Abstract
Unions’ strength and identity is determined primarily by the extent to which they can nurture effective solidarity amongst wage earners in general and between networks of unions in particular. The experience of inter-union coordination throughout the Accord years has strengthened political solidarity across the movement (demonstrated most recently in the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign). The movement’s industrial solidarity has been in secular decline since the peak union leadership enthusiastically embraced enterprise bargaining in the final phase of the Accord in the early 1990s. The key challenge for unions today is to broaden the ambit of political solidarity and to revitalise industrial solidarity in an era of increasing workforce diversity and working life transformation.
[Unions] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. With apologies to Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, [1852] in Marx and Engels (1977: 398).
These astute observations about the nature of human agency and the process of social change were made by Marx in his account of the failures of the democratic upheavals of France of 1848 and the rise of authoritarian rule in their wake. His reference was to the agency of humans in general, not unions, but the insertion of unions works well for the purposes of this paper. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Australian unions, while constrained by ‘circumstances not of their choosing’, actively shaped history through their participation in the Accord with the Labor Government. In so doing, they drew on some established traditions while transcending others to achieve far reaching social and economic change. This paper explores how key legacies were variously extended, discarded and transcended during the Accord years in an effort to advance the social, political and economic position of Australian workers in general and of unions in particular.
Contemporaneous accounts of the Accord were mixed, with a common criticism being that the centralised nature of the early Accord led to a withering of workplace representation, leaving unions exposed in the transition to enterprise bargaining and facilitating a perilous drop in union membership (e.g. Ewer et al., 1991). An alternative account is that even though the initial stages of the Accord did not nurture workplace structures, the managed transition to enterprise bargaining kept unions in the process and prevented the sort of dramatic collapse in union membership witnessed by more radical and sudden transitions to enterprise bargaining, as occurred in New Zealand (Peetz, 1998: 173). Muddying the waters is the paradox that while a social democratic corporatist vision inspired many to support the Accord, the lasting reality is that it helped legitimate the ascendancy of neoliberal policies that persist to this day (Dow and Lafferty, 2007). Another strand of the literature has examined the legacy of the Accord on various dimensions of union structures and operations. This has included an assessment of its impact on the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) – what has been described as its ‘rise and fall’ as an institution of major influence in public life (Briggs, 1999a, 1999b). Researchers in this tradition have analysed the organising model as a means of reversing declining union membership (Cooper, 2003; Carter and Cooper, 2002) and its impact on union structures and democracy, particularly arising from the wave of union amalgamations that were integral to its final phase (Peetz and Bailey, 2012: 531–533). The Accord has also served as a useful reference point for commentary on the changing relationship between the union movement and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) (Lavelle, 2010).
This article focuses more specifically on the impact of the Accord on union solidarity, by which we mean the capacity and willingness of unions to work together to achieve their objectives. We do this by looking at the initial and lasting impact of the Accord on two domains of activity: the industrial and the political. While the boundaries between the two domains are fluid and porous, and union strategy inevitably draws on aspects of both, our argument is that the lasting impact of the Accord is that it fractured industrial solidarity while strengthening political cooperation and common purpose. Our analysis builds on Hyman’s (2001) insight that unions in the Western European tradition have been struggling with the strategic dilemma that their traditional modes of industrial and political calculation (what Marx eloquently refers to ‘all the traditions of dead generations’) are increasingly unhelpful for making sense of and formulating responses to an increasingly hostile environment. During the Accord years, unions consciously re-oriented their strategic positioning in ways which have had long-term consequences. This repositioning both drew on as well as broke with past traditions. For unions, the most vital traditions concern how they define and build solidarity. This shapes both their identity as social actors and their effectiveness as agents in a complex world. As a result of experiences during the Accord era, the movement’s political solidarity has been strengthened by the practices of coordination that deepened from the inception of the Accord to its end. On the other hand, the legacy of its final phase of wages policy – where peak unions both initiated and provided significant legitimation for decentralised wage determination – has undermined the capacity to nurture industrial solidarity across the labour market. This paradox of heightened political solidarity and weakened industrial solidarity has been the lasting impact of the Accord on the Australian union movement.
