BY MELANIE SJOBERG
The Australian Financial Review claimed breathlessly that the "new" leaders of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, president Sharan Burrow and secretary Greg Combet, "unveiled a radical policy agenda that shifts the union movement to the left ... especially through its hard-line opposition to free trade" at the council's congress in Wollongong, July 26-28.
If only it were true!
In his address, Combet described the congress as an attempt to reassert the role of the union movement as the guardian of social justice, arguing the need to "fairly share the benefits of economic growth and change" and to "restore the balance in the workplace with a decent set of laws and employment rights". This would be the way the union movement would be rebuilt, he said.
But ACTU policy documents reveal that most of the peak body's proposals are minor and timid: legislative changes, award variations, tinkering.
Timid
Most workers and unions oppose the Workplace Relations Act as anti-union and might even have attended rallies against it, but the congress documents make no mention of the need to repeal that law.
Existing ACTU policy opposes Australian Workplace Agreements, but the congress asks only for a ban on non-union individual contracts (what about union ones?).
The congress report notes that, despite "the most sustained period of economic growth since the post-war boom", there are more low-income households now than ever, but it makes only the vague promise that the ACTU will pursue a basic wage of $500 per week "over time". And so it goes.
In the hands of the ACTU leaders, even positive accomplishments and experiences wither.
The union federation has produced a wealth of material, studies and glossy brochures on the steady increase in working hours. A campaign for a shorter work week, as both relief for the overworked and job opportunity for the under-worked, would surely be immensely popular.
Construction unions have fought and won a 36-hour work week in Victoria, while in France unions have been similarly successful, winning a 35-hour week, a cap on maximum hours and other measures to shorten working time.
Yet the best the ACTU leaders can come up with is a proposal for a 48-hour per week maximum on working hours, which wouldn't even act as a fixed, legal cap but simply be an upper average over several months. Any commitment to a target number of hours is absent, as are plans for militant industrial action.
Even where positive policy measures are enacted, they are marred by other, regressive steps.
The congress approved a charter of rights for union delegates and shop stewards, which individual unions can seek to add to enterprise agreements. The charter outlines delegates' rights to be free from intimidation and discrimination and to be free to negotiate on behalf of their members and provide them information about union activities; the charter also outlines delegates' right to reasonable paid time to perform their union duties. A positive step
But then the federation goes and adopts a proposal to enforce a user-pays system on non-members who benefit from union-negotiated agreements but don't pay union dues. Such a step will only alienate non-members and hinder recruitment efforts; it also could also undermine any progress toward unions becoming organisers of workers, rather than service providers.
'Free trade'
As for the policy on "free trade", the congress document can scarcely claim to be a step to the left, let alone "hard-line opposition". In the global debate between "free trade" and "fair trade", the document adopted, "Globalising Social Justice", seeks to sit cosily in the middle.
Prior to the congress, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron had declared that a return to high tariff walls was the only solution to "globalisation" and said he would fight for the ACTU to adopt just such a policy.
The union leader has rebuffed left-wing criticism that greater protectionism will not save those jobs in manufacturing lost due to a 30% increase in "productivity" or because of increases in the working week. He has also rejected concern that protectionism will only worsen the conditions of workers in the Third World dependent on access to Western markets, claiming Australian unions were not in the business of defending workers in other countries. His call to arms, however, never eventuated.
The eventual, compromise document contains some fine sentiments — including a call for the Australian government to lift its foreign aid to the UN mandated level of 0.7% of gross domestic product, support for anti-debt campaign group Jubilee 2000s call for Australia to forgive bilateral debt owed it by the least developed countries and a (vague) commitment to increased international union collaboration.
But on matters of substance, the document falls to pieces. The ACTU notes rising global inequality but fails to note the role of the imperialist governments, such as the United States, Europe and Australia, in causing it.
It condemns the failure of Indonesia to adhere to international labour standards and the unwillingness of India and Pakistan to confront child labour — but makes no mention of Nike or Coca-Cola or BHP, the Western multinationals which profit from these abuses.
Instead, the document commits the union federation to supporting liberalised trade, just so long as it leads to a "race to the top" in labour and environmental standards, rather than a "race to the bottom".
While movements are arising around the world to abolish institutions like the World Trade Organisation, which bear down on the poorest to the advantage of the richest, the ACTU document is still back at the starting line, calling for trade which "protects core labour standards", as though the WTO and the wealthy nations who run it will allow any such thing.
It calls for the establishment of a WTO working group to monitor core labour standards, a demand supported by US President Bill Clinton at the Seattle WTO ministerial in November and which has been condemned by many as only strengthening the WTO's powers.
Rather than a shift to the left, what we're left with is a repackaging of the alliance with Labor.
Combet affirmed that there will be no repeat of the Accord between the ACTU and the ALP that held during 13 years of Labor rule from 1983 to 1996. But he then told his audience that the policies necessary for reshaping Australia "make it critical that Kim Beazley and Labor succeed at the next election".
Unions and Labor, he claimed, share a common commitment to social justice and for that to be "fully activated, Labor must be in government" — the same old refrain.
The union movement does need a shift leftwards, it does need to overhaul its attitudes, its policies, its strategies, its tactics, its democracy. Most of all, it needs to get rid of the choke collar that Labor still has around its neck. That would enable a vibrant rejuvenation of an organised movement.
But that awaits leaders who are really new, because Combet and Burrow really aren't up to the job.