The CBA Standoff and the Jobs Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

I’ve been following the CBA enterprise agreement saga the way some people follow test cricket: not because I expect a dramatic finish, but because I like watching the slow accumulation of small, telling moments. And this one’s telling. Negotiations breaking down, management digging in rather than caving early like they usually do. Something’s different this time, and most people online seem to agree on what it is: AI and offshoring, finally out in the open instead of happening quietly in the background.

I don’t work in banking. I work in IT, which means I’ve watched this exact movie before, just with different actors. Development teams shrinking, work handed to contractors in other time zones, a slide deck somewhere calling it “efficiency” with a straight face. It’s not new. What’s new is a big, visible, unionised workforce actually pushing back instead of absorbing it quietly.

One comment in the thread stuck with me: the idea that this is a prisoner’s dilemma. No single company benefits from being the last one to hold the line on local jobs, because their competitors won’t wait around either. That’s a fair point, and I don’t think it’s wrong. Companies aren’t charities. CBA isn’t going to volunteer to pay more for labour out of civic duty. But “it’s just rational business behaviour” is also the sentence that’s been used to justify every bit of wage suppression and casualisation of the last thirty years. Both things can be true: the incentive structure is real, and it’s also a structure we chose, which means we can choose a different one.

The bit that got me thinking harder was the suggestion of pegging offshored roles to local award wages. Not banning offshoring outright, just removing the arbitrage that makes it attractive. I don’t know if that’s workable in practice, tax and labour law get complicated fast, but it’s at least aimed at the actual mechanism rather than just being angry at the outcome. I like policy ideas that target the lever, not the lever-puller.

There’s also the NAB precedent people keep bringing up: staff rejected the first offer, got a better one, and management still handed out the thousand dollars anyway because being seen to lose the vote mattered more to them than the money. That’s a useful thing to know if you’re on the fence about voting no. Management desperation is not evenly distributed, it turns out. Sometimes the “final offer” has another final offer hiding behind it.

I’ll admit a personal contradiction here, because I’m not going to pretend I don’t have one. I’ve benefited from cheaper offshore labour in my own industry, tools and platforms built on infrastructure and support that’s cheaper because someone overseas is paid less to run it. I use AI tools most days and find them genuinely useful, sometimes remarkably so. I also worry, sincerely, about what happens to a country that hollows out its own middle-skill jobs while telling itself it’s “moving up the value chain.” Both things sit in my head at once and I haven’t resolved them. I’m not sure they resolve.

What I keep coming back to is the shareholder point someone made in the thread: most of us are CBA shareholders, through super if nothing else, and almost none of us will ever show up to an AGM and say anything about it. The union vote might be the more honest form of shareholder activism available to ordinary people right now, precisely because it’s the one lever that isn’t mediated by a fund manager three steps removed from the decision.

I don’t know how this ends. Maybe CBA staff vote no and get a better deal, like NAB did. Maybe they don’t, and this becomes the template every other bank quietly follows. Either way, it’s worth watching properly instead of scrolling past it, because whatever happens here won’t stay inside banking for long.