One of Australia's top childcare providers has expressed support for controversial industrial relation reforms, breaking away from top business groups.
An executive at Goodstart Early Learning, a not-for-profit publicly listed provider running about 640 centres, said he was "broadly supportive" of proposed workplace laws.
The reforms would restructure wage agreements between employers and employees and allow sector-wide bargaining.
While most unions have supported the proposals, industry bodies have said the bill would cause disruptive strike action while the business sector struggles with a volatile economy.
Multi-employer bargaining would allow employees to negotiate pay alongside everyone else in the same industry.
Goodstart supports multi-employer bargaining, head of advocacy John Cherry said.
"We're broadly supportive of the provisions. We're happy to engage in multi-employer bargaining," he told a parliamentary committee on October 31, 2022.
"As an employer that went through an enterprise bargaining process last year, we certainly welcome a number of other provisions that will make ... the registration of agreements easier.
"I think that they've carried broad consent across both employers and unions across the country."
Not all workplaces in an industry are the same, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar has said.
"Businesses will be forced to adopt one-size-fits-all terms and conditions, which may be unaffordable and ill-suited to the needs of their workplaces. This is not opt-in," he said.
"[It] does not provide adequate safeguards to ensure businesses with limited similarities won't be compelled to bargain together."
Mr Cherry said around 20 per cent of the early learning industry had enterprise agreements, 15 per cent paid above award without a contract, and 63 per cent paid award wages.
"How you come up with a sector-wide multi-employer documentation of that as an endpoint is something which does my head in a bit," he said.
"But I have been heartened by the comments from [Employment Minister Tony Burke] that even under these arrangements, that a single employer agreement is still the government's preferred outcome."
Mr Cherry said he wanted the government to fund any childcare sector-wide negotiations.
"We want government at the table to fund it. Without government at the table, it would be a long, drawn-out process with not a lot of return for workers," he said.
Goodstart has called for an immediate ten per cent pay rise for early learning teachers to help bolster the workforce before cheaper childcare subsidies kick-in July next year.
The sector suffers from a workforce shortage, with industry bodies and unions claiming low wages are a key cause.
The government has not backed a childcare pay rise, and the Fair Work Commission has twice knocked back requests to increase the minimum wage for early educators.
Employment and workplace relations minister Tony Burke has said the new reforms would allow educators from across the sector to negotiate their wages together, making an increase more likely.
"If a group of childcare workers at childcare centres want to bargain with their employers, they're all similar workplaces, they all have similar rules," he told the ABC.
"At the moment, all those negotiations have to be technically separate negotiations."
Opposition spokesperson for employment, Senator Michaelia Cash, has said allowing multi-employer bargaining would increase the risk of mass industrial strikes.
Mr Burke said the new reforms would not create more industrial action because of conciliation provisions.
"The rules in being able to do it [industrial action] are no different to what they would be if you were doing a single employer negotiation," he said.
"There'll now be compulsory conciliation to try to sort these disputes out. That may of itself across the board put real downward pressure on industrial action because we get issues solved first."
Mr Cherry said that regardless of workplace reforms, the government needed to increase financial support for the childcare sector.
"But without the change to the funding system to underpin that wage rise, it's not going to move," he said.
