Yes to Enterprise Bargaining
The unexpected victory of the Morrison government in the May 2019 election is a positive development to the extent that Australia has been spared an Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal government led by Bill Shorten. Such a government probably would have been arrogant and unresponsive, similar to the Hawke and Keating economic rationalist governments of the 1980s and 1990s. That the Hawke/Keating governments survived was due to their coalition opponents being more extreme than the ALP. John Howard however successfully tapped into the widespread dissatisfaction with Labor’s economic rationalism so that the coalition won the 1996 federal election.
Nevertheless, the Howard/Costello governments (1996 to 2007) continued on with the economic rationalist policies of the Hawke/Keating era but were more successful due to the mining boom. This bi-partisan endurance of economic rationalism can be traced to the break which commenced with the election of the Whitlam federal Labor government in December 1972 as it sought to upend the legacy of the great Alfred Deakin who served as Australian prime minister in the 1900s.
The cornerstone of the Deakin legacy was arbitration which enabled trade unions to effectively represent their members by utilizing the institutional supports of the industrial relations commission (the Commission) following the passage of the landmark Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 (the 1904 Act). The 1904 Act enabled many relatively small craft based trade unions to be viable with Australia becoming one of the most unionised nations in the free world so that by 1976, 51% of employees belonged to a trade union! Despite this tremendous success, a left-wing neo-Marxist critique of Australian trade unionism developed which was called the ‘Howard Dependency Syndrome’. This critique falsely maintained that Australian trade unions became too dependent upon arbitral supports so that they were co-opted into an employment relations system which ultimately served the interests of employers (‘the bosses’). Ironically it was under the Hawke government that the very successful Deakinite industrial relations system began to be undermined with the passage of the Industrial Relations Act 1988 (the 1988 Act) which regrettably superceded the 1904 Act. The cornerstone of the 1988 Act was the facilitation of trade union amalgamation.
The left of the trade union movement and of the ALP accepted the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating government in return for the introduction of trade union amalgamation and of compulsory superannuation in which many of the funds were controlled by trade unions. The left-wing rationale behind union amalgamation was unions should exist on an industry basis as opposed to a craft basis so that there would be a concentration of resources so as to collectively advance working class power.
The reality of trade union amalgamation was that it facilitated a profoundly de-unionising process in which Australian union membership now stands at 14% of the workforce! The reason for this abysmal state of affairs is that employees lost their sense of identity in belonging to their craft based trade union. Consequently, too many employees decided to opt out of trade unions. Trade union amalgamation has also led to a situation of union oligarchy in which unions have become massive unaccountable bureaucracies.
It is therefore wrong for the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally Mc Manus to call for there to be a ‘change the rules’ campaign for Australian employees to gain a better deal from the current industrial relations system when it is the structure of Australian trade unionism which is flawed and thereby contributing to contemporary union ineffectiveness. The current award system cannot be changed to the extent to lift the general level of wages because awards still essentially fulfil a safety net function.
Instead for there to be union renewal and union effectiveness the Australian union movement needs to embrace enterprise bargaining. This is a process (which was originally introduced under the 1988 Act) where pay and conditions are determined at a workplace level as a result of negotiations between employers and unions/employee representatives. The consequent enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) is then ratified or rejected by the workplace employees and if approved is submitted to the Fair Work Australia Commission for certification on the basis that the pay and conditions do not fall below the award safety net.
The potential benefits of enterprise bargaining from a union perspective are immense. This is because enterprise bargaining provides both a strategic and practical means by which unions can engage their members (or potential members) to negotiate improved wages and conditions for them. The contemporary mystery is why Australian trade unions are not more proactively engaging in enterprise bargaining. Currently under 15% of private sector employees in Australia are covered by EBAs. Unless this situation improves then the viability of Australian trade unionism must be called into question.
The mystery of Australian union ineffectiveness is also apparent in that the ACTU has long being aware of the need for the Australian union movement to embrace an organising strategy. At the 1993 ACTU Congress a motion was passed calling on its constituent members to embrace union organising. Indeed, a special trade union training programme was authorised by the ACTU called Organising Works which was suppose to endow union officials with the capacity to promote the organising union model (the organising model) among rank and file members, particularly workplace delegates.
Yes to the Organising Union Model
The organising model was originally conceptualized in the United States in the early 1990s whereby union officials devolved union organising tasks at a workplace level to rank and file delegates. The rationale was that rank and file delegates would assume greater responsibility for organising tasks so that American trade unions could win the right in representation ballots to negotiate on behalf of employees at the applicable workplace.
The Australian union movement’s official endorsement of the organising model should have led to a union renaissance because this model can be applied to an enterprise bargaining context. Unfortunately, too many Australian unions are not applying the organising model because they are not sufficiently engaging in enterprise bargaining. One union which is successfully engaging in enterprise bargaining is the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), the ‘Shoppies’.
The SDA instead of being held up as a beacon of a successful trade union in a context of general union ineffectiveness has instead being lambasted by both by the far left and the neo-liberal right for entering into supposedly dodgy deals with the major retailers. That some of these EBAs have been overturned by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) for failing the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) has served as a rousing confirmation of the parody of the SDA as a tame cat bosses’ union.