Our argument proceeds as follows. The standard indicators of unions and their performance imply that the Accord coincided with a decline in union influence and strength. Such indicators must, however, be read in the context of a dramatically changing labour market. The key statistics on both issues are provided in the next section. This is followed by an account of the categories required for making sense of how unions both shape and are shaped by hostile circumstances. These then structure the analysis of how Australian unions, during the Accord era, consciously redefined their identity and operational practices in response to the political and economic challenges of the 1980s and 1990s. The positive outcomes of these changes for political solidarity are then analysed. This in turn is followed by an account of their negative outcomes for industrial solidarity. The paper concludes by reflecting on the analytical and political significance of our argument.
The basic facts: Declining union influence and deepening labour market inequality 1
Union density, number of registered unions, workplaces reporting union delegates and recent strike activity, 1980–2012.
n/a: not applicable.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1996b); ABS (2012). For consistency, union density is taken from the Trade Union Members series (Cat No 6325) up to 1995 and Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership (Cat No 6310) thereafter. The 1980 figure is actually taken from the survey March–May 1982 (the earliest in the series) and the 1985 figure from August 1986.
ABS (1996a). Series discontinued in 1996.
Considine and Buchanan (2008), including information from the Australian Workplace and Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) 1990 and 1995.
Since the days of the Accord, union density has fallen from around one worker in two to less than one in five today. The proportion of workplaces with delegates has fallen from one in five to one in 10. The incidence of industrial action has all but disappeared. In 1990, over 10% of workplaces reported such activity in the previous year. By 2006, at the peak of the trade cycle, a mere 3% in the private sector reported such action.
These outcomes have not, by and large, been desired by Australian unions. During this period, they have actively sought to build membership levels and workplace delegate structures. Circumstances, however, made achieving preferred ends difficult. The most visible of these have been increased employer militancy and an increasingly unsupportive legislative environment. But just as, if not more, important has been the transformation of the labour market itself – the field in which unions operate. This has been subject to extraordinary and rapid changes over recent decades, most of which pre-date the Accord and which cannot be attributed to it. Especially since the 1960s, unemployment and under-employment have moved from being virtually non-existent to directly affecting one worker in six; higher school retention rates have totally redefined the nature of the transitions to adulthood and women have moved from less than 20% to now constituting nearly half the workforce (Watson et al., 2003). While industrial restructuring is commonly noted, the scale is rarely grasped. As recently as the early 1960s, just under two in five workers were in agriculture, mining or manufacturing. That proportion is now down to just over 12% (Watson et al., 2003: 51).
Changes in forms of employment and hours of work, Australia, early 1980s–late 2000s.
Hours data are for actual, not usual, hours of work. In any one week among employed persons, about 7% of men and 8% of women report working ‘0’ hours, hence numbers do not sum to 100. This is due to workers taking leave, etc.
Sources: Forms of employment: Shomos et al. (2013). ‘Early 1980s’ refers to 1982 and ‘later 2000s’ refers to 2011. Hours of work: Wooden M and Drago R (2007). ‘Early 1980s’ refers to 1980 and the ‘later 2000s’ refers to 2006.
The issues of casualisation and hours of work problems are well known. In terms of labour contracts, the decline in permanent employees has been offset almost entirely by the growth in casual employment. There has not been a fundamental rise in business forms of employment or entrepreneurial workers. The rise in IT contractors and franchises, for example, has been offset by the decline in family farms and small retail outlets. Just as, if not more, dramatic has been the decline in people working 35–40 hours in any one week. In the early 1980s, the largest proportion of employees worked such hours. Currently, such workers are a minority, with over two-thirds of men and over three-quarters of women working either part-time or extended hours of work.
The final key feature of the labour market is wages. The transformation here in terms of functional and individual distribution of income has been dramatic. Between 1978 and 2010, wages share of gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 62% to 52%, with the gains going to business (Buchanan et al., 2013). Trends in male earnings inequality from the Second World War until 2001 are shown in Figure 1.
