On May 23, a federal cabinet meeting finalised the Coalition government's planned "reform" of Australia's industrial relations laws. The "reforms" were publicly unveiled by Prime Minister John Howard in parliament on May 26.
Most media attention will be focussed on the issue of "state's rights" — the conflict between Howard and the state premiers over the federal government's plan to use the Commonwealth's corporations powers to create a single national industrial relations system if the states don't voluntarily agree to a federal takeover of all industrial relations.
However, the Howard government's IR "reforms" represent a massive attack on workers' rights, particularly their right to act collectively to defend and improve their living standards.
The "reforms" aim to make it easier for employers to force more of their employees on to individual contracts — Australian Workplace Agreements. Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Greg Combet pointed out in a May 23 media release that "AWAs are pro-forma documents prepared by the employer or the government's Office of the Employment Advocate in identical and unilaterally determined terms ...
"The typical employer bargaining strategy with AWAs involves a take it or leave it demand to individual employees. Employees who don't sign are told they will suffer a specific consequence, such as the denial of a pay increase. Job applicants who don't sign are refused employment.
"This approach is accompanied by a refusal by the employer to collectively bargain with employees or to recognise the representative role of a union."
The Howard government wants to make unions largely irrelevant by getting most workers on to AWAs. Treasurer Peter Costello made it clear that this is a key aim of his government when he told the February 19 Melbourne Age: "We should be trying to move to an industrial relations system where the predominant instrument is the individual contract."
Workers' main means of counteracting the enormously greater bargaining power that the ownership of capital and access to large amounts of credit gives their employers is the threat or actuality of the collective withdrawal of the only productive asset workers have — their labour power, their capacity to produce goods and services.
The Howard government's plan to legislate that all strike action be lawful only if approved by a secret ballot is aimed directly at drastically weakening the ability of unions to organise strike action.
While secret ballots for strike action sound very democratic, they are aimed at making a decision for strike action virtually impossible. The decision-making process will be taken out of the control of the workers' own organisations — the unions — and placed under the control of a special authority to be set up by the government to conduct strike ballots.
Rather than voting for or against strike action in collective workplace or industry-wide mass meetings, where workers can gain a sense of their collective power and can directly debate the issues with their workmates, workers would instead mark their ballot papers in the isolation of their homes.
Furthermore, the administrative delays involved in conducting the ballot will give employers a long time to pressure and intimidate workers, including through the corporate mass media, not to vote for strike action.
The blatantly anti-worker, pro-employer character of the government's IR "reforms" is indicated by its proposal to exempt all businesses with up to 100 employees from the unfair dismissal laws, thus depriving 60% of Australia's 9.7 million employees of the right to seek legal redress for unfair dismissal!
The day after Howard's IR attacks were unveiled, it was quietly revealed that parliamentarians will receive a 4.1% pay rise on July 1. So as Howard threatens the wages and conditions of workers across Australia, his own salary will increase by $11,300 to $289,000.
The Howard government's attack on workers' rights needs to be vigorously resisted. The largest possible turnout to the June 30 stop-work protest rallies that are being organised by the unions in Victoria, Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania will be a good start.
But to defeat Howard's attack will require much more than this. In particular, it requires a willingness by the union movement as a whole to call nationwide protest actions when the government tries to jail unionists who refuse to abide by its unjust laws.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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