Beware the smiling assassin

The Struggle for Australian Industrial Relations
By Braham Dabscheck
Oxford University Press, 1995. 194 pp., $26.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon As Keating and Howard obscenely compete for the votes of working class "battlers", we should remind ourselves to beware politicians bearing industrial relations gifts because both packages contain faulty goods and come with a steep bill. Whichever smiling assassin delivers the unwelcome gift, it's going to cost the working class and benefit our bosses. You don't have to be some mad Trot to believe this. This is the message (for those who can add a micro-economic reform and an "enterprise flexibility agreement" together and come up with wage restraint and job cuts) of this new book on industrial relations in Australia since 1983. Braham Dabscheck, a University of NSW professor, concludes that the union movement has been rendered impotent by the Prices and Incomes Accord between the federal Labor government and the ACTU. The original Accord, in 1983, reintroduced centralised wage fixation based on price increases in an attempt to reign in and regulate a wave of successful wages struggles begun by unions during the latter period of the previous Fraser Liberal government. However, the new ALP government soon departed from the script. From 1985, accompanied by the new tune of "improving Australia's international competitiveness", delays and discounts became regular means to cut real wages. The hand of the Business Council of Australia (BCA) in this is now apparent, especially since former finance minister John Dawkins confessed that the ALP government was jumping to the BCA baton. The BCA was formed in 1983 and represents around 80 of Australia's biggest companies, and is not much liked by Dabscheck. The BCA argued for radical deregulation of the labour market with an enterprise-based industrial relations system where wages would be based on productivity. The BCA waved the banner of "Australia's national interest" to lead Australian workers away from "an outmoded role and rhetoric of class war". In other words, the BCA sought the union movement's surrender. The ALP proved a willing partner in this and the ACTU led many retreats, accepting "productivity" and "the national interest" in the guise of "structural efficiency principles", award restructuring, multi-skilling, wage-tax and wage-superannuation trade-offs, and so on. The bosses cackled all the way to the bank when "enterprise bargaining" hit the fan in the '90s. Dabscheck is quite right to say that enterprise bargaining was the "inevitable consequence" of productivity-based wage rises. ACTU secretary Bill Kelty called a 1991 decision by the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) to delay implementation of enterprise bargaining a "rotten egg" and "vomit". The IRC's decision was motivated partly out of concern that the economic recovery might ignite a wages break-out in a free-for-all of collective bargaining, and partly by concern at losing its own influence in a more decentralised industrial relations system. Meanwhile industrial relations tribunals in the Liberal-governed states had raced ahead to institute enterprise bargaining. They rolled back awards, introduced individual contracts and non-union enterprise bargaining. It wasn't long before the federal government was tracing their footsteps. Although Keating's infamous gaffe in 1993 — that enterprise bargains would become "full substitutes for awards" — was painted by his minders as an "unfortunate turn of phrase", the Keating government's Industrial Relations Reform Act of 1993 opened the door to non-union enterprise bargaining across the country. While all this has been going on, the ACTU has lost the plot, argues Dabscheck. In an orgy of bureaucratic and ineffective union amalgamations, and an ill-conceived strategy to replace class struggle with shop-a-dockets, unions have "turned in on themselves" at a time when wages and working conditions have been under attack by employers. All that amalgamations did was "create an illusion of bigness" at a time when unions' ability to attract and retain members was declining. "Marginal unionists" (those thinking of joining or of leaving unions), writes Dabscheck, "feel somewhat antipathetic" to unions when they are associated with real wage cuts under the Accord and when they speak "the rhetoric of employers": "restructuring", "efficiency", "wealth creation", and so on. Union leaderships by and large have forgotten about representing unionists, he argues, as they have taken up the employers' cause. Dabscheck's book is not intended for nor written in a style suitable for use on a picket line. But if you can put up with a bit of academic terminology (e.g. "orbits of interactors"), a ritual swipe at Lenin, and Dabscheck's prescription of economism for unions (wages and conditions should be the sole focus of unions, which would rule out trade union action to oppose French nuclear testing in the Pacific, for instance) then this is a useful book for militant unionists.