Distribution of male incomes in Australia: 1942–2001.
From the late 1940s until the mid-1970s, earnings inequality, as signified in the ratio of middle to top income earners, was stable. Since the late 1970s, earnings inequality has risen in secular and dramatic fashion. Data on the situation from 2002 to 2012 reveal this trend has continued unabated (see Fair Work Commission, 2013: chart 6.5).
These figures show very clearly that wage inequality began to increase before 1983 and continued during and after the Accord. How, if at all, were unions shaped by and how did they shape developments such as these? To answer this question, we draw on the recent literature concerning union strategy.
Understanding unions: Between market, class and society 2
While there is a voluminous literature on the transformation of work, little of it has considered the implications of this for union strategy. Most scholarship has focussed on the drivers of change, such as industry and occupational restructuring and employers’ preferences for non-union arrangements. Following a wave of literature on union strategy in the early 1990s (e.g. Golden and Pontusson, 1992; Pontusson, 1992; Swenson, 1989), the ‘organising model’ debate focussed more on structural and operational issues than ideology (Bronfenbrenner, 1998; Carter and Cooper, 2002; Cooper, 2003; Dolvik and Waddington, 2002; Peetz, 1998). Yet an earlier tradition, such as the long-running revolution versus reform debate (Gollan, 1975), viewed questions of union strategy as primarily related to ideological differences. Path-breaking research in the early 1980s examined how strategies pursued by union movements with different ideological orientations shaped, as well as responded to, profound political and economic upheavals of the 1970s (Gourevitch et al., 1984; Lange et al., 1982). However, the interest in union ideology and strategy has receded as unions have been buffeted by economic and political change, such that unions have been studied as the object rather than the subject of change (see Martin and Ross, 1999).
The shift in focus is understandable, given the changing fortunes of unionism in the last two decades, but our interest is in how unions might have both shaped and been shaped by the changing nature of work. One of the few recent texts that has analysed the ideological (and not simply the organisational) dimensions of the current strategic dilemmas facing unions is Hyman (2001). This text argues that there are three basic traditions that have given unions in the Western European tradition their identities: ‘labourism’ (or business unionism), anti-capitalist ideology and Catholic social doctrine. Arguably, the oldest is that of ‘business unionism’ (sometimes referred to as ‘labourism’), which holds that unions are best understood as representative organisations of particular occupational interests. The second is the classic communist or socialist tradition which defines ‘unionism as a form of anti-capitalist opposition’. The third, corporatism (with roots in Catholic social doctrine but ultimately most strongly embraced in Northern European social democratic states), regards ‘trade unionism as a vehicle for social integration’ (Hyman, 2001: 2–3). Over time these converged into modern ‘social democratic unionism’. With the end of the long boom, however, this framework has been incapable of adequately responding to political-economic restructuring in general and the transformation of work in particular. It is worth considering Hyman’s analysis more closely as it provides important leads for understanding what has shaped contemporary Australian unionism as a profoundly ideological and political problem concerning unions' identity and capacity to build effective forms of solidarity.
Hyman observed that few unions neatly fall (or fell) within one of the three categories. This is because all unions, to use his words, ‘face in three directions’ (Hyman, 2001: 4). As representatives of wage-labour, unions cannot ignore the market. Bargaining over the price and conditions of labour as a commodity is unavoidable for any union that wishes to maintain its relevance with members. But this is not the only function unions must fulfil. As collective representatives, they create an ‘identity which divides workers from employers’ (Hyman, 2001: 4). This means they cannot escape performing a role as being an ‘agency’ for class. Finally, unions are more than just ‘labour market’ and ‘class’ bodies. They are also organisations functioning in society at large and their survival necessitates interaction with other social organisations. In this role, they are agents for social cohesion and integration, the role associated with corporatist visions of unions. Hyman (2001) argued that because of these inescapable realities, there is ‘a triple tension at the heart of union identity and purpose’ – the ‘eternal triangle’ (p. 3). This he describes as the ‘geometry’ of trade unions as organisations simultaneously embedded in market, class and societal relations.
