If you don't fight

April 30, 1997
Issue 

If you don't fight ...

The failure of the ACTU's living wage claim for a $20 "safety net" rise and a general 8.75% increase in award wage rates indicates the weakened state of the trade union movement today.

In rejecting the ACTU's claim on April 22, the Industrial Relations Commission granted a rise of $10 a week to workers on federal awards. Commenting on the IRC's decision, ACTU president Jennie George said, "Executive salaries have grown at double the rate of inflation in the last five years — the people I represent have seen their real award wages cut in that period, and today's decision does not compensate for those losses".

George's comments were backed up by the remarks made by 52-year-old textile worker Yvonne Jelovic. Interviewed by the Australian's Jamie Walker the day of the IRC's decision, Jelovic said that the $10 rise would not make much difference to her life. Like millions of other workers, Jelovic receives only the basic award wage. Her husband, Ralph, has been unemployed for three years and is ineligible for unemployment compensation because he took a redundancy pay-out.

"By the time Ms Jelovic pays the rent on their two-bedroom house, the bills and buys petrol for their 12-year-old car, the $333 she clears a week is all but gone", Walker reported.

While George and other union officials have expressed disappointment with the IRC's decision, the result should have been expected. The IRC has always made its wages decisions on the basis of what it thinks "the economy" (i.e. the employers) can afford to give workers in to order to preserve industrial peace.

With no nationally coordinated campaign of industrial action to back up the ACTU's claim, the IRC judged that the relationship of forces between the unions and the bosses was such that granting a few crumbs would be enough to maintain the myth that it remains the "industrial umpire".

This myth of the IRC's "neutrality" is one of the most cherished illusions of the Laborite officials who head the ACTU and its affiliated unions. It accords with their general outlook and material interests as privileged intermediaries between the buyers and sellers of labour power.

The trade-union officialdom is overwhelmingly made up of self-seeking careerists who view the interests of capital and labour as fundamentally harmonious, rather than irreconcilably antagonistic. The political and economic policies they advocate seek to promote the expansion of Australian capital, while lobbying for the bosses to grant their workers a slice of this "expanding pie" (which the workers themselves create).

During the 1950s and '60s, when the capitalist "pie" was expanding, it was relatively easy for the union bureaucracy to secure higher wages and better conditions for union members. But since the mid-1970s, capitalism around the world has fallen on hard times and, in order to maintain their profit rates, the bosses have demanded more and more sacrifices from workers. With their "what's good for capital is good for labour" outlook, the bureaucrats responded to the bosses' demands by agreeing to a series of ever more compromising concessions — from "wage restraint" in the first years of the ALP-ACTU Accord, to wages-productivity trade-offs in its later years, to trade-offs of wage rises for concessions on working conditions under enterprise bargaining.

The consequences of these class-collaborationist policies have been disastrous not only for workers' living standards but also for the unions. With the election of the Howard government, the union bureaucracy's ideological bankruptcy and political impotence have been starkly revealed.

Thus Peter Reith was able to confidently dismiss the ACTU's threats of "class warfare" over the introduction of the Workplace Relations Act as empty bluster. The IRC judges have also not been slow in recognising that Kelty and George are all piss and wind.

The outcome of the national wage case confirms the truth of an old militant union aphorism: "If you don't fight, you lose". As long as the labour movement is saddled with "generals" whose first priority is preserving their own cushy lifestyles and their career prospects as future Labor politicians, workers will continue to be on the losing side of the class struggle.

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