Australia's centre-left Labour government moved to revive the influence of the country's struggling union movement yesterday, unveiling new workplace laws which employers warned would lead to more disruption.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who brought the laws to Parliament, said the changes would restore fairness and job security to workers, who lost basic rights under the former conservative government. But a leading employer group said the new emphasis on employee rights and collective bargaining would lead to increased "union activism".

"The combination of new employee and union rights and the new regulatory and compliance obligations will carry significant risks to employers, small business and jobs," Peter Anderson, chief executive officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said.

The reforms are a key part of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's political agenda, after he won power in late last year by promising to abolish highly unpopular workplace laws which had undermined job security and weakened union power.

The new laws, expected to be endorsed by parliament by mid-next year, make it harder for bosses to sack workers, and give workers the right to have a collective agreement rather than the individual work contracts favoured by the former government.

The laws also restore union rights to enter a workplace to meet union members, and to be involved in negotiating wages and conditions if asked by workers, although the government will maintain secret ballots in any vote to strike.

"Australians voted for a workplace relations system that delivers a fair go, the benefits of mateship at work, a decent safety net and a fair way of striking a bargain. That's what this bill does," Ms Gillard said.

The bill comes at a time when Australia's union movement faced falling membership after its influence waned under almost 12 years of conservative rule by the former government.

Only one-in-five Australian workers, or 1.7 million people, are members of trade unions, with union membership falling five percent in the past year. In the private sector, only 14 per cent of workers are union members.

At the same time, Australia has overturned its 1970s reputation as a strike-prone country, with days lost to industrial disputes at record lows. An average person does six hours unpaid work a week over the standard 38-hour week.

The union movement hailed the new laws as a historic turning point for worker rights, and said unions would make full use of them once they were passed, to recruit new members and revive their weakened influence.

"We want to use the laws, we want to bargain with employers," Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow, Australia's top union official, told reporters.

The unions are also set to push for greater influence in Australia's mining sector, where workers have been lured by big-paying individual contracts and where union membership is only marginal outside of the coal industry.

"This bill is the greatest increase in the union movement's power since 1901," remarked Australian Mines and Metals Association workplace director Christopher Platt.