Hyman shows how market, class and society pressures led to the fusion of union identities into ‘social-democratic trade unionism’, a synthesis of collective bargaining, state-directed economic management and social reform which he describes as ‘political economism’. This discourse kept the rhetoric of class struggle for ‘ceremonial purposes’. It was, however, more than business unionism because it recognised the importance of politics especially as it affected macroeconomic management, labour law and the social wage context of bargaining. (Hyman, 2001: 55)
As these economic circumstances changed, unions attempted to respond to the crisis on the basis of habits of thought and behavioural practices that had succeeded in the past. This initially involved experiments with income policies, the legacy of which was partial stabilisation of inflation, but these often alienated members, especially activists. Some unions responded by endeavouring to play a more radical ‘social movement’ role, thereby alienating employers. Union responses varied by country and sometimes by sector within countries. The key development, however, was the emergence of myriad paradoxes. Those who pioneered the conception of unions as actors within, rather than against, existing society were typically innocent of economic analysis. Yet the triumph of the social partnership model half a century ago depended strongly on economic foundations; as these foundations have been undermined, so unions have had to seek instruments of market regulation which transcend the consensual. And as the clash of economic interests has returned to centre stage, so the logic of class has acquired new resonance. The triangle is complete. (Hyman, 2001: 62–63)
Australian unions before the Accord: A politically divided movement in an equalising industrial regime
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Australian union movement evolved into an integral, if not leading, element of a distinctive labour market regime. Prior to the Accord, there had been deep cleavages within the movement which had their roots in the different political/strategic traditions of the kind identified by Hyman. Yet there were militant unions, often led by communist or other socialist forces, pursuing very active industrial campaigns that involved strikes and other forms of direct action to improve wages and conditions. The other major tendency was comprised of industrially quiet unions that were more accommodating to employers and relied on arbitration to achieve their outcomes. The core leadership of this group was provided by the right-wing ‘industrial groups’ of the Catholic Church organised by the National Civic Council. The roots of this can be traced back to the 1930s and the organisation of formal support for the Falaganists in the Spanish Civil War (Gollan, 1960, 1975; Turner, 1965). There were, of course, exceptions to these tendencies. Some ‘right-wing unions’, such as those covering transport workers and storemen and packers were industrially militant. And some left unions, notably the Miscellaneous Workers Union, relied heavily on arbitration to improve wages and conditions because of the relatively weak positions their members held in the labour market.
The older dynamic of differences within the movement, ironically, was associated with a wages system that resulted in gains of the strong in the labour market being shared with the weak. Immediately prior to the Accord, a high degree of inter-union rivalry and the relatively passive role played by the Federal Government meant that the industrial tribunals were at the centre for managing relations between unions, the Federal Government and business (McGavin, 1987). Inter-union rivalry was especially fierce around wage increases. As quasi-judicial bodies, the tribunals’ guiding principles to dispute settlement were derived from the common law notion that ‘like cases should be treated alike’. This meant that great efforts were made to establish, and where possible maintain, stable relativities in wages and conditions. Arbitration never totally displaced collective bargaining and a very distinctive dynamic between the two principles of wage determination emerged. Within a particular industry or occupation, militant unionists would periodically take industrial action to improve pay and conditions. This affected ‘going rates’ of pay in a sector. Claims would then be lodged with industrial tribunals to ensure that awards retained their relevance and that the principle of comparative wage justice was applied, first to workers within the same industry covered by the same award as the militants and then to workers in other industries whose rates were set by reference to benchmark standards that applied to all awards. In this way, the gains of the industrially strong would, eventually, improve the wage and conditions of the industrially weak. 4
Over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, arrangements worked well by creating a regime of rising labour standards, including wages. By the early 1980s, however, questions were being raised about the sustainability of this regime. This was especially the case following the shorter hours campaign of 1981–1982 (Briggs, 1999b). It was in response to the widely accepted limits of the old model arising from this campaign that the Accord emerged. The evolution of the Accord marked a deliberate effort by all elements of the movement to find another way of defining their identity and achieving progressive change in the labour market.
