Reforming Australia's Unions
Edited by Michael Costa and Mark Hearn
Federation Press, 1997.
290pp., $24.95(pb)
Review by James Vassilopoulos
With the ALP's Prices and Incomes Accord now dead, it's easy to be sceptical about it, to express concern at the effects of wage restraint on workers and to acknowledge the trade-offs in working conditions that accompanied enterprise bargaining.
Despite its consistent support for the Accord throughout its operation, the Labour Council of NSW does just that in Reforming Australia's Unions.
This book is a collection of articles from Southland magazine, published by the Labour Council. It contains essays on amalgamations, the Accord, enterprise bargaining, women at work and workers' rights in the Asia-Pacific region.
The biggest failing of Reforming Australia's Unions is that it does not address the central political question for the union movement — the anti-worker role of the ALP, which has almost monopolised control over Australia's trade unions.
The book is critical of the ACTU and its strategies for rebuilding the union movement, but puts forward ideas on how unions should be changed which are not fundamentally different.
This is not surprising. For all the ALP right-dominated Labour Council's criticisms of the ALP centre/left-dominated ACTU, they are both in the same party. That party is a party of austerity, of union bureaucrats who put their career paths and factional interests ahead of the interests of working people. The blame for the Accord and enterprise bargaining lies with the ALP as a whole, not just the ACTU.
If you believe Peter Sams, secretary of the Labour Council, it has been proven right in all major debates with the ACTU.
It was the Labour Council, he says, that gave primacy to the "award safety net system" over the "obsession of enterprise bargaining". It was the Labour Council that was "sceptical" about the ACTU-ALP accord. It was the Labour Council that defended an "independent" Industrial Relations Commission and that maintained that the amalgamation of unions into super-unions was a flawed policy.
It is all too easy to bag past policies. Too bad the Labour Council took no serious action on its concerns at the time. Too bad it supported the Accord and enterprise bargaining. Too bad it remained in the party that implemented these policies and screwed workers for 13 years. Too bad it's support base included the most rotten, corrupt and pro-management unions in the country.
On the surface, some of the Labour Council's criticisms of the ACTU are correct. Its argumentation, however, is not. For example, its criticism of the Accord flows from a belief that a deregulated and "opened up" economy cannot be reconciled with such centralised wage outcomes and the Accord.
A left critique of the Accord would be very different. It would start from the reality of 17-28% cuts in real wages, the shift in income distribution to the rich, the cuts in the social wage and persistently high unemployment.
It would also emphasise the smothering of union struggles for better wages and conditions that flowed from the implementation of the Accord, leaving the union movement smaller and weaker in the face of the federal Coalition's attacks.
What is the Labor right's solution to the crisis confronting the unions? Costa writes that unions of the future will need to give members "the choice of purchasing trade union services from whatever union offers the most attractive package of services. Union constitutional monopolies inhibit choice and the development of a trade union market place. Entrepreneurial unions deserve to grow ... A competitive market for union services is what the union movement needs."
This is a corporatist view of unions. Nowhere do we hear of unions organising or fighting for workers' rights. Rather, they would be tail-ending the defeats the working class has suffered over the last 14 years.
Of course, there is no mention by Costa of that dreaded word "class". Yet the future he paints in one where the bosses rule.
Costa's ideas undermine the core of unionism, which is about workers suppressing competition between themselves, so as to achieve the highest possible wages.
The well-being of each worker depends on collective action and solidarity. Costa's view removes the national strength and the collectivity out of the union. He says "traditional collectivist notions will increasingly be seen by the work force as reflecting the philosophy of a by-gone era".
Unions should be more "decentralised, with greater authority at the local level. Enterprise agreements will need to be tailored to the needs of a work force", he says. That is, enterprise unions with more enterprise bargaining, and more trading off of working conditions for one-off wage increases. Individual contracts would fit nicely into this scheme.
Instead of combating labour market deregulation and flexibility, (i.e., wages and conditions loss), Costa argues that if the Liberals do deregulate the labour market, the unions "would have already begun down the path of developing both the culture and the skills required for survival in the new operating environment".
The Labour Council and its base of right-wing unions such as the Australian Workers Union and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) are not, however, pure on these questions either.
The Labour Council has a tradition of token "days of action", but has not organised any ongoing campaign against the Liberals' industrial relations attacks.
A recent enterprise bargaining deal between the SDA and Coles was used to poach members from the meatworkers' union and redefined ordinary working hours from 8am to 9.30pm.
The Labor right-controlled postal and telecommunications branch of the communications union was recently found to have rigged the union elections.
These are not the sort of unions we need. We need unions that are independent of the Labor Party, that build militant and broad campaigns, and that defend the rights of all working people.
Costa's assertion that "collectivist notions" will be seen as passé is best countered with reference to the truck drivers' strike in France in 1995, which won a shorter working week and a reduction of the retirement age. The November 30 Le Monde editorial on those events concluded: "The unions have shown that collective action is just as modern as the law of the market".