Ian Macfarlane, the head of the Reserve Bank, must be really pleased with the work of his Australian Council of Trade Unions office. With unemployment falling to 5.6% and construction booming, the ACTU has submitted to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) a claim for a $26.60 a week increase in minimum award pay rates for 2004.
According to ACTU calculations, this claim would add only 0.1% to wage costs and 0.08% to inflation, having an infinitesimal impact on the Reserve Bank inflation target (2-3%).
The ACTU's self-discipline is truly remarkable. Even if its claim is awarded in full, those 1.6 million workers who depend directly on awards would only get a wage increase of 4.5% (for full-time workers).
This would set an admirable example of restraint to the rest of the country, especially to CEOs, whose income has been expanding at 7.3% a year.
The ACTU's concern for Reserve Bank targets is even more remarkable when we remember that the share of profits in the country's total income is at its highest level since 1959-1960 — 25%.
That's around $40 billion a year more going to Australia's capitalists than would be the case if profit share was still where it was at the beginning of Labor's Accord — 18%.
If awarded in full, the ACTU claim would cost Australia's employers around $1.5 billion a year and scarcely touch profits, especially if strong economic growth continues.
Naturally enough, the ACTU points out that its wage cases have increased the federal minimum wage by 8% since 1996, and that if the federal Coalition government had had its way Australia's poorest workers would be even worse off than they are today.
That's because the federal government continues to successfully apply a tactic that the ACTU has forgotten — the ambit claim. This simply consists of asking for a decent slice of the cake in the hope that you'll at least end up with some crumbs.
Through their tactic of calling on the AIRC to award increases of only $8-12 in the minimum wage, the Coalition government has got the AIRC bringing down "affordable" decisions which have helped the unprecedented boost in profits of the past decade.
As for the ACTU, because it's given up on the "old-fashioned" unionism of ambit claims, it has contributed to a situation where the bottom 20% of income-earners in this country are getting only $3 a week more than in 1996 (as opposed to $109 for the top 20%).
The ACTU would of course say that if the Industrial Relations Commission thought the union peak body was making "outrageously excessive" claims, it would bring down decisions that would punish the ACTU and teach it to be "reasonable".
That's quite likely. But has the ACTU also completely forgotten the idea of an industrial campaign in support of its claims in the commission? Would a strike or two, and a few mass meetings be too much to ask for?
Such activity would remind the country's poorest paid workers that the union movement still exists, and might even help arrest its nose-dive into irrelevance and powerlessness.
If you don't fight, you lose. It would be difficult to find a more miserable bunch of losers than the present "leadership" of the Australian trade union movement.
From Green Left Weekly, December 3, 2003.
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