'It's about transparency, knowledge and being able to take proactive steps to safeguard your career,' says FSU’s Nicole McPherson
Workers in many high-paying sectors are wary of how artificial intelligence (AI) might replace them. To get a lead on what lies ahead, the Finance Sector Union signed an enterprise agreement (EA) with an industry super fund that ensures it must share information about how AI will change roles.
The agreement affects workers at Cbus Super – the Construction and Building Unions Superannuation Fund – which manages about $94 billion on behalf of more than 920,000 members.
The union predicts the EA will set a “gold standard” for the finance sector, where AI is predicted to be deployed on a vast scale. ut will it also see a shift to a four-day week with no pay cuts?
“What we are seeing at the moment is just a complete lack of knowledge across the finance sector of how AI is being used,” Finance Sector Union national assistant secretary Nicole McPherson told HRD.
“When workers are in the dark, they can’t make any kinds of decisions about how to shape their career going forward.”
The “industry-first” protections in the EA include an extra five days’ consultation time if a role is affected by AI.
AI is already a significant disruptor in finance, McPherson said.
“We know AI is being used across the finance sector very broadly, but there is little transparency on how employers are using it,” she said. “That makes it really difficult for them to retrain and reskill to perform the jobs of the future.”
Some jobs will likely be replaced by AI, and employers will do well by their workers if they tell them how operations will be transformed by the technology.
“In order for workers to [prepare], they need to know what the roadmap looks like now, so they have a period of, preferably, years to be able to retrain for those jobs of the future,” McPherson said.
Make no mistake, the FSU is broadly pro AI.
“We think it is going to have, on the whole, a positive impact on our sector and our community,” she said. “The risk for us is that the productivity gains from AI simply go onto the bottom line of our largest companies.”
On some estimates, AI could create a 20% efficiency gain, McPherson said. “We want to see those efficiency gains going to workers through shorter working weeks, higher pay and things of that nature.”
The potential in AI would be sorely misdirected if it wasn’t used to tackle boring, repetitive tasks.
“Our members are excited about the proposition of being able to have some of that work done by AI,” she said.
“If there is, in fact, a 20% efficiency dividend from AI, then where that extra 20% goes really has this incredibly exciting possibility of reshaping how we structure work in this country.”
A giant step up in efficiency could be key to enabling one of the FSU’s long-held ambitions: a four-day week for its members, with no tradeoff in pay.
“It would allow a four-day working week to happen with no cost to employers,” McPherson said.
“We’ve had an eight-hour day for an extremely long time now – decades and decades and decades. This is a really exciting possibility to reshape our working week.”
The spectre of AI invokes both fear and wonder. As the magical new tool has appeared in workers’ lives, governments and regulators have been slow to catch up.
“There is a degree of nervousness from some employers to put clauses into enterprise agreements, because AI is such a fast-moving area,” McPherson said.
“We knew that if we referred to specific technologies [in the Cbus EA], for example, the clause would be out of date before it even got approved by the Fair Work Commission – and we didn’t want to do that.
“We came back to first principles: it’s about transparency, knowledge and being able to take proactive steps to safeguard your career to the benefit of fund members. That was how we landed on the clause that we did.”
