By Peter Anderson
Many will remember the line from an old Joni Mitchell tune, "You don't know what you've got 'til its gone", which has taken on a new significance in the face of economic and industrial relations policies being implemented by Liberal governments in Victoria and Tasmania, and to be embraced nationally should the Liberal-National Coalition win next year's federal election. A number of unions have now adopted the line as a slogan to rally opposition to the changes.
What is likely to go under the Liberals' plans — detailed in the Fightback! and Jobsback! manifestoes — includes not only hard won union conditions, but along with them the very means for defending workers' rights, including the legal right to strike, and in some cases the existence of unions themselves will be threatened.
John Hewson's enthusiastic endorsement of the Kennett government's program has removed any doubt there could be significant differences between the Victorian and federal Liberals. For federal Liberal industrial relations spokesperson John Howard, "The main elements of Mr Kennett's policy I endorse 100% because the main elements of his policy are exactly the same as ours," subject only to minor reservations.
This is not to say business interests taken as a whole are enthusiastically behind Hewson and Kennett, or the Groom Liberal government in Tasmania. It seems many in the manufacturing sector still believe Labor's Accord strategy and enterprise bargaining can deliver similar results with lower overhead costs from union and political opposition.
In the resource, farming and financial sectors there is obvious support for the Coalition program, though Kennett's tactics have panicked many corporate leaders who understand the public opposition to his precipitous actions could rob the Liberals of federal government.
"Howard must part with Kennett on IR law" was the judgment of a recent Australian Financial Review editorial. And Rupert Murdoch's Australian has stridently advised Kennett to postpone the industrial relations attack in favour of concentrating on budget cuts, the state debt and the crimes of the former Victorian Labor government until after federal elections.
But these difference are minor compared to the broader agreement in ruling business circles about the fundamental changes they aim to get. For a number of years now, the Liberal and National parties have been experimenting with the political forms needed to overturn past union gains.
The 1974-75 recession — which marked the turn from the long post-war boom to a long depressionary downturn — provided the backdrop to the austerity program implemented by the Fraser government. More recently, the election of the Greiner government in NSW was seen as an opportunity to test out a more far reaching range of Coalition political options under the banner of the New Right.
Greiner breaks the ice
Trapped this year by his own anti-corruption commission, Nick Greiner opened the late '80s New Right assault with a broadside against the social movements — beginning with Aborigines and the gay and lesbian community — then stepped up public housing, education and health cuts, made gaols more barbaric, and finally brought in a phalanx of anti-union laws.
Passing 37 bills in 4 months, Greiner's initial legislative rush was much less than Kennett's is now, but it broke ice in a number of areas. The Greiner themes were the now all too familiar list of smaller government, law and order, union bashing, public service cuts, user pays government services, corporatisation of government industries and privatisation. While many of Greiner's anti-union laws were not extensively implemented, as had been the case too for the Fraser government federally, compared to the current Coalition proposals the list looks particularly relevant. Greiner:
l Introduced common law procedures into industrial affairs by making the Industrial Relations Commission a division of the Supreme Court.
l Prevented the IRC awarding payments for time lost during disputes, and empowered it to order inquiries into the financial affairs of unions.
l Introduced "capacity to pay" principles and "flexibility" in wage determination.
l Made union membership voluntary, introduced statutory provisions to make secondary boycotts illegal, and required secret postal ballots for union executive and official positions.
l Appointed an ombudsman to investigate union members' complaints against their unions.
After an initial small flex of the muscles, the NSW right-wing trade union leadership found its own way to live with the Greiner government. However, clumsy changes designed to create an elite system of secondary education caused such public opposition that the government was forced to temper its New Right agenda.
Backed by the NSW Teachers Federation, in August of 1988, four months after Greiner's election, a march of 80,000 teachers, students and parents in Sydney caused the Coalition to rethink. At the time, Greiner's was the only mainland Liberal government in the country. The Gray government in Tasmania faced strong environmental opposition and the Bjelke-Petersen National government in Queensland was on the slide.
The experiment has not been without results, however. It marked how far the Coalition could go and helped to shift the acceptable political spectrum. One effect was to push the federal Labor government further to the right on social and industrial policy. Moreover, the experience told the Coalition it was unlikely to achieve any more if it did not first break the power of the unions.
This dynamic tension between Labor and the Coalition was further heightened by John Howard's leadership of the federal Liberal Party. Howard faced the dilemma that Labor already occupied most of the available rightist political territory. He therefore chose to commit the Liberal party to a fully fledged New Right ideological program.
This was epitomised by Howard's racist One Australia policy. Backed by the infamous FitzGerald Report on immigration, Howard's target was the increasingly large Asian migrant community. But his disgusting campaign stimulated enormous community opposition to the Liberals, while Labor quietly went along implementing many of the FitzGerald recommendations without public notice.
A new stage
Fightback! and Jobsback! mark a new stage in this long-term plan. But without the disasters caused in Victoria and elsewhere by Labor's big-money mentality, and more importantly without virtually permanent mass unemployment, it would have been far more difficult for the federal Coalition to win any acceptance for its far-right project.
