Are unions ditching enterprise bargaining?
James Vassilopoulos
If you believe media reports of the September 1-5 ACTU congress, unions are abandoning enterprise bargaining and are moving towards industry-wide bargaining. This, unfortunately, is not the case.
An article in the September 3 Brisbane Courier-Mail stated that "delegates vote down enterprise bargaining". Similarly, an article in the September 3 Australian claimed: "The ACTU retreated yesterday from its six-year commitment to enterprise bargaining at individual workplaces in favour of claims against particular industries".
The wages policy passed at the congress has three main components: collective bargaining, the living wage case and the protection of awards.
The section on collective bargaining states that "collective bargaining may involve enterprise, corporation, industry and/or regional campaigns". Clearly, this allows for bargaining at the enterprise or workplace level.
Rather than being a fundamental shift of wages policy, it is merely a repackaging. The words "collective bargaining" are substituted for "enterprise bargaining".
This repackaging is necessary because workers are fed up with enterprise bargaining under the ALP, which involved trade-offs that worsened their working lives. It also severely fractured unions' industrial power.
Although the ALP brought in enterprise bargaining, including non-union enterprise bargaining, it was the initial idea of the Business Council of Australia.
The ACTU wages policy goes on to state in a vague way that "an improved capacity to bargain at an industry level must be a feature of any future wages system".
In practice, this "new" policy will mean that very little changes. The few strong unions will pursue wage increases on an industry-wide basis, but they do so currently anyway. The industrially weak unions will be forced to go for workplace or enterprise-wide bargaining, as at present.
Over time, the only thing that will change is that more and more workers will go to enterprise bargaining, because employers now generally have the upper hand.
Fancy words about an "improved capacity to bargain at an industry level" will not stop this. Thus the leadership of the Community and Public Sector Union, only weeks before the ACTU congress, surrendered to the government by ditching a public service-wide campaign for an agency-by-agency or department-by-department approach.
The Australian Industrial Relations Commission only recently knocked back the Transport Workers Union's attempt at an industry-wide agreement for an 11% pay increase. More and more the AIRC will be closed off as an avenue to get industry-wide pay rises, as the government stacks it with its friends. The only way to get industry-wide agreements will be with industrial muscle.
The second part of the ACTU's wages policy, the living wage case, is also in tatters. Earlier this year, the AIRC rejected the first stage of the living wage claim, an 8.75% wage increase and $20 per week, and instead gave a measly $10 (2.8% for the lowest paid).
The ACTU wants to set $12 per hour ($456 per week) as the minimum wage by the year 2000. All this is well and good, but it does not have any perspective on how to achieve it following the AIRC rejection of the earlier claim.
The final part of the ACTU wages policy is protection of the award system. How is this to be done? By going for the living wage case, by industrial action and by collective bargaining.
Yet industrial action has been nowhere to be seen as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry looks to destroy awards in its current test case before the AIRC.
Certainly the reality of workers' wages demands large increases. There is the astonishing figure that 47.2% of workers over 15 years of age earned less than $15,600 in 1996, according to the 1996 census. There were the real wage losses under the Accord. There is the spread of part-time and casual work, amongst the highest of all OECD countries. There is the development of a working poor.
The alternative is to run a cross-union, cross-industry wages and hours campaign using the collective strength of the movement. Such a campaign would increase the wages of part-time and casual workers also.