EBA stands for enterprise bargaining agreement. It is one of the most important documents of your working life, so it pays to understand it. You can find your EBA in the member portal, under ‘My Membership’.
Also called an enterprise agreement, an EBA is a legally enforceable agreement – between your employer, the ANMF and employees covered by the agreement – outlining your wages, working conditions, allowances and entitlements.
Legally enforceable means that the entitlements contained in EBAs are backed by the full force of the law, and employers may be subject to significant financial penalties if they don’t comply with agreements. ANMF is here to help you if you believe your employer is not complying with your EBA.
Why do EBAs exist?
Before EBAs, nurses, midwives and carers were paid as various industry groups by operation of the relevant award. The awards were determined by an arbitral body and employees did not have a direct ability to change their terms. Rates and classifications were flatter, and the capacity for wages growth was more limited.
EBAs were introduced by the federal government in the early 1990s, with the aim of providing higher wages and better conditions to workers, but it has been an imperfect system that has not equally benefited nurses, midwives and personal care workers.
Part of the reason for this is that until 2023, the legal rules only allowed an EBA to cover one employer (with a few exceptions). This restriction has meant that workplaces with a greater density of ANMF members have often achieved higher wages and better conditions than workplaces with a lower density of ANMF members – primarily because the more ANMF members a workplace has, the more power those members have to achieve positive change:
A good example of this is the public sector, which until recently was one of the few exceptions to the ‘one EBA for one employer’ rule.
There are tens of thousands of members working in the public sector under one single enterprise agreement. When all those members work together, they can achieve great things – for instance, ratios were only achieved (first in the EBA) because public sector members fought hard for them, over many years; and then fought again and again to save them, and ultimately secure them in law.
What happened in 2023?
The Albanese government passed new workplaces laws in June 2023.
The new laws mean that more workers employed by different employers in the same industry – private aged care, for instance – may be able to negotiate together for a single EBA that coves multiple workplaces (in the event certain conditions are met), thus increasing their bargaining power through strength in numbers.
ANMF has used these laws to achieve successful results for members – for example, we negotiated a multi-employer enterprise agreement to cover our members across 14 individual bush nursing centres across Victoria, achieving pay parity with the public sector and improved working conditions.
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Know your EBA
‘Everybody was shocked because they’d worked there for years and had never claimed a cent. But here was somebody freshly arrived from England coming and claiming $320.63.’
Clinical nurse specialist Allington Gono read his EBA ‘inside out’ before he started working in Victoria, and used it to claim extra money. Read more
ANMF runs regular training to equip Job Reps with a solid foundation in reading and understanding EBAs.
If you’re a delegate, find out more at delegates.anmfvic.asn.au.
Not a Job Rep? Find out more at anmfvic.asn.au/jobrep.
Find out more about the EBA process