While Jobsback! aims to make unions irrelevant, Fightback! will cause a dramatic drop in incomes and living standards for the great majority of working people. Despite pretensions, neither will go any way towards relieving unemployment and in fact will only worsen the already disastrous jobs situation.
Central to the Fightback! package, the Goods and Services Tax is designed to bring about a massive redistribution of income away from ordinary wage and salary earners and towards big companies, magnates, ocial parasites — the collection of no less than $50 billion dollars a year, half the annual tax revenue, will be transferred to the GST.
The proposed elimination of sales tax is not likely to flow on to lower prices of essential commodities or to absorb the GST price- effect, but will be pocketed by suppliers. The elimination of payroll tax, which is added to the negotiated wages bill as a company cost, will be another windfall for business, which will also benefit from lower real wages overall. Reduced income tax rates, should they ever appear, would in the end benefit only the most well off.
On top of this, every consumer will pay at least an extra 15% for virtually all the goods and services they consume. The whole proposal is predicated on a major shift from a flawed but theoretically progressive tax system to an especially regressive tax. All talk of a net gain for wage and salary earners, from areas like the supposed fall in petrol prices, is deceiving.
But none of this could be achieved without first binding the unions hand and foot. It is revealing, but not very surprising, that the provision of jobs is not once mentioned in John Howard's Jobsback! scheme, the aim of which is to increase "workplace productivity" by reducing costs to employers and by making workers work longer hours for less pay.
In this respect, the introduction of contractual arrangements for employment is especially dangerous and significant. Common law procedures for breach of contract will effectively make most industrial activity illegal. As in Victoria, there are further penalties for bucking the system. And statutory "compliance procedures" will make solidarity actions between workers impossible.
Ending the compulsory arbitration system is not the most important feature of the package: arbitration has in any case always been a two-edged sword. More important is that unions as such cannot be a legal party to contractual arrangements between bosses and workers, individually or in groups.
The contract system will simply break down union conditions. Against a century of hard won gains, Jobsback! guarantees absolutely no more than:
l A minimum hourly rate of pay (but not a minimum weekly or annual living income in any sense) and a minimum hourly youth wage.
l Four weeks annual leave (without loadings).
l Two weeks non-cumulative sick leave each year.
l Twelve months unpaid maternity leave after one year's service.
All contracts will include clauses prohibiting strike action for the duration of the contract period. Any arbitration called for between bosses and workers will be provided by the Commission only on a fee-for-service basis where workers will have to pay their own share of the exorbitant costs. In cases of breach of contract, in addition to a $5000 fine, workers themselves will be responsible for legal costs.
The end of unions?
From a reading of Jobsback! it becomes quite clear that the Coalition hopes to remove unions as far as is practicable from the sphere of relations between employers and employees. It says:
l "Australia's future lies not with its institutions (read, 'unions') but with its working men and women".
l "The removal of restrictions on working hours will make it easier for parents to blend their family and workplace responsibilities" [if, of course, there is any time at all left at the end of the working week!].
l "The 'closed shop' will be prohibited; so will union preference clauses in awards and agreements." l "Employers and employees will be free to negotiate to their own satisfaction [!] such matters as the length of the working day, hours worked and the time they are worked, redundancy arrangements, penalty rates, holiday loadings and any superannuation arrangements beyond those applying under the Superannuation Guarantee Act at the time of the election."
l "Workplace agreements can be concluded only between individual employers and one, some or all of their employees. Union or employer organisations — or any other agent of the signatories — cannot be parties to a workplace agreement."
l "Neither employees nor employers will need the approval or intervention of any union, employer organisation or industrial tribunal to make a workplace agreement."
l "The Liberal and National parties believe that all Australians have a fundamental right to work. Any form of compulsory unionism, closed shop arrangement, or preference clause in an industrial award, or any kind of agreement, infringes that fundamental right."
l "The monopoly representation rights of trade unions within the award stream will be ended... The Coalition will encourage the emergence of enterprise unions where that is the desire of the majority of employees in individual workplaces."
l "We will make it an offence for any employer to pay, or any employee to accept, strike pay."
The whole policy is designed to divide and atomise workers, between the strong and the weak, between high wage sectors and the rest who will undoubtedly suffer badly, between different work sites within the same industry where conditions will vary in infinite proportions, and within factories between workers under different contracts.
The Liberals' dream is couched in the terms of economic rationalism and the alleged virtues of the "free market". But far from market freedom — a ridiculous concept to apply to very unequal relations between employers and workers — the Coalition actually proposes a highly regulated legalistic system. Even the Australian Financial Review sees evidence of this:
"The Victorian Government is in fact regulating the bargaining process in order to give employers the power to exact greater concessions from their workers than would occur in a free market."
Caused by falling export incomes, the depression of the 1890s gave rise to a great strike wave across the shearing, waterside and mining industries, as workers fought against dramatic wage cuts. The result was the institution of tariff protection and the emergence of the industrial arbitration system, along with the introduction of the White Australia policy and rural assistance. The benefits, as is evident, were very mixed.
The evolving depression of the 1990s is being greeted as the occasion for a new fundamental change to the system of "industrial relations". What remains is not simply the need to defend the arbitration system against contract labour — at best, a partial and inadequate response — but to immediately begin the task of building and strengthening the unions so they can meet the new challenges, what ever form they may take. n