By Dick Nichols
[This is the text of a talk presented at Politics in the Pub in Perth on January 21. Dick Nichols is the editor of Solidarity.]
I want to try to explain what I think the alternative to enterprise bargaining is and how to achieve it.
I'm assuming that we all agree that an alternative framework for wages is needed. We aren't indifferent to the wages systems that Labor and Liberal governments and the ACTU bring down on our heads.
With increasingly few exceptions, there simply aren't clever ways of making enterprise bargaining work for us, of achieving those fabulous "win-win outcomes" so beloved of the ACTU.
As Laurie Brereton told Queensland business chiefs when he was selling Labor's new industrial relations legislation: "This is not 1982-83. Our economy is more open and competitive, protection is lower, and the focus of wages growth is the enterprise agreement, not the industry award ...
"By insulating the award scheme from the agreement stream we will have largely averted the old problem of flow-on. General increases will be confined to the award safety net. Enterprise agreement-based wage rises will only apply to that particular workplace, and so will be earned one by one."
If Brereton had been more honest, he would have added that this time around we'll have a bigger reserve army of labour than in the early 1980s.
So, forget about enterprise bargaining restoring the real wages that have been lost under a decade of the Accord, and definitely forget about enterprise bargaining narrowing the gap between men and women's pay.
Nor is it true that a sufficiently strong and well-organised union, or group of unions, can prevail against any wages system. Some wages systems are better than others; workers were better off when there were quarterly cost-of-living adjustments and no strong legal impediment to industrial action.
We need an alternative that makes it easier for unions to secure wage justice. And we need a short-term approach for minimising the impact of enterprise bargaining combined with a medium term strategy for developing the alternative.
Facing facts, in the short run, for many, there is no alternative to the enterprise bargaining jungle, either because it's being implemented by union leaderships who actually believe in the system, or, more frequently, because even those who hate enterprise bargaining don't believe there's any feasible alternative. Or, again, because some workers still feel that enterprise bargaining is worth giving a go (after all, anything would be better than an 11th year of centralised wage fixing — just ask your nearest airline pilot).
Short-term defence
Firstly, the short term. What short-term defence can we mount against the logic of enterprise bargaining, which is to pit worker against worker, factory against factory, workers in one region against workers in another, especially if Bill Kelty's schemes for regional development get off the ground.
The most basic step is to make the "enterprise" as big as possible, like the University of New South Wales staff who rejected bargaining at the level of the university; or the coal miners, who are fighting to have the coal industry as a whole regarded as their enterprise.
Second is the adoption of a union position against the method of enterprise bargaining: the trade-offs with their bitter fruit of cashing-out award and non-award conditions, worsening of occupational health and safety and all the rest. That would tend to contain enterprise bargaining to tussles over the distribution of any new productivity gains.
Third will be the defence, if not of the letter of the old award, then at the very least of the idea of a common wage and condition for the job — the defence, that is, of the concept that enterprise bargaining is aimed at destroying — comparative wage justice.
If such an agreed set of standards is not something simply devised in union offices but developed and endorsed through consultation and vote with the ranks in genuine mass meetings, so much the better.
These common standards should be negotiated across whole industries, as the new leadership of the ACT Public Service Union is seeking to do with all other unions having members in the ACT and federal public sectors.
Doubtless, there are many other tricks and gambits to help minimise the impact of enterprise bargaining. We should certainly make use of the present upturn in the economy to extract as much as possible from the employers — the way unions have always done. However, in 99 cases out of 100, the deals that will result will be exercises in damage control, simply because the unions have been severely weakened by 10 years of the Accord.
Decent wages
How do we develop these defensive fights into a struggle for decent wages and living standards?
It's a simple enough matter to agree on a formula for a fair wages system. It would:
- be based on a reliable and fair system of indexation, with regular automatic adjustments;
- provide for catch-up for the lower paid;
- allow for productivity-based increases;
- entrench pay equity, and a mechanism for enforcing it, for women workers;
- eliminate the "youth wage";
- contain no restrictions on industrial action of the kind that have been the norm since the 1981 metal trades campaign.
It's easy to devise such a system — for fine detail look up old ACTU wages resolutions before the 1980s. It's even easy for some of us to remember periods when something like it formed the basis of ACTU wages policy. What's not easy is to imagine how the unions could return to such an approach.
That's because such a return would involve those who tried it in a head-on confrontation with all the institutions of Australian capitalism. The underlying cause for the shift to enterprise bargaining has been that the competitive position of Australian capitalism couldn't tolerate the continuation of the old system of centralised wage fixing, industry awards, industry-wide campaigns and that awful thing called comparative wage justice.
All six previous versions of the Accord have been exercises in pushing towards enterprise bargaining ("labour market deregulation") as quickly as the balance of forces in the unions and society at large would allow. Big capital isn't going to stand by meekly if a decent wages campaign tries to recoup some of the $40 billion a year that the Accord has shovelled into its pockets.
Political confrontation
That means that a return to any sort of wage justice necessarily draws us into an ideological and political confrontation, and not primarily an industrial one, with capitalist governments. (Here, the differences between Labor and Liberal are marginal. Indeed the Liberals could never have made the contribution to profit share that Labor's Accord has done.)