Understanding the Accord: Three phases and an underlying process
The Accord was not one fixed policy instrument with a constant content. Indeed, during its operation predictions of its imminent demise were common. It is important that we avoid the assumption that its longevity was ‘inevitable’. It is best conceived as an evolving process that contributed to the redefinition, restructuring and repositioning of the Australian union movement within society in general and the labour market in particular. At every stage, active leadership from national union officials and the Labor Government was required to construct support throughout the movement for the directions of change adopted. While there were eight distinct ‘Accord Agreements’ (i.e. Accords Mark I–VIII), in retrospect it is possible to discern three distinct phases in its evolution.
In the first period (March 1983–July 1986), the objective was macroeconomic stabilisation in light of high and rising unemployment and inflation. The Accord was integral to a classical Keynesian reflation of the economy. Wage restraint led by unions (and supported by industrial tribunals) ensured pro-growth fiscal and monetary policies resulted in jobs growth and not wage inflation. In return for (industrial) wage restraint, the Federal Government delivered initial improvements in the social wage – especially the introduction of Medicare; increased funding for labour market programs, education and training; and a host of initiatives directed at supporting industrial restructuring in sectors such as the steel, automotive and shipbuilding industries.
The second period (March 1987–April 1991) addressed the moral panic that followed the sharp fall in Australia’s terms of trade in the mid-1980s. The predominant policy narrative arising from this experience was that structural change (termed at the time ‘microeconomic reform’) was necessary to revitalise the Australian economy. The move away from centralised wage determination to a ‘managed decentralism’ occurred during this period. The guiding objective was progressive ‘labour market reform’ and this was promoted by the structural efficiency principle and award restructuring. This adjustment process embedded in the Accord differentiated Australia’s economic transformation, and the impact on its workforce, from the radical ‘free market’ approach experienced in Thatcher’s United Kingdom and Regan’s United States.
The third and final period of the Accord (April 1991–early 1996) ushered in the new industrial relations settlement. Enterprise bargaining, agreed in principle between the federal government, the unions and employers in 1991, was formalised with Labour’s Industrial Relations Reform Act of 1993. This marked the beginning of the end of the award system as a mechanism connecting most employees to a common reference point of labour standards. Instead, from this point on the award system commenced its transformation into a ‘safety net’ only relevant for the residual workforce that could not settle enterprise agreements, ending the era when the gains of the strong (won through bargaining in hot shops, then incorporated into consent awards) were flowed on to the weak.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to now see that the Accord was a transitional mechanism, not an enduring new element of national economic and social decision making. Using an analogy from the construction industry, it provided the scaffolding around which new labour market institutions and other economic arrangements were built. Understanding the Accord as a transition process begs the question: Transition of what? There were two core developments at the heart of the Accord process: changes in the connections between unions as a group (i.e. inter-union coordination) and changes between unions and their connection with wage earners in general (i.e. industrial solidarity the labour market). The realignment of forces within the union movement was intimately connected with changed relations between it and the workforce at large.
As noted earlier, prior to the Accord, a dynamic involving union rivalry and tribunal mediation of difference created a very effective means for the strong to help the weak in the labour market. With the emergence of the Accord, many of the old rivalries subsided as all major elements of the union movement agreed to coordinate their strategies and especially their wage claims. In return for subordinating their sectional interests, the movement collectively reached agreement with the Federal Labor Government to improve employees’ (and their families’) living standards through other realms of policy, especially taxation, social security and health. This was achieved by unions (led by the ACTU acting in concert with the traditional wage leaders) coordinating wage claims prior to periodic negotiations with the Federal Government and, importantly, with leading employer groups in the then strategically important metal and engineering sector. Unions put aside their previous rivalries. Those that did not, such as the Food Preservers Union in 1983 (Burgmann, 1984: 91), the Builders Labourers Federation in 1984 (Burgmann, 1985: 82) and the Australian Federation of Air Pilots in 1989 (Spooner, 1990: 139), were ostracised. This process of inter-union coordination continued from the commencement of the Accord until its end with the defeat of the Keating government in 1996.
