The wages debate at the ACTU Congress was the one where everyone was expecting "action". All the ingredients for a major clash seemed to be there: the Transport Workers Union had denounced the loss of wages under the Accord; the New South Wales Labor Council had called on the ACTU for immediate pursuit of the $8 "safety net" claim; delegate after delegate had remarked in workshop sessions how much the unions were "on the nose" with working people because of wage losses.
Yet, if any debate was "full of sound and fury signifying nothing", it was this one. By the time the great tide of anger reached the final plenary session, it had shrunk to a thin trickle of feeble amendments.
At the end of it all Accord Mark VII, which looks to enterprise bargaining as the main source of wage increases, was solidly in place. Any thought of a campaign for a general wage increase had been squashed.
The debate began in the wages "syndicate", the ACTU's fancy name for workshops, which were introduced for the first time at this congress. There it fell to Peter Sams, the assistant secretary of the NSW Labor Council, to utter some home truths about how Accord Mark VII had been put in place.
"It was the last week in the election campaign and we voted on a document which we thought we would never have to implement. And, as I recall, we were harangued for two hours by the principal officers of the ACTU about what we should be doing about the election. There was no opportunity for debate."
Sams concluded: "The Accord is not relevant to the current circumstances, so let's not remain locked into a document founded on false assumptions".
Sams explained how enterprise bargaining could never win a wage increase for more than 20-30% of the work force. With hundreds of thousands of enterprises and only thousands of union officials, it would take ages to strike enterprise bargains across all workplaces.
For example, an industry like building "would require 96,000 separate agreements ... which would take 300 union organisers two years to achieve even if they negotiated an agreement a day".
The enterprise bargaining "obsession" would, Sams said, guarantee that the vast majority of workers (who hadn't had a wage rise for two years) would probably have to wait another two years for the next increase.
The assistant secretary of the NSW Transport Workers' Union, Steve Hutchins, said the unions should push for a general wage increase, indicating that he was sick of being told by members that the unions had presided over a wage freeze.
"The vast bulk of Australian workers will not achieve anything from the system we are about to put to them. No matter how we gloss it up, most employers see enterprise bargains as a negative, cost-cutting exercise", Hutchins said. "It's all right for the generals [the ACTU] to say one thing. The officers are saying another thing."
At the plenary session on wages, the Transport Workers' Union presented an amendment calling for a new Accord based on a general wage increase and productivity-based increases at the enterprise level. In seconding the proposal, the new TWU federal secretary, John Price, said the Accord had brought the greatest transfer of income from wages to profit in Australian history, that enterprise bargaining was "working harder with less people" and that, with profits at their highest levels since 1989, it was "time to have a go".
Delegate Noelene Rudland told the congress that enterprise bargaining did nothing for women and that what gains there had been for women in pay equity had been the result of awards. Rudland also said she was having difficulty explaining to members why they shouldn't leave the union and get a pay rise of $6.21 now (their union dues) instead of waiting until the Industrial Relations Commission eventually awarded (maybe) an $8 rise.
But ACTU secretary Bill Kelty had prepared his counterattack. He mocked the contrast between the sharpness of the attacks on Accord Mark VII and the paltriness of the amendments presented by the NSW Labor Council (which secretary Michael Easson himself called "incredibly modest proposals"). These amendments tightened up the conditions which would have to be met if the ACTU was to continue to support the Accord and required that awards bring "regular" improvements instead of improvements "over time"! They were accepted by the ACTU executive.
As for the TWU proposal, Kelty pointed out that it would make winning wage increases harder for the TWU itself than Accord Mark VII. The TWU proposal would have conditions placed on enterprise bargaining by the IRC, whereas now strong unions like the TWU could win whatever increases they had the strength to achieve through enterprise bargaining.
"You've got carte blanche. It's not somebody forcing a wage adjustment that you don't want ... you know what it's called — bargaining, union power, leadership", Kelty said.
Kelty won easily. The rebellion collapsed, firstly because some of the rebels were uncomfortable in their role but more importantly because no-one proposed the real alternative to enterprise bargaining — not a return to the IRC and the miserable round of national wage cases, but a cross-union, cross-industry wages and hours campaign using the collective strength of the movement to restore something of what the Accord has stolen from us.