ALP-Labor Council-unions deal: a mini-Accord?
By Jenny Long
SYDNEY — The NSW government's pay offer to nearly 200,000 public sector employees (see article on this page) should be approached by workers with considerable caution. The involvement of the NSW Labor Council in a "no new claims" deal between unions and the state Labor government should ring alarm bells amongst union activists.
Already, many union leaders are compromised by their divided loyalties between representing their members, and advancing the interests of their party — the ALP — and their own careers within the party. When the employer they are negotiating with is an ALP government, this danger is particularly acute.
Many of the present difficulties of the Australian union movement are a product of the Prices and Incomes Accord, signed by the ACTU and the federal Labor government in 1983, which remained in place throughout the 1980s and early '90s. Under the Accord, the ACTU policed wage restraint in exchange for supposed control over prices and promised increases in the "social wage" (government services).
Most of the promises of the Accord were never delivered to workers — except the policing of wage restraint by the ACTU. The most extreme result of this policy was the deregistration of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots and the Builders Labourers Federation for stepping out of line.
Along with a dramatic shift of wealth from the working class to the capitalists, the legacy of the Accord has been the demobilisation and decline of the trade union movement. Suppression of industrial action under the Accord has had a lasting impact on the capacity of Australian workers to defend themselves. Much of the culture of trade union struggle and solidarity has been lost. Undoing this damage is now a big challenge.
A deal between government and a trade union peak body that promises "no new salaries or conditions claims arising from the negotiation of productivity and efficiency improvements covered by this agreement" should be avoided at all costs.