By Paul Oboohov
SYDNEY — Industrial relations experts from around the world met here on August 31 at the International Industrial Relations Association (IIRA) 9th World Congress. The tone of the congress indicated just how far the neo-liberal agenda has swamped the workplace debate in recent years.
Addressing the opening ceremony, Prime Minister Paul Keating extolled the virtues of the Accord in holding down wages, restoring profits and curtailing industrial disputation. He described enterprise bargaining as a new era in Australian industrial relations. After him, NSW Premier John Fahey presented the Liberal model for opting out of the award system.
This was essentially a debate between the model of a thousand small cuts and that of the big, blunt axe.
In the keynote address, outgoing IIRA president Professor John Niland, architect of the NSW Liberal government's industrial relations law, focused on the move to "human resource management" (HRM) and away from the traditional "industrial relations" practice — a result, he argued, of intensifying international economic competition.
Professor Tom Kochan, probably the best known writer on HRM, was elected as the new IIRA president. HRM is essentially the ideological expression of new labour control practices that have arisen in major industrial nations, especially Japan and the USA.
Contrary to the normal industrial relations approach in which unions are regarded as a necessary part of the landscape, under HRM unions are bypassed, with little or no consultation by management. For management, the focus is the individual worker.
The transition is partly the result of the decline of Taylorist methods of production line and process work and the growth of multiskilled work routines. HRM has been prominent also in "greenfield" industrial developments, which invariably install a handpicked right-wing union sympathetic to HRM aims.
HRM also places more value on the creation of a corporate image and ethos as a means for gaining worker loyalty and tightening management's ideological control over the work force. Unions are a considered an obstruction to this ideological process.
John Niland described the effect of these changes on the academic world when he said industrial relations schools in British universities are now being subsumed by the business schools.
The increasing internationalisation of capital and its effects on labour were highlighted especially by European delegates, who had been lications of European unification.
US academic Clifford Donn described union attempts to regulate labour supply in what he saw as the most international labour market, the shipping industry. He drew attention to the contradiction between the internationalisation of the industry and the national framework of labour regulation, and cited the consequent blatant exploitation of shipping crews from Third World countries.
One Korean delegate caused a flurry when he said that, in the Third World, he preferred the authoritarian corporatist model to the pluralist and liberal models of industrial relations. Others pointed to the low proportion of urban workers in Third World countries and the common practice of unions acting as a transmission belt for government development policies.
Among those who addressed the new situation in eastern Europe, Ludwik Florek of Warsaw University described how the Solidarity trade union became a focal point of opposition to the Stalinist regime, and its splintering after the regime fell. In 1990 Poland's workers' councils gained the right to appoint plant managers and promptly used this power to sack 90% of managers in that year. However, with privatisation, workers' councils are to be dissolved.
Forcing international competitiveness on the labour market could lead to the emergence of new, internationally organised unions. Already in the metal and printing trades, some initiatives have been taken. Nonetheless, it was mentioned that such international union organisation has not yet passed the stage of information exchange.
A hasty meeting of trade union delegates was organised on the final day of the congress. Though poor translation facilities caused some South American delegates to leave, representatives from Uruguay, the USA, Sweden and Israel attending along with a larger group of Australian unionists. It was hoped a trade union agenda could be included for the next World Congress in Washington in 1995.