However initially flawed, EBAs can always be improved upon so long as the union concerned has a workplace presence. The SDA, by its application of the organising model has established, and is establishing, workplace delegate structures in order to recruit more employees into their union. Consequently, should there be an EBA in need of improvement, the SDA will by having recruited more members be better positioned to improve future wages and conditions when the next round of enterprise bargaining commences.
By contrast the hard left of Australian union movement seems to be continuing down the dead-end amalgamation process with the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and with the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) amalgamating with the Construction Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) to form a mega-super union.
It is a tragedy that the TCFUA is amalgamating into the CFMEU because t this will mean that some of Australia’s lowest paid workers will not be effectively represented by such a union colossus. If the TCFUA was going to amalgamate it should have instead linked up with United Voice which has effectively represented hospitality and cleaning employees by brilliantly applying the organising model is an enterprise bargaining context.
Unfortunately super union bureaucracies do not reach out into non-union areas but will rather concentrate resources on their current coverage. In other words enterprise bargaining will not be proactively engaged so as to promote broader future unionisation in non-union workplaces by amalgamated super unions.
Super unions also due to their vast scale fail to be as democratic as craft based unions were. Nevertheless, the application of the organising model in an enterprise bargaining context offers the potential to renew union democracy in an informal context because workplace delegate structures must be established and utilized as defining components of the organising model.
Adapt to the Rules
Enterprise bargaining is the means by which unions can ‘change the rules’ in their members favour. Indeed, the current Fair Work Australia Act (FWA) brought in by Julia Gillard when she was deputy prime minister in 2009 seeks to promote enterprise bargaining. It is therefore a tremendous pity that Australian trade unions (with the notable exceptions of unions such as the SDA, Transport Workers’ Union and United Voice) are not vigorously applying the organising union model in an enterprise bargaining context.
For the FWA’s enterprise bargaining orientation to be implemented requires a shift on the part of Australian trade unions to embrace this process so that blights in Australian industrial relations such as high casualization rates for unskilled and semi-skilled labour can be addressed. For instance, the TCFUA should apply the organising model in an enterprise bargaining context to ensure that their members have guaranteed hours of work and access to available overtime penalty rates after they have been employed for a particular period of time.
Because enterprise bargaining will be the future determinant of Australian union effectiveness, let the trend continue whereby moderate trade unions continue to apply the organising model in an enterprise bargaining context so that this becomes an ideological identifier of a union’s particular approach to union purpose.
From a broader ideological perspective enterprise bargaining can also be a practical means of facilitating distributionism. Distributionism is a philosophy which seeks to maximize ownership of the means of production so that there is substantial employee involvement in day to day management. Perhaps Australia is culturally not socio-economically receptive toward adopting a distributionist system as has occurred in part of the Basque region of Spain.
Nevertheless, enterprise bargaining can be utilized by trade unions to a point where distributionist principles are applied to the extent that employee concerns can be taken into account to a greater degree so as to more greatly affect day to day management decisions. Alas, due to trade union under-appreciation of enterprise bargaining, too many Human Resource Management (HRM) managers are utilizing enterprise bargaining as a means to control their employees. This situation could shift should the organising model be applied by unions.
Yes to Distributionism
The Right of the ALP will therefore hopefully continue to encourage union branches aligned to them not only to apply the organising union model but also to more proactively promote enterprise bargaining which takes into account employee concerns. While the ALP Right may now have a monopoly on security /defence and foreign affairs issues (even if the current Shadow Foreign Minister comes from the Socialist Left of the party) this should not necessarily mean that the Right surrenders when it comes to socio-economic and industrial relations policies.
There could be a counter argument from a left-wing perspective that the ALP Right previously dominated Labor’s socio-economic and industrial relations policies. The retort to that contention is that the ALP Right in these areas of public policy sold out by operating under an economic rationalist paradigm which led to the arrogant neo-liberal governance of the Whitlam and Hawke-Keating eras.
Now that the federal ALP has its first left-wing leader in the person of Anthony Albanese it is essential that the Right of the party move away from economic rationalism by embracing distributionist principles when it comes to socio-economic public policy. In essence, Social Action Australia is asking that the ALP return to applying the Deakinite principles which valued labour, instead of continuing to apply economic rationalist policies which are derived from the neo-liberal philosophy of the Free Trade leader, George Reid, who was Alfred Deakin’s arch political rival.
It can be pointed out by ALP stalwarts that Alfred Deakin was never of the Labor Party and eventually opposed this party following the fusion of his Protectionist Party with the Free Traders in 1909. However, Alfred Deakin was greatly influenced by John Watson who led Australia’s (and the world’s) first Labor government in 1904. It was under Watson’s influence that the Deakin passed the landmark 1904 Act which ensured that the Deakinite agenda prevailed over George Reid’s public policy agenda.
The extent of the ALP’s impact upon the Deakinite legacy was reflected by the 1900’s political joke that the most frequently used phrase of Alfred Deakin was, ‘Yes, Mr. Watson’. In a similar vein let the contemporary ALP return to its historic roots by shouting an emphatic ‘Yes’! to breaking with economic rationalism!