Enterprise flexibility agreements in small business: Rhetoric or reality?

The federal government's industrial relations reforms have aimed to decentralize industrial relations to the enterprise level. In order to encourage enterprise bargain ing in all Australian workplaces, division 3 of part VIB of the Commonwealth Industrial Relations Act 1988 enabled constitutional corporations to obtain a non- union enterprise agreement. This type of agreement is known as an enterprise flexibility agreement'. It was expected that enterprise flexibility agreements would act as a mechanism to extend enterprise bargaining to the small business sector. However; research reveals that fourteen months after the introduction of the legisla tion, only sixteen of the sixty-eight enterprise flexibility agreements approved by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission applied to small businesses. This find ing supports the argument that the formal system of (federal) industrial relations has little impact on the manner in which industrial relations are conducted and regulated in small businesses. Indeed, this study would suggest that the federal government's reforms are largely irrelvant to small businesses.