have spent nearly a year engaged with the union trying to simplify archaic workplace agreements – and now are upping the ante by circumnavigating the union.

The new deal being offered will see three tiers of wage hike being offered to staff on the enterprise agreement

Salary up to

Wage rise

$75,000

3.25%

$110,000

2.25%

$153,000

2.00%

A CBA spokesman told the AFR that the bank believed that the new EA offered the correct balance of “more pay, more leave and better benefits.”