Rural workers: why unions should be concerned
BY SUE BOLAND
When politicians refer to people from the "bush", there is an implication that they only mean farmers.
It wasn't until last December, when federal treasurer Peter Costello called for rural and regional employers to be allowed to pay below the official minimum wage rates, that the establishment media and National Party politicians suddenly "discovered" rural workers.
Workers in rural and regional areas are uniformly lower-paid, more unemployed and poorer than their urban cousins.
The Bureau of Rural Sciences' 1999 report, "Country Matters: social atlas of rural and regional Australia", found that mean taxable income across Australia averaged $31,374 per annum ($603.34 per week) in 1996-97. The non-metropolitan average was $28,539 per annum ($548.82 per week).
In 1996, 33.8% of families in non-metropolitan areas with dependent children received some form of government pension or benefit, compared to 28.7% of metropolitan families with dependent children. A 1998 Society of St Vincent de Paul report found that 40% of rural Victorians over 15 years live on $200 a week or less.
Australian Bureau of Statistics monthly labour force figures consistently show that unemployment is highest in regional and rural Australia, on average almost double the unemployment rate in the cities.
Jobs lost
The loss of jobs in agriculture is not the sole cause of the widening gap between city and country. The social atlas shows that in 1996, the majority of rural and regional areas had only 30-50% of the work force employed in agriculture.
A big killer of jobs in non-metropolitan areas has been the closure of government services. Of the 30,000 jobs lost in NSW rural areas in the decade to 1996, 19,500 were state government jobs. Other regional industries to shed jobs on a large scale have been mining, timber and meat processing.
Tom Hanan, the national secretary of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU), told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that in NSW, 76 meat processing plants have closed in the last 15 years and that approximately 20,000 jobs nationally have gone.
Rural poverty levels have also been exacerbated by a growing wage differential between city and country, in part a result of the enterprise bargaining system introduced by the former Labor federal government. Rural workers have suffered because employers have taken advantage of their lack of industrial muscle and the lesser demand for their skills.
According to Roger Raven, a research officer for the Western Australian branch of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), "Award-based pay increases are the only pay increases that most country workers get, and they have been relatively small, because awards haven't been modified or improved", he told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. In Victoria and NSW, the proportion of rural workers on basic award rates is double that of city workers.
Those rural workers who are covered by an enterprise agreement rarely receive increases over 2% a year; agriculture is one of the three industries where low-wage enterprise agreements are most common.
Peter Hood, the Public Service Association organiser for the Riverina in NSW, points out that privatisation has also exacerbated the pay differential. He explained to Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that the sell-off of government irrigation schemes in the Riverina, has resulted, in some instances, in different rates of pay for union members and non-members.
The unemployment rate also depresses rural and regional wages, placing workers in a weak bargaining position. Many feel obliged to accept pay cuts or forego pay rises in the hope of preserving their jobs. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission can, and does, make rulings for lower pay increases in "depressed" areas.
Union organisation
The low level of union organisation means that the prospects for overcoming rural poverty look bleak for the immediate future.
Raven is candid about the lack of union organisation in smaller towns. He says the general decline in trade union membership has meant that unions have concentrated on the capital cities and big centres.
"I don't think that most country towns in the south-west of WA would have had a visit from a TWU organiser in a long time", he says. "I think that would be much the same for the Australian Workers Union and rural unions generally."
There are some exceptions, such as the Shearers and Rural Workers Union, formed in 1994 by a group of Victorian shearers who were members of the AWU.
Despite hostility from the AWU and the National Farmers' Federation, the SRWU has survived and grown stronger. Its membership base has expanded into other states and it has won some victories, including $20 million in entitlements for the Cobar mineworkers.
It remains an exception, however.
Union weakness means that employers can not only get away with paying rural workers less, they can take advantage of that to undermine wages and working conditions for all workers. Telstra, for example, announced in April that it was considering moving its call centres to areas where lower regional rates of pay can be introduced.
