By Peter Boyle
On the eve of the Kennett government's Employee Relations Act coming into operation in Victoria, there is hardly a union official in the state who is prepared to say in public what most rank and file unionists know: that the official leaders of the union movement have pulled back from an effective industrial and community campaign against the act because of their loyalty to a Labor Party desperately seeking re-election.
Victorian Trades Hall Council industrial officer Brian Boyd admitted in January — in a narrowly circulated discussion paper — that ALP pressure had "undermined" the campaign, but he has since been silent. VTHC secretary John Halfpenny admitted the ALP's restraining influence when he told the media on February 24 that the campaign could expand if the Coalition won the federal election.
This is only the latest example of the terrible price the union movement is paying for its affiliation to and domination by the ALP. There is a long list of struggles sacrificed in the last decade in the name of keeping Labor politicians in office, extending from the 1985 SEQEB dispute in Queensland to the campaign against the NSW Greiner government's attack on workers' rights and schools to last year's APPM dispute in Tasmania.
In each case, union officials restrained an angry and militant rank and file, prevented sustained mass united action and finally demoralised workers into accepting significant defeats.
Since 1983, through the ALP-ACTU Accord, most unions have been transformed into extensions of increasingly right-wing ALP governments. Union officials have taken up the role of policing their own ranks, restraining wages, trading off conditions and sacrificing jobs.
When a few unions sought to challenge the Accord, as did the Builders Labourers' Federation and airline pilots, other unions (some even calling themselves "left") moved in to break these struggles by collaborating in vicious police repression against these "rogue unions" and by organising scabbing and membership poaching.
The negative effect of the Accord is often measured in terms of wages — in the last 10 years the real award wage rate has been cut by between 17% and 30% — but the worst effect has been the erosion of workers' power to stand up to their employers.
This erosion has come about through the destruction of the once traditional union principle of solidarity ("the struggle of one is the struggle of all"), through the loss of militant tradition and experience in the movement and through the marked decline in union membership.
Union solidarity has been outlawed through Sections 45D & E of the Trade Practices Act and through High Court support for the employers' right to sue unions and individuals for crippling damages arising out of industrial action. The International Labour Organisation has complained that there is no right to strike in Australia, yet the federal Labor government has done nothing to restore the workers' rights it nominally supports in its official policy.
The practice of ALP-aligned union leaderships has been divide and rule. Combined with the drive to forcibly amalgamate unions into a few tame super unions, the rank and file have been taught to distrust other unions. Workers in a dispute know that they cannot count on the solidarity of other unions.
In Victoria the loss of a militant tradition was obvious even in the half-hearted attempt at a campaign against Kennett's attacks — in the organisational bumbling by officials on November 10 and in the pathetic "national day of action" on November 30. But the problem extends beyond top officials, to the shop floor delegates and shop stewards and rank and file members. Many people simply did not know how to organise a strike.
And is this so surprising after a decade of record industrial peace enforced through the Accord? A 1991 survey by the federal Department of Industrial Relations showed that in 72% of workplaces, employees had never taken industrial action. In a further 10% of workplaces, no industrial action had been taken for the previous two years. A 1992 Saulwick Age Poll found that three out of 10 unionists were sceptical about the value of their unions.
Figures released on February 25 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that the unionisation rate dropped from 45.6% to 40% between August 1986 and August 1992. At the beginning of the 1980s it was 51%. The main reason cited by the bureau was "changing work patterns", i.e. the increasing percentage of casual and part-time workers. But this shift is a direct result of ALP policy, implemented with the collusion of the ACTU. It has also contributed to the rise of the "new poor".
Despite the record of ALP governments, most union leaderships are campaigning uncritically for the re-election of the Keating government on March 13. This is much more than the recognition that a Labor government would be a lesser evil than a Coalition
government. Their uncritical stance towards Labor's unashamedly right-wing and "economic rationalist" politics and their unwillingness to help build a political alternative to the major parties indicate a willingness to continue helping the ALP run the country for big business.
While that subservience to the ALP remains, unions will go on failing their members — and therefore losing them.