In the initial phase of the Accord, inter-union coordination primarily concerned the scale of wage claims and consideration of the social wage benefits to be achieved in return for wage restraint. As the Accord evolved, however, the industrial matters subject to inter-union dialogue broadened to include the organisation of the union movement itself and the defining features of the wage system more generally. The end result of the former was the dramatic union amalgamations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The end result of the latter was a total recasting of relations between unions, employees and industrial tribunals – more commonly called ‘enterprise bargaining’.
What impact have these developments emanating from the Accord years had on unions subsequently? In the next section, we assess the impact on the movement as a political force. Then in the following section, we reflect on the Accord's significance for unions as an industrial force.
Impact I: Reconfigured and strengthened political solidarity
Arguably, the most visible legacy of the Accord on unions was the amalgamations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The vision was for large unions organised along industry lines that would more efficiently service existing members, avoid the costs of demarcations and be open to capturing new and evolving occupations and sectors in the Australian labour market. These objectives were contained in Australia Reconstructed (ACTU, 1987) and the less widely circulated document Future Strategies (ACTU, 1986). In reality, the operation of amalgamated unions fell far short of what had been intended. Twenty years on, there are very few instances of genuinely integrated amalgamated unions. Because of a variety of factors (chiefly factional alliances within the ACTU and the ALP and the persistence of demarcations along occupational lines), most amalgamated unions operate as a series of parallel autonomous entities or with ‘divisionalised’ structures where only core administrative functions may be shared (Tarrant, 2000).
Union amalgamations brought about a concentration of power, the impact of which would be felt in the decision-making bodies of the ALP and the ACTU. Amalgamations strengthened the ability of the ACTU Executive to make decisions that would be acted upon across the movement, setting the foundations of greater political solidarity and establishing the mechanisms whereby the union movement (led by the ACTU) could conduct wide-scale political campaigns that engaged with the Australian public. Political campaigns by Australian unions are nothing new. From their involvement in the anti-conscription struggles of the Great War to their bans of export of pig iron in the 1930s and uranium in the 1970s, the tradition of direct political struggle is long-standing and deep-seated (e.g. Gollan, 1975; Turner, 1965). Such campaigns in the past, however, were almost always led by only one section of the movement, usually the non-ALP left. During and following the Accord, these campaigns were almost always movement-wide and could not be written off as being conducted by the more ‘political’ elements of the movement.
However, union amalgamations addressed neither unions’ diminishing membership nor their weak presence and organisation in the workplace (Peetz, 1998; Peetz and Bailey, 2012: 533), requiring a strategic response by the movement through the widespread adoption of the organising model (Carter and Cooper, 2002). Strategies that built on the new political solidarity emerging from the Accord years came of age during the Howard Government. The first major success was the 1998 waterfront dispute. A legal victory in the High Court most clearly marked the Maritime Union of Australia’s success, but peak union coordination of movement-wide and community protests and international action by other unions (Smith, 2010) were integral to the eventual reinstatement of the sacked workers. The defining characteristics of this approach were integration of industrial, legal and community actions, coordination among all involved unions, and a platform for the ACTU to speak with authority in defence of community values. Later campaigns, including the pursuit of worker entitlements following the collapse of Ansett and OneTel (Cooper, 2002: 253), the battle to secure compensation from James Hardie Industries for asbestosis victims (Holland and Pyman, 2011: 574) and struggles in defence of Workers' Compensation rights in places like New South Wales (NSW) (Rathmell, 2007), persisted with this model.
