By Peter Boyle
A national poll conducted on July 1 and 2 by Irving Saulwick and Associates found that 49% of the voting public preferred direct employer-worker negotiation for wages, hours of work and working conditions. Only 22% favoured the involvement of unions or the Industrial Relations Commission in the process. Ten years ago the arbitration system was supported by more than two-thirds of workers.
It would seem that, should the Liberal-National coalition win the next federal election, it would have the support of nearly half the voting public for introducing an industrial relations system like that in New Zealand.
Labour, like any other commodity, should be dealt with by the market, say the New Right ideologues. But a "deregulated labour market" is nothing but industrial relations jargon for a system under which employers can foster and exploit competition between workers for jobs, wages and conditions.
Hence the chief features of the Liberal-Nationals' "voluntary employment agreement" system are measures to limit the use of workers' collective strength. These include encouragement of individual contracts for workers, contracts between employers and smaller groups of workers, and further restrictions on the right to strike and picket. The objective is to limit worker solidarity — because "the union makes us strong", as the old picket line song goes.
A deregulated labour market acts most strongly in the employers' favour when there is a surplus of labour, so it is no surprise that Liberal and Labor parties no longer espouse the once unchallenged governmental objective of "full
employment".
Even if unemployment numbers in Australia eventually drop, the globalisation of the economy means that the pressure of permanent mass unemployment in the Third World and in other countries can be brought to bear on workers here.
In a country whose working population is overwhelmingly made up of wage earners, significant public support for an industrial system that threatens the very essence of unionism — the right of workers to take collective action — is symptom of a major weakness in the union movement.
Yet the same poll found that 63% believed that unions had too much power. This is a drop from 78% who thought the same in 1986, but still significantly more than the 49% who thought unions too powerful back in 1971.
But if fewer people today think unions have too much power, the percentage who believe big business has too much power has been rising consistently and more dramatically since 1971, from only 24% then to 31% in 1986 and 59% in 1992. Billionaire Sir Peter Abeles has complained that the media made too much of the crash of the high- flying "entrepreneurs" of the 1980s.
Of course polls are often biased because of techniques used. More importantly the "public opinion" they purport to measure is so grossly manipulated by the mass media that it represents little more than the conservative prejudices they have pushed the hardest.
Such prejudice may have little to do with reality. For many years the chief prejudice was that Australian unions were "strike happy". But a 1991 study by the federal industrial relations department found that employees in 72% of workplaces had never experienced a strike. A further 10% had no industrial action over the
previous two years.
Last January, the lowest level of strike activity in 33 years was recorded by the Bureau of Statistics. For two months in a row there had been not a single working day lost in a strike in South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT or the Northern Territory. The fact that real wages have fallen every year but one since 1983 would also seem to be inconsistent with the notion that unions are "too powerful".
However, the unpopularity of unions is more than a media invention. There is also a backlash against the close relationship between the top leadership of the union movement and Labor governments because this collaboration (formalised in the Accord process) has cut real wages, eroded social services and created record unemployment.
Senior union officials admit that rank and file unionists have become increasingly alienated from the process of determining wages and conditions. The Industrial Relations Commission shares the opprobrium because it and union officials have delivered wage control, erosion of working conditions (eliminating "restrictive work practices" and increasing productivity, from the employers' perspective) and job shedding ("rationalisation" of the workplace).
Industrial relations minister Senator Peter Cook freely admits that the "success" of the Accord can be measured in terms of wage restraint even while corporate profits reached record levels in the late 1980s. He has boasted that the Accord has delivered a harder working, more flexible and more productive work force. Senior ACTU officials have also adopted these as their strategic goals.
But the "success" of Labor politicians and ACTU officials in delivering high corporate profits at the expense of workers has disillusioned
many workers in the value of unions.
More than a century ago, the first unionists went to jail or were deported to penal colonies for their struggle for the right to organise collectively and to strike. In the 1990s, it appears that these same rights will have to be battled for once again.
If developments in New Zealand are any indication, the union movement that is rebuilt in the midst of this fight will also question its traditional support for the Labor Party and for the compulsory arbitration system that is the fruit of that relationship. Years of reliance on the arbitration system have sapped union consciousness and bureaucratised many unions. The unions that survive the New Right holocaust will bear little resemblance to Bill Kelty's vision of corporatist unions.