With unemployment at its highest levels in Australia since the 1930s the question of jobs creation is naturally high on the current political agenda. But one solution has been studiously ignored — a shorter working week, without loss of pay. KAREN FREDERICKS looks at the history of union campaigns for shorter working hours.
Once upon a time, in the early 1980s, when Laurie Carmichael was assistant secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union, he stood before mass meetings of workers and urged them to take militant industrial action to win a 35hour week with no cut in weekly pay. There are pictures to prove it.
Bill Kelty, then a senior ACTU executive member, came in behind the campaign, according to press reports, and Victorian AMWSU secretary John Halfpenny urged union members to learn from the victory of militant unionists at the Altona petrochemical plant who won the 35hour week in 1981 after months of strikes and lockouts.
Today these figures remain significant in the union movement, but they, and others like them, are not known for their militancy. Today they do not suggest a 35hour week campaign in response to record unemployment. No longer do they point out that technological advances have increased productivity and decreased jobs making shorter working hours with no loss in pay the only solution. Today, they say, in the words of the 1991 ACTU jobs charter, "Jobs must be created in a continuing process of restructuring and developing world class industries that can hold their own with productivity, quality, uniqueness and service".
No more "us and them". Today's union leadership is fonder of youth wages, jobs levies, immigration controls, "competency based training", enterprise bargaining and superannuation schemes than they are of anything which will require employers to sacrifice any of the enormous gains they have made at the expense of working people since the advent of semi-automated production and the silicon chip.
Fight for eight-hour work day
But campaigns for reduced working hours have not always been such a no-no. While Australian union leaderships have always shown a tendency to differentiate between "our" capitalists and "theirs", exhibiting misplaced faith in tariff barriers and immigration controls, there was a time when they also identified workers' interests separate from employers'. This progressive tendency has been demonstrated most powerfully in the various campaigns for shorter working hours scattered throughout Australian labour history.
In the 1850s a 10- or 12-hour day was common in Australia, but with the gold rushes, an upturn in the economy and the consequent increased demand for labour the bargaining power of the working class was strengthened. The Eureka rebellion opened up a period of general militancy and craft unions in the building industry led the way in the rking hours.
In 1855 Hugh Landreth of the Stonemasons declared that "in the opinion of the Society, eight hours should be the maximum of a day's labour". The stonemasons went on strike and were granted an eighthour day, six days per week — a 48hour week. The Society of Operative Plasterers and the Melbourne Progressive Society for Carpenters and Joiners joined the struggle soon after and it wasn't long before the campaign for the eighthour day became a widespread political, and not merely industrial campaign.
The arguments against the eighthour day in the 1850s was not so different, then, to those mounted against union militancy today. The Melbourne Herald of April 22, 1856, pronounced that "Provisions, clothing, fuel and rent were becoming cheaper, and the working class had a fair chance of getting on again and keeping it all themselves when some stupid, mischievous blockhead — the worst enemy they ever had in this country — set this agitation going and the whole fabric of their prosperity will be blown to the wind".
After a long battle, during which employers' argued that they should be able to cut wages if they cut working hours, the eighthour day, or 48hour week, finally became generally enforced in the Australian colonies in the 1890s.
In 1928 the timber workers of Victoria and NSW waged a tremendous battle for a 44-hour week. For over 6 months a campaign of strikes, lockouts and confrontations with police raged. Leaders of the struggle were arrested and charged with "conspiracy to prevent men from following their lawful occupations". Although workers' productivity had risen by 20% in the years from 1912 to 1929 the employers argued that a 44hour week was "economically impossible" unless it went hand in hand with a 10% reduction in wages.
35-hour week
The ACTU was formed in 1927. In 1931 it called an emergency conference to discuss the problem of massive unemployment caused by the depression. At that conference it called for the introduction of a 35hour week with no loss in pay. At its congress in 1932 it went further and demanded work hours be cut to 30 hours per week over five days, that is, a sixhour day.
Increased prosperity after the Second World War resulted in a sharp upturn in the activity of the trade union movement. In October 1944 newspaper industry workers struck for a 40 hour week and were victorious. When other workers followed their example, over the next four years, some 4 million workdays were lost through strike action.
In January 1948 the Commonwealth Arbitration Court granted a significant wage rise as well as a 40-hour week in response to the enormous campaign. The court was quite explicit that working class militancy had won the day, remarking in course of their decision that "This working class claim has been and is the basis of industrial disputes and unrest... No realist thinks for a minute that a rejection by the Court in these cases would bring about industrial harmony and ant the demand for the shorter week." Employers, predictably, complained that the court had "surrendered to union threats and expediency".
In 1957 the ACTU Congress received a dire report from its committee on automation. In response to the report the Congress planned a national campaign for a 35hour work week without loss of pay to "secure a just share of gain from technological progress and to maintain employment". The campaign was concentrated mainly in the capital intensive industries of coal mining and power generation, but it was not until 14 years later, in 1971, that coal miners and oil workers were granted the 35hour week.
In September of 1979 the ACTU Congress reaffirmed its commitment to campaigns for a 35hour week and called on affiliated unions in all industries "to immediately develop and actively pursue programmes for achieving shorter working hours." In the following months unions in the petrochemical, oil, gas, metal, power and vehicle industries rallied to the call, launching, in some cases, nationwide campaigns of militant action. Mass meetings of metalworkers in May of 1980, for example, voted to commence an unprecedented national campaign of overtime bans and "monthly 35hour weeks".
But what the ACTU had started it was also able to stop. Following Arbitration Commission threats to withhold wage increases if the campaign was not ceased the ACTU, while unable to totally recant on the campaign due to the mass support it had attracted, nevertheless began to squash all industrial action. The landmark came when an ACTU motion to halt the national AMWSU campaign of industrial action was narrowly passed at mass meetings in a majority of states on October 31, 1980. Despite vigorous opposition from large numbers of rank and file workers eager to continue the struggle, the 35hour week campaign petered out from this point on.
Today Laurie Carmichael, architect of the accord and, more recently, of Labor's youth wages strategy, would probably prefer not to be reminded of his part in a militant campaign which, during a Liberal reign, propelled him and his cronies to the highest echelons of the union bureaucracy on the backs of struggling workers. Now, under an ALP regime, he and his fellows in the ACTU and Labor Party, prefer to speak sadly of the "unavoidably" high unemployment rate. Gone are all references to a shorter working week. Now that they govern the country it is no longer in their vocabulary, nor in their interest. But it remains in ours.