The culmination of this approach (to date) was the 2007 ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign in response to the Howard Government’s Work Choices reforms. The campaign sparked a movement-wide re-engagement with members, initiated a new generation of union activists, and demonstrated that unions were still able to coordinate their activities beyond the workplace, even to the point of sharing precious membership data (Ellem, 2013; Muir, 2010). The campaign also affirmed the acknowledged role of the ACTU (and state-based peak bodies; see Ellem, 2013) in providing leadership, direction and unity. During the initial Accord years, the legitimacy of the union movement to speak on behalf of the community had been accepted by the Federal Government, but during the era of the Howard Government, it had to be won directly with the community. That the campaign was successful, leading to the defeat of the Howard Government, also affirmed that the union movement had a role to play as guardian of the community’s values (Spies-Butcher and Wilson, 2008). Deepening solidarity across the movement at large has been a general force in society for fairness, a powerful legacy of the enforced cooperation of the Accord era. To return to Hyman’s framework, unions winning back their legitimacy are essential to the success of any union strategy in the current ideological climate (Hyman, 2007: 207).
Impact II: Weakened industrial solidarity
As noted earlier, during the third and the final phase of the Accord, the locus of wage-setting was shifted from the national to the enterprise level. With the active and enthusiastic support of nearly all parties (except the Commission itself), the role of the award system was downgraded and the primary focus for improved wages and working conditions was moved to enterprise agreements. Prior to this point, awards had played an integral role in the setting of wages and conditions for most employees. While industrial tribunals were the formal custodian of awards, unions – along with employer organisations – were the only parties privy to these arrangements, which set and maintained labour standards that were at (or close to) the level of those actually prevailing in the workplace. In this way, awards had played an integral role in linking standards prevailing for most employees in the labour market – and unions, as parties principal to these instruments, played a very strong, albeit indirect, role in determining the wages and conditions for all workers – not just members.
Indicative estimates of the change in employee coverage of different instruments defining enforceable rights concerning work, estimates based on a meta-analysis of employer surveys, Australia, 1990–2006.
Sources: Reproduced with permission from Considine and Buchanan, 2007; Buchanan and Considine, 2008.
Fitter (C10) and trades assistant (C13) award rates as a proportion of full-time male non-managerial median earnings, 1980–2011.
Sources: Information on C10 and C13 (and equivalent classifications in earlier years) obtained from award rates maintained by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. The reference rate of pay is median wage-based weekly earnings for male full-time non-managerial employees are reported in ABS, Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership (Cat No 6310), (previously known as Weekly Wages of Employees (Distribution), August, for the years 1975–1998. For union density, see Table 1.
This reports on the situation for the fitter (C10) and trades assistance (C13) rates in the Manufacturing and Associated Industries and Occupations Modern Award (and its predecessors), which has long been regarded as the benchmarks for comparisons across awards. In 30 years, the C10 award rate reduced from being 86.7% in 1980 to 57.4% in 2011 of full-time male median earnings. The deterioration in the trades assistant rate was not as severe, reflecting the policy shift of seeing awards as providing only a safety net primarily for low-skill workers and others who lacked bargaining power.
The significance of these data is best captured by reference to the Organization for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD) definition of ‘low pay’, which is two-thirds of median earnings. On this basis, the award rate for the C10 (or fitters’ rate) is now below the OECD definition of low pay. This classification used to be the benchmark rate for setting standards for the labour market at large. The end result of the wages policy and allied labour law changes started and legitimated by the Accord is that the award system now provides a very comprehensive set of rates for the lower reaches of the labour market. Whereas once unions worked to provide leadership and standards across the labour market (i.e. industrial solidarity), they now operate as ‘bargaining agents’ for individuals covered by agreements. And while awards still provide a reference point for bargaining or informal arrangements, they do so as a wage standard that is declining relative to community movements (Healy, 2011). For those with no bargaining power, the comprehensive analysis by Evesson et al. (2007) has shown that the ‘floor’ of award rates is effectively a ceiling for such workers. In this way, the decline of effective ‘industrial solidarity’ is not merely of academic interest; it has meant the unions have not only faced a deepening trend of wage inequality that commenced before the Accord era – they now have fewer institutional mechanisms to do anything about it. The end result is not just deepening wage inequality, but the isolation of unions from a workforce increasingly subject to the vagaries of the market.
