By John Rainford
If organising the working class is narrowly construed as organising workers into unions, then it must be said that we've gone from being pretty good at it to being pretty crook.
Australia was once the most highly unionised country in the world. That was not a statistical aberration, but a position held for a long time. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on union density rates show an overall rate of 28.1%, with private sector rates of 21.4%. The figures indicate that we are heading towards the US level of about 15%, particularly in the private sector. Unionisation rates in 1982-3 were 49.5%.
The decline in union membership accelerated at a time when we had a Labor government in Canberra for most of the period and Labor governments in the states for significant periods.
As some commentators have pointed out, the decline can be explained by two external factors and by a third, but crucial, internal factor.
The two external factors are structural changes such as unemployment, casualisation, the employment shift to the services sector, the emasculation of the public sector and legislative and ideological attacks by employers and governments on collectivism.
The crucial third factor has been the response of unions. To put it bluntly, the response has been poor, with some notable exceptions.
Union amalgamation as a response to the crisis has not worked. The gimmicky services notion, tying union membership to inducements, has failed to strike a responsive chord — which is no surprise to activists.
The recruitment drive under the ACTU's "Organising Works" has had some success but, overall, it has not arrested the level of attrition.
Now just in case anyone is worried that this crisis has led to terrible unemployment among union officials — let me quickly reassure you!
In federal parliament, some 18 of the 24 Labor frontbenchers and 19 of the 28 senators are former union officials, and that's before we get to the lower house backbenchers. Those ex-union officials include the two past presidents of the ACTU and would have included the present incumbent, Jennie George, if she had not been dudded for a seat in Victoria.
What trade union movement policies might explain the present crisis? The Accord between the ALP and the ACTU was the crucial policy. Many workers — unionists and non-unionists alike — see the Accord as an instrument that helped the ALP retain government at the expense of workers' living standards and working conditions.
Under the Accord, there was a massive shift of GDP share from wages to profits. In 1982-3, the profit share was 12.1% and the wages share was 63.3%. By March 1996, profit share was 16.3% and the wages share had dropped to 57.8%. That was a free gift from workers to capital of 4.2% of GDP — in money terms, more than $20 billion a year, or about $320 billion since 1982-83.
Of course, they invested that surplus in the public interest didn't they? Not quite! It was used to fuel the speculation frenzy of the late 1980s that, in turn, led to an even deeper recession in 1991.
It is not going to be easy to claw that back. In the December quarter of 1998, profits as a share of national income were at the highest level recorded since quarterly national accounts began in 1959.
The second important effect of the ALP Accord was the shift to institutionalised enterprise bargaining. Wage increases traded for longer hours have been its main feature, as well as increased casualisation and contracting out.
The links of workers' solidarity have been snapped: 30-40% of workers have enterprise agreements; 35-40% rely on awards only; and the rest are award-free.
There's a very clear divide, and even amongst those covered by agreements, there can be vastly different outcomes. For example, in the 1998 March quarter, the average wage increase in agreements was 4.2%, but only 9% or workers received this. Some got 15%, others zilch. And, surprise, women were worse off than men.
A casualty has been workers' shop-steward structures and organised mass meetings in particular industries. Small wonder that in a recent Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research (ACIRRT) survey some 50% of respondents said that unions did not look after their members.
It's not all gloom and doom. There are still some 2 million union members, and that is a lot provided that there is a policy shift back to collective, democratic, militant unionism.
There are two competing traditions of the labour movement — Laborism and socialism. The Laborist tradition is in deep trouble. The only way it relies on to civilise capital is with the election of Labor governments. With the grip that "economic rationalists" have on the ALP, it is difficult to see this strategy realising other than change at the margins.
The socialist tradition is also in trouble given the lack of an alternative model that can be pointed to. However, it is the socialist tradition's organisational practice — organising mass movements — that provides the only challenge to capital.
Obviously workers, whether unionised or not, do not represent the whole of the working class, which embraces those not in the work force such as retirees and the unemployed.
Do you build on the collectivism of unionism to organise the broader working class or do you write off the union movement as representing secure wage-earners (and a large proportion of high wage earners at that)?
It's easier to do the former, even if that involves a significant battle to reorient so-called "left" unions to a social unionism linked to the broader community and challenging the myopic vision of the right.
The clear starting point for a militant, democratic union movement is to establish strong links with existing community groups and foster the establishment of others. The most important of these groups is the unemployed.
ACIRRT recently published data that showed the true unemployment rate to be 19%. The figure is shocking and significant. When compared to the private sector unionisation rate of 21.4%, it shows that by organising the unemployed in unions and broader regional collectives, unionisation rates could be doubled and collectivism promoted on a wider scale beyond the workplace.
The lessons of the Militant Minority Movement the 1920s and '30s need to be heeded rather than ignored. Not only did that movement organise and politicise unemployed workers, it also radicalised the unions and played a major role in the development and militant direction of the shop stewards' movement.
In the 1980s, in some unions at least, there was a deliberate policy of seeking out unemployed activists, providing them with necessary office space and technical support and assisting them to both organise the unemployed and develop policy responses.
This led to debates on the job which resulted in the banning or limiting of overtime and pressure on employers to open their books. It wasn't the answer to large-scale unemployment, but it was a start and, importantly, it extended the principle of dignity of labour beyond paid employment. In the 1990s, this response appears to have all but vanished.
Not entirely. Earlier this year, the Electrical Trades Union in Victoria had a dispute about expanding job opportunities for younger and older workers at the Docklands site. The ETU was able to win a 36-hour week with capped overtime; a 3:1 ratio of tradespersons to apprentices; and a 6:1 ratio for workers over 45. Recently, this flowed on to the large Federation Square project.
That example shows what can be done. The more difficult task is to get it done on a much wider scale.
There are no magic solutions. Organising the working class in paid employment is no easy task. Organising unemployed workers is even more difficult. It's a question of plugging away whenever and wherever we can.
[John Rainford is national industrial officer of the electrical division of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union. This speech was delivered at the "Organising the Working Class' forum held recently in Wollongong. The views expressed were presented in a individual capacity, and do not necessarily reflect those of the CEPU.]