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March-April 2006
Industry campaign delivers early victories in ANZ National
A year that has seen the majority of Finsec members actively involved in large campaigns around pay systems appears to have delivered early benefits to staff at ANZ National. ANZ National’s General Manager People Capital, Andrew McSweeney, recently responded to a letter from Finsec General Secretary Andrew Casidy confirming that the bank would not be looking at a target-based pay system as it looks at possible models to adopt as it merges its existing two pay systems:
“If what you are referring to are remuneration frameworks, such as those operated by our competitors wherein ‘performance’ is measured simply by attainment or not of set targets, then I can give you a categorical assurance that we do not want this as part of ANZ National Bank’s remuneration system for our non-TEC staff.”
Finsec’s Campaign Director, Karen Skinner, believes that Finsec’s public campaigns in both Westpac and BNZ have placed significant pressure on ANZ National to avoid adopting a performance pay system. Finsec members in ANZ National have worked hard within their bank over the last year to promote a pay system that treats them fairly by rewarding skills and experience.
“This is probably another case where the real wins from a committed and active campaign by union members are delivered 12-18 months afterwards. Sometimes it takes a while for everyone to emerge from a dispute and move on.”
Skinner is reminding members that they need to capitalise on this momentum:
“Although target-based pay is off the table, members still have a lot of work to do. The proposed new pay system could contain any number of problems as it’s developed, such as unfair competency assessment processes, different pay levels for doing similar jobs, or some jobs being red-circled so that they are not entitled to negotiated pay increases. To protect all these things we need members to send a strong signal to the bank by recruiting new members.”