While recognising that rising earnings inequality did not commence with the Accord, the wage policy promoted and supported by the last phase of the Accord did, however, legitimise and entrench a wages system that limited the capacity of unions and industrial tribunals to do anything about this problem. There is no doubt that the old industrial order that the Accord replaced was crumbling, especially in terms of delivering a stable wage system. But with the end of the Accord period, the necessity for unions to centralise their industrial activities through the ACTU Congress and Executive disappeared and any link between the strong and the weak was severed. Once the principle of enterprise bargaining was enshrined, it was logical and inevitable that there would be further changes – notably non-union bargaining streams and restrictions on pattern bargaining – that would further limit the capacity of the union movement to develop and demonstrate industrial solidarity, even across workplaces, much less industrial and occupational boundaries and union demarcations (Cooper and Ellem, 2012).
Conclusion
The Accord brought about a change in how Australian unions worked with one another in pursuit of their objectives. Prior to the Accord period, in an era of protectionism and with a labour market still dominated by the male breadwinner, unions adopted a range of political and industrial strategies drawing on all sides of Hyman’s eternal triangle. Intense ideological differences mitigated against political solidarity among unions, but the system of conciliation and arbitration and the principle of comparative wage justice underpinned de facto solidarity in the industrial sphere, even though here too unions were ultimately free to pursue militant or conciliatory approaches with employers. The Accord through its initial phases constructed political and industrial solidarity within the Australian union movement. In facilitating the introduction of enterprise bargaining, the Accord unwound a century’s tradition of de facto industrial solidarity, but political solidarity among Australian unions has endured and strengthened in the years since.
Given that a return to centralised wage fixation is not in prospect, the successful display of political solidarity provides a pointer to how a modern version of industrial solidarity could be pursued. The ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign (and the other community campaigns leading up to it) showed the movement had the capacity for articulating, and Australian society has a receptiveness for supporting, solidaristic notions of labour standards and decent work. Successful union campaigns around nurse–patient ratios in health (Gordon et al., 2008) and quality education (Tattersall, 2010) show that both union members and the public can be mobilised in support of a broader vision of improving life by collective provision of goods and not just expecting individuals to look after themselves. However, while very significant in their particular social domains, these achievements have had limited impact. The nursing and education campaigns were confined to particular sectors in particular states. The premier campaign of recent times was waged for and successfully defended ‘rights at work’. These were constructed as individual rights rather than collective rights and certainly not as rights for unions. The consequences have been all too clearly manifest in the continuation of most of the WorkChoices anti-union provisions in both ALP and Coalition policy and industrial law ever since (Ellem, 2013).
The key challenge remains to identify the new contours of solidarity in the labour market and working life. The issues needing to be confronted concerning this, as noted earlier, are significant. Wage inequality has been rising in near secular fashion for over three decades. Fragmentation in hours of work is now profound and more pronounced than in most OECD countries. The prevalence of non-standard forms of employment makes it difficult to define new labour standards in universalistic ways that occurred in the pre-Accord era. New ways of thinking about life and collective representation over the life course, combining wage, tax and public policy more generally will be critical. Equally new ways of defining local and occupational notions of common interest based on skill potentially provide new foundations for redefining solidarity at work and beyond in current times. Addressing these realities will require the building of new institutional arrangements that ensure the free development of all enables the free development of each and every individual. Recent work on the nature and possibilities for flows within the labour market, and between work and life beyond, provide promising new leads here (see e.g. Buchanan et al., 2013; Wheelahan et al., 2012; Yu et al., 2012).
Future success will come not by revitalising some mythical golden age that existed before or during the Accord era, but rather with the development of practical vision of how unions can help build both a fairer as well as prosperous society. The legacy of cross-union communication and support is a powerful organisational asset for devising and delivering such a vision. Successfully realising the progressive possibilities will require, however, overcoming the profoundly divisive legacies of the last phase of the Accord. New ways must be found for the strong to help the weak. Until this occurs, the negative traditions of the Accord generation will weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.