Comment by Steve Painter
As the German trade union movement unleashes a powerful strike wave over declining living standards — an approach dismissed as old-fashioned by most Australian union officials — most local unions are sinking deeper in the swamp they stumbled into a decade ago in pursuit of their Prices-Incomes Accord with the Labor Party.
Ten years of reliance on the courts to deliver wages rises and of urging workers to accept lower living standards in the "national interest" have left many unions severely weakened for an emerging round of struggles that could threaten the future of Australian trade unionism.
In recent weeks, very large companies in the food, paper and aluminium industries have contemptuously dumped the supposed consensus of the Accord years and launched an offensive against long-established industrial conditions.
- In early April, Associated Pulp and Paper Mills tore up most of its agreements with its work force, provoking a still unresolved struggle in which union officials have been arrested, security guards have been moved into the company's Burnie plant, and APPM has imposed a savage workplace regime which includes banning newspapers in lunchrooms and forbidding employees to listen to the radio while driving company vehicles. The company's declared intention is to bypass trade unions in relations with its workers. It has launched legal action for multimillion-dollar damages over stop-work meetings called by the unions, which have legally sanctioned coverage of the mill workers.
- Not far behind APPM is Pacific Dunlop, which recently bought into the food preserving industry with a takeover of Petersville Sleigh. It quickly embarked on a restructuring program, beginning with the Edgell potato chip plant in WA. There, a threat to close the plant quickly forced the workers to surrender penalty rates for shift work and growers to make concessions as well. Pacific Dunlop then turned its attention to other Edgell plants, closing three, in Cowra, Greenacre and Bairnsdale. The Cowra closure is a particularly severe blow to workers and farmers in a community that has relied heavily on the Edgell plant for 50 years. Plants at Bathurst, Ulverstone and Manly will not be closed, but are targeted for restructuring.
- Also joining the anti-union push is aluminium giant Comalco, which is using conditions at its Tiwai Point plant in New Zealand as leverage for similar conditions in Australia.
A common factor in the approach of all three companies is a desire to impose New Zealand-style industrial conditions in this country. Since its election in 1990, the National Party government of Jim Bolger has savaged the trade union movement, destroying many small unions with its Employment Contracts Act, which legally excludes unions from discussions between workers and their bosses. While Australian unions have watched the New Zealand changes nervously, most have thought they would be insulated from such developments by the federal Labor government. Even the extremely right-wing Greiner government in NSW has not been able to go as far as Bolger in New Zealand, though it has introduced severe anti-union laws. But now, these very powerful companies are pursuing New Zealand conditions through a combination of industrial and court actions.
Already, APPM has secured the opinion of federal Industrial Relations Commission deputy president Paul Munro that "the right of an employer to manage its own business clearly extends to changing the work practices considered by it to be inimical to efficient operation ... There is no requirement in either legal or arbitral principle of which I am aware that should compel the company to enter into enterprise level agreements about such measures."
This is despite the fact that the APPM and other companies have recently secured large-scale workplace reform through precisely such agreements, parading under the title of enterprise bargaining. If Munro is right, it appears many enterprise deals may be nothing more than "agreements" that companies can tear up whenever the mood takes them. Meanwhile, concessions made by the unions in pursuit of such deals are almost certainly irretrievable in the short term.
Like other stages of the Accord, enterprise bargaining is turning out to be one more stage in a long retreat by the union movement. The difference is that this latest stage is showing signs of becoming a rout.