The last days of chez union?

November 18, 1992
Issue 

What Should Unions Do?
Michael Easson and Michael Crosby (eds)
Pluto Press, 394 pp. $24.95.
The Challenge for Unions: Workers versus the New Right
By John Wishart
Left Book Club, 86 pp. $14.95
Reviewed by Michael Rafferty

Ten years ago, Clyde Cameron proclaimed that the unions in Australia were in crisis. Since then, leaders of trade unions have been partners in a collaborative arrangement with business and the ALP known as the Accord. Union leaders have become much more influential within industry and government.

It may seem paradoxical, therefore, that the crisis of unionism has been growing. Union membership has plummeted, and attitudinal surveys suggest that unions are not popular among either members or non-members. Strategies being considered by the leadership of trade unions therefore deserve critical evaluation.

The proposition that the Accord has been mainly an incomes policy no longer arouses the controversy it once did. Like all incomes policies, it has been a mechanism to redistribute income from wages to profits, interest and rent. These economic effects have been fairly well documented and are now accepted by both its supporters and its opponents. Unions have accepted that the primary unit of economic activity is profits.

The political effects of the Accord, however, while less well documented, are arguably of greater significance. It has also represented an increased domination over workers which extends well beyond economics. Some of the consequences include a growing atomisation of labour; union structures corrupted into an instrument of production; and a growing class confidence of employers.

The Accord was not supported by all trade unionists. Those unions or activists who did oppose it, however, were dealt with swiftly and harshly. It is not just that unions have become undemocratic in an abstract sense; these tensions now define much of the rift between workers and unions.

This preamble is a necessary backdrop to the two books under review because neither wishes to deal with the main political consequences of recent union history. No do they discuss unions and the changing role of the institutions of labour within capitalism.

One book proposes an extension of the collaborative arrangements towards enterprise unions, while the other wants to return to the

"original" Accord in the face of the "new right".

In neither case do the needs and aspirations of labour as a class appear at the centre. In Easson and Crosby's collection, we get the need for unions to become more involved in increasing productivity (read keeping workers' shoulders to capital's wheel). In the other, it is union structures to allow unions to recapture labour in a Social Democratic net (called social unionism).

For Easson and others, enterprise bargaining is welcomed and would help to institute a US or Japanese type of unionism, involving enterprise unions, annual wage bargaining and collaboration between labour and management in the factory and in society at large. Unions would become basically service organisations for employees along corporate lines.

Another strand in the union leadership want to return to the "original" Accord. They want to bring social and industry policy issues back alongside incomes policies. Here the spectre of the "new right" is held as the other alternative to social unionism. Wishart's book is broadly a restatement of this position.

The new right has been used as a rhetorical strategy by union officials for several years. They must now try to resurrect the new right bogey, but to do so they must redefine it.

In the mid-1980s it was said that the Accord would link wages to inflation and stop the new right forcing out cost of living rises. Then the cost-of-living nexus was broken and productivity became the main avenue for nominal wage increases.

Later it was said that a centralised wage system was much better than enterprise bargaining. Now the ALP and ACTU are supporters of enterprise bargaining. Then unions said that minimum wages were offensive. Now we don't have youth minimum wages, we have Carmichael's youth training wages. And so on.

The space within which industrial relations are being contested by the major parties and union leaders is now very compressed.

The recent comments by minister for industrial relations Peter Cook on the Opposition's "Jobsback!" platform is revealing here. He criticised it first as a low wage policy, and then, in an ironic twist, accused the Opposition of stealing his ideas.

The Easson book is a vision for advancing to a new level of collaboration between labour and capital.

The Wishart book is more promising. Unfortunately, Wishart uses categories like the new right, restoration of democracy and fighting foreign firms. Such terms move the focus away from central antagonisms and blur the issues involved.

Militant unions were born out of the struggle in the factory, for better conditions and to resist speed-up and management control. The project for capital is to turn labour's resistance into creative cooperation.

Forty years ago C.L.R. James said that the vital task of the time was to expose the violent antagonism between capital and labour. Our task today is not merely to re-assert this, but to try to give a sense of the central conditions and contradictions of capitalism. Whether "new right" or Social Democratic, both schemes of industrial relations are plans for continuing the rule of capital.

Saying that the rule of capital is contained in both schemes is clearly inadequate on its own. But by reinstating the working class at the centre of labour politics, such an approach is a much better starting point than either of these books.

You need Green Left, and we need you!

Green Left is funded by contributions from readers and supporters. Help us reach our funding target.

Make a One-off Donation or choose from one of our Monthly Donation options.

Become a supporter to get the digital edition for $5 per month or the print edition for $10 per month. One-time payment options are available.

You can also call 1800 634 206 to make a donation or to become a supporter. Thank you.