It would not be sufficient, it could even be a recipe for disaster, for a union (or a group of unions) simply to embark on an old-style wages push without a thorough campaign, within the unions and the public political arena, for the right to a decent wage and pointing to wage losses since 1982, without a campaign against the obscene and increasing levels of profits and income inequality in Australian society, without thorough and persistent work aimed at reversing all the received wisdom about one person's wage rise being another person's job, without taking on the arguments about competitiveness — in a nutshell, without presenting and popularising an all-round working-class viewpoint and approach.
It's here, in the battle of ideas, that the opponents of the present wages system are so weak, so intimidated, by the arguments of capitalist economists, especially when these come out of the mouths of Bill Kelty and Martin Ferguson. This is a product of the old prejudice that the unions can concede the ideological battle to the capitalist class (and to their little helpers in the ACTU and the ALP) and still, somehow win the industrial battle.
That's false. It's impossible, under present conditions, to imagine a return to the metal trades campaigns of the 1960s. It's impossible to imagine a return to the Transport Workers Union and Telecom union campaigns of the late 1970s.
The fight for a decent wage can't win without boldly taking up the challenge to the way things work, to the priorities of the system — competitiveness, labour market flexibility, adequate profit share and all the rest of it. That's what class-struggle unionism entails in today's conditions.
Of course, this doesn't mean that a decent wages campaign should be hostage to other political developments in a progressive direction. We can't stand around waiting until some other issue stirs a progressive movement into life. Indeed, a vigorous wage campaign could impart a powerful impetus to such a development.
Campaign
Holding these considerations in mind, how would such a campaign be run?
- First, it would have to be the work of an alliance of unions committed to the project. The best precedent is that of the 28 rebel unions in Victoria during the 1960s and 1970s, which broke with the right-wing Victorian Trades Hall Council majority and set about their own campaigns. Some of the most important gains we take for granted today (four weeks' annual leave, improved maternity leave and lots more) started life as aims of that campaign.
Will this mean a break with the ACTU? Almost inevitably, given that the ACTU is one of the key institutions of capitalist policy. It's the Keating government's wages policy lever, so to speak.
As an initial step, or as a parallel process, it would be useful to take up the fight against the ACTU leaders, especially at ACTU Conference, to start to overcome the strange spectacle of hundreds of delegates whingeing about enterprise bargaining in the corridors only to vote for the executive position or be out of the room when the vote is taken.
- Second, the campaign has to be really based on the rank-and-file unionists, run by them, made their campaign in reality, because the campaign won't have the faintest chance of success without that mobilised support. This means, among other things, careful surveying of members' opinions, thorough education in the aims of the campaign and truly democratic running of the campaign by elected delegate committees. Here the standard old mass meeting, where everyone gets the resolution as they go through the gate, is woefully inadequate.
To have any chance of success — of enthusing good unionists into action, of strengthening the waverers, of convincing the sceptical — the campaign would have to be made part of life of the workers through education, delegate seminars, local meetings, as the old metal trades campaigns were at their best. We have to face squarely the fact that there's a huge job of confidence-building in the unions to be done with many workers.
Until we've tried all this we don't have the right to complain that the ranks are apathetic or anti-union.
- Third, the campaign would have to operate on the understanding that it can be won only by winning, or at least making great gains, in the public propaganda war. That means an aggressive approach to the media and all other access roads to people's hearts and minds. It means devoting big resources to the job. It also means demanding public political support from all likely sources and not hesitating to use the threat of disaffiliation from Labor, or actual disaffiliation, to induce whatever support can be squeezed from that quarter.
Some will say this is all pie in the sky: the ranks aren't ready to struggle; workers are apathetic; there are too many divisions in the unions; the right wing is too strong. Those who are looking for an excuse will easily find one they're happy with.
Signs
In most cases this is simply blaming the ranks for the weaknesses and shortcomings of the leaders. Many signs at the moment point the other way. Workers are heartily fed up with enterprise bargaining.
Every day brings new examples of enterprise agreements being voted down; of delegates and shop stewards leading successful or near-successful revolts against deals; even of workers organising to defeat their delegates who have been inveigled into the enterprise bargaining maze. In recent union elections, for example in the PSU, two state leaderships were sent packing by the members for their support for enterprise bargaining, and in a third, Tasmania, the incumbents held on by the skin of their teeth.
Even right-wingers are complaining about enterprise bargaining, because they know that it's making them very unpopular and threatening their empires. This is particularly noticeable in NSW, heartland of the Labor right and source, in the figure of Peter Sams of the NSW Labour Council, of the sharpest criticism of Accord 7 to be heard at the ACTU Congress last September.
The real question is this: can the union movement afford not to have a campaign against enterprise bargaining and for a decent wages alternative? No-one can guarantee the result of such a campaign. As always, only the struggle will decide. But we can guarantee the result of not having such a campaign. It will mean the continuing decline and growing irrelevance of the unions and the faster approach of the day when the once-strong Australian unions are broken on the wheel of capital.