This article appeared in Canberra times 30 August 2007 p. 25 without the sentences in red. These deletions shifted the political stance of the argument and were made without consulting the author.
Kevin Rudd’s WorkChoices Lite is now even more like John Howard’s full-strength industrial relations policy.
Labor’s system, explained in more detail on Tuesday, will only take full effect in 2012, well beyond a single parliamentary term. It leaves in place obstacles to effective union solidarity like the Coalition’s restrictions on the right of union officials to enter workplaces and union members’ capacity to take industrial action (by requiring bureaucratic secret ballots and banning campaigns that seek common wages and conditions in different enterprises). It sneaks Australian Workplace Agreements through the back door, as common law contracts that will over-ride awards for employees earning more than $100,000.
The ALP still has a distinctive, if declining, relationship with the working class through its electoral base and union affiliations. But if the Party wins the election later this year, it will come into office with the most anti-union, pro-business strategy for regulating industrial relations in history.
In 1973, Whitlam’s Industrial Relations Minister Clyde Cameron introduced a bill designed to end the right of the Arbitration Commission to impose fines and other sanctions on trade unions. The Whitlam Government used the public service to set the pace for working conditions, especially annual and maternity leave. The background was favourable economic circumstances and pressure from rank and file unionists who were self-confident and militant in their attitude to industrial action.
The Hawke Government came into office promising that its Accord with the ACTU would achieve industrial harmony through price controls and the maintenance of real wages ‘over time’. Labor ended the use of the Trade Practices Act to prosecute unions for ‘secondary boycotts’ (industrial action that affected businesses other than that of the direct employer).
In practice, the Accord led to cuts in real wages, increases in productivity, monopolised by employers and falling union membership. Changes in industrial relations under Hawke and Keating, especially the replacement of industry by enterprise bargaining, paved the way for John Howard’s workplace relations system.
The ALP’s current policy leaves most of the Coalition’s measures in place.
This can only undermine Labor’s electoral chances. Industrial relations has been and remains the key issue undermining support for the Government. There is now widespread recognition that the Howard Government’s recent policy initiatives have mainly been cynical efforts to secure re-election despite, its ongoing commitment to serving the interests of corporations at the expense of working people.
The leadership of the ACTU transformed its strategy of opposing WorkChoices through huge protests, which involved some stop-work action, into a purely electoral publicity campaign. This weakened the potential for unions to resist any attacks on unions by a Rudd Government.
The decision by a meeting of five hundred union delegates and shop stewards in Melbourne to hold a mass rally and march on Wednesday 26th September, however, indicates that there is scope for an alternative strategy, with has better chances of success whoever wins the election.
In this climate, business advertising that makes bizarre claims about the differences between the industrial relations policies of the Coalition and ALP provide a boost to Labor’s credibility that has no basis in reality.
A magnifying glass is no longer enough to measure the distance between Labor and the Coalition in most areas. Unpack the microscope.
The ALP has endorsed the Government’s racist campaigns against Mohamed Haneef, fear-mongering about Muslim terrorism and grab for Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory. Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Garrett are as one on Gunns’ proposed new Tasmanian pulp mill. While Rudd and Howard differ over Australian participation in the occupation of Iraq, they agree about the centrality of the US alliance to Australian foreign policy on the importance of keeping Australian troops involved in the equally doomed and disastrous operation in Afghanistan. The Liberals, Nationals and Labor embrace a common, punitive stance on welfare reform.
Over all these issues, the genuine parliamentary opposition to the Coalition is the Greens, not Labor.
The defeat of John Howard will provide an important boost to the morale of rank and file unionists and those opposed to racism and Australia’s aggressive foreign policy in alliance with the United States. But it is the mobilisations like those of the early ACTU Your Rights at Work Campaign and the enormous anti-war protests of February 2003 which are the real hope for a shift in the direction of Australian public policy.
Rick Kuhn, a Reader in Political Science at the Australian National University, is the editor of Class and Struggle in Australia Pearson, Frenchs Forest 2005.