Additionally, poor union organisation, the economic insecurity of rural workers and the increasing number of farmers forced to look for off-farm work could provide plentiful recruits for strikebreaking, as occurred during the 1998 waterfront dispute.
Hanan said that in the meat processing industry, "farmers have had a dramatic impact in turning people away from the union movement in some areas".
Because they consider themselves independent producers rather than workers, many farmers see no use for unionism. In one instance, farmers campaigned for 13-hour shifts so that they could work three 13-hour shifts per week and then have four days on their farm.
NFF the 'champion'
The lack of union organisation in rural areas has allowed the NFF to claim to be the "champion of the bush", a false claim given that since its 1979 formation it has had a two-pronged agenda: agricultural deregulation (eliminating small farms) and labour market deregulation (eliminating strong unions). It has supported the GST, privatisation and government spending cuts.
With most trades and labor councils outside the capital cities having ceased to function, there is no political counterweight to the NFF in rural areas.
In NSW, according to Hood, there are only two regional trades and labor councils outside Newcastle and Wollongong that are "sort of working": in Wagga Wagga and Tamworth. Raven says a similar situation exists in Western Australia, and is most likely the case in the other states.
Statements by the NFF this year indicate that it hasn't yet finished with its attacks on unions. In February, NFF president Ian Donges confirmed that a key issue for the NFF was "a continuing and full industrial relations agenda".
After the 1998 waterfront dispute, NFF executive director Wendy Craik threatened that the NFF-established scab company, P&C Stevedores, "remains as another entity in the waterfront landscape, with the will and the capacity to re-enter the fray". She added, "The meat processing industry has historically been another target in NFF's sights for reform, and we may be getting closer to that target".
In order to succeed in its anti-union drive, the NFF needs the support of small- and medium-sized farmers. To do so, it has claimed that lower wages and speed-ups on the waterfront and in the meat processing industry would result in increased farm profitability for all farmers.
But while big agribusiness companies do gain increased profits from lowering pay rates and working conditions, the vast majority of farmers gain no benefit whatsoever.
The final settlement of the 1998 waterfront dispute did result in a decrease in the cost of shipping containers, but that was never passed on to farmers in the form of lower freight prices. Instead, it was pocketed by the stevedoring and shipping companies as increased profits.
A rural researcher from the University of Sydney, Bill Pritchard, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, "For most agri-processing industries — canning and freezing fruit and vegetables — labour costs are no more than 10-15% of total factory costs.
"In most agro industries, and particularly on farms, labour costs are not high. Nobody in those industries gets paid over-award payments and award payments aren't very high. The idea that Australia's agricultural competitiveness is being harmed by labour costs is all a bit of a nonsense."
Efforts
Some farmers aren't totally convinced by the NFF's anti-union arguments. Hanan notes, "when the farmers have discovered the harsh conditions that meatworkers work under, they have been driven into the arms of the trade union movement".
The AMIEU and the MUA were approached by members of the Union of Farmers during the waterfront dispute who said that they opposed "the bully-boy tactics of the National Farmers Federation". A group of dairy farmers from East Gippsland even organised a barbecue for the waterfront workers at the Melbourne docks.
This support didn't come out of the blue, however. The Victorian branches of the Waterfront Workers Federation (now part of the Maritime Union of Australia) and the Builders Labourers Federation (now part of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union) had helped dairy farmers in the past.
Raven points to the development of the Rural Action Movement in his state as a positive sign. The RAM is made up of concerned farmers who want to do something about the rural crisis but who have avoided the far-right pitfalls that many other farmers' groups have not.
If the union movement wants to keep farmers and rural workers out of the arms of the NFF and the far right, it needs to set about building an alliance between workers and working farmers, and it needs to have a plan to re-unionise the rural work force.
There are many examples of trade unions helping farmers during droughts and of union organisers trying their hardest to build up their union's base in the bush. There are even some success stories. But the effort is still insufficient.
While many union leaders favour an alliance with the Australian Labor Party, a party whose policies have been disastrous for the bush (and for urban workers), there is as yet no perspective of an alliance with farmers or rural workers, an alliance which would be far more useful.