Abstract
Elizabeth Humphrys’s How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project is a well-organized book that takes up the role of organized labor and the Australian Labour Party (ALP) in the construction of Australian neoliberalism, focusing on a social contract between the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the ALP called “the Accord,” between 1983 and 1996. The significance of the Accord, other than its centrality in the electoral victory of the Bob Hawke ALP government in March 1983, was that it initiated a long period of wage restraint and industrial action suppression without fulfilling promised trade-offs: full wage indexation, an expanded social wage (cash and in-kind benefits via state expenditures), social security, and tax concessions. The result, Humphrys argues, was that Australian labor organizations “forgot” how to organize and the ALP, in the end, ushered in its own obsolescence. In a particularly poignant section in the introductory chapter, Humphrys describes a 2012 gala event celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Accord, even as “state and federal Labor parties were recording some of their lowest primary votes in a century and the union movement’s coverage of workers was languishing,” as a “party in a cemetery” (p. 7).
The seeming inability of center-left forces to collect themselves in the post-crisis period is, of course, not a phenomenon specific to Australia. The book is appropriately situated in the larger context of the rise and fall of organized labor in advanced capitalist countries, culminating in the present-day weakness of unions in both quantitative and political terms—and a corresponding tendency, in some cases at least, for organized labor to resist calls for wage increases that would benefit all workers. This is the background to one of many present-day political oddities, including (as Humphrys notes) the phenomenon of some central banks and international financial institutions serving as leading voices in the advocacy of wage and spending increases. In order to grasp oddities such as these, we should grasp how labor movements and left parties participated in the making of the present.
Taking a strong step in this direction, the book is framed against a “standard” narrative in “academic and popular understandings” that situates neoliberal transformations’ origins in the “ascendancy of the New Right and the coercive implementation of economic reform”—that is, more specifically, in the the radical restructuring of Pinochet-era Chile, the victory of New York City’s financial-political elites over municipal unions in the 1970s, and the Reagan-Thatcher axis in the 1980s (pp. 2–3). In important cases, as Humphrys shows, center-left parties and labor movements were proactive forces in the forging and implementation of neoliberal settlements.
On the heels of a historical periodization of the unfolding of neoliberal arrangements in Australia (Chapter 5), and after considerable theoretical engagements with Marxian and Gramscian thinking in the initial chapters, the book’s main empirical contributions appear in Chapters Six through Nine.
Chapters Six and Seven look at the content, implementation, and effects of the Accord, including the ensuing “disorganization” of the Australian labor movement. Documenting the Australian variant of the cross-national story of late-1900s wage stagnation, especially on the bottom 50 percent of the wage distribution, as well as the suppression of the labor share of Australian national income, Humphrys highlights the shift from workplace-based organizing to central arbitration and, under this new regime, labor-led suppression of industrial action and wages. Humphrys notes—though in a way that would benefit from a richer discussion of wage restraint’s very different meaning in a Keynesian world versus a neoliberal/financialized one (discussed further below)—that austerity and wage restraint were consistent with the ALP’s historical tendencies (p. 129). Chapter Seven looks at how the accord was neoliberalized in what the author characterizes, referencing Gramsci’s notion of the “integral state,” as a process of “enwrapment” of “formerly oppositional civil society actors into the process of state rule” (p. 133). More specifically, Humphrys documents how the Labor government used corporatist practices to “‘educate’ the unions about what would be possible under the Accord”—or, in other words, to discipline labor in order to prioritize profits and job creation over wages (p. 137).
Finally, Chapters Eight and Nine delve into Australia’s neoliberalization from the perspective of organized labor and evaluate how well this “labour made neoliberalism” account fits with other cases: New Zealand in the 1980s, the United Kingdom in the 1970s, the United States in the Reagan years, New York City in the late 1970s, and Finland in the 1990s. The material in Chapter Nine is more suggestive than conclusive, however.
In sum, How Labour Built Neoliberalism is a valuable, theoretically grounded, well-documented analysis of the role of labor-left in Australia’s neoliberalization. It is very much an academic book, better suited to specialist audiences than non-specialist ones. One could, however, raise three concerns.
One is that the framing of the standard account of neoliberalism’s origins is fair in a narrow sense but inaccurate in a broader view. Academic literatures on neoliberalism written in a critical Marxian vein do tend to stick to the narrow narrative of right-led neoliberalism that Humphrys outlines. But this is not true of academic accounts in general. One might also note that the term “neoliberalism” is not generalized across the human sciences (unsurprisingly, it is especially unpopular in economics) and, when it does appear, it is often between quotation marks and hedged with now-ritualized acknowledgments of the concept’s dubious analytical value. I would need to be persuaded that, beyond the academy, there is a popular narrative of neoliberalism that extends beyond socialist, democratic socialist, and other left-leaning circuits. None of this undermines the book’s contribution to our understanding of the historical political economy of Australia, however.
A second concern, referenced above, is an approach to historical analysis that does not take up the question of how, from the perspective of the actor, old policies take on new meanings, especially as actors themselves and economic arrangements undergo rapid change. Policies like wage restraint, once initiated, are not frozen in place; what they mean, and the logic by which they are implemented, depends on how those with the power of interpretation and implementation understand what is possible and what is not. Humphrys’s analysis touches on financialization but does not say much about how financializing policies emerge alongside other neoliberal policy fare (privatization, deregulation…) and does not adequately center the relationship between the wholesale transformation of the economic order and people’s understanding of it. On this kind of question an emphasis on state-led class rule, no matter how sophisticated theoretically, may obscure more than it clarifies.
A final issue is that Humphrys’s analysis stays on familiar institutional terrain—parties, states, labor organizations—but doesn’t venture beyond it. This is sensible, but it also leaves one wondering what else is going on. How, more broadly, did Australian civil and democratic institutions change in the 1980s and 1990s—say, in terms of the kinds of people and organizations involved in policy deliberation and implementation, or in the world of nonprofits and media, or in how parties and campaigns operate? Given the importance of these sorts of institutions in other accounts of neoliberalism, one hopes that further scholarship will build on Humphrys’s work in order to address these questions.