Big tasks – Difficult times

ACTU Congress

Big tasks – Difficult times

Anna Pha

More than 500 trade union representatives from around Australia are meeting in Brisbane this week for the 2009 triennial National Congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). It is the first Congress since the defeat of the ultra-conservative Howard Coalition government in 2007, a defeat in which the trade union movement, in alliance with the wider community, played such a critical role. The Congress is being held at a time of serious economic crisis and rising unemployment, made more difficult by the punitive and draconian restrictions imposed by the former Howard government’s WorkChoices legislation, which remains largely in place.
The face of trade unionism and conditions under which unions operate has been transformed over the past 20 years. During the Howard years, in particular, trade unions suffered a hammering with waves of anti-union laws imposing the most punitive and restrictive of regimes denying trade unions, their officials and individual workers basic rights: policies that are in breach in of International Labour Organisation conventions signed by Australia.
There has been a dramatic decline in the level of trade unionism to its lowest level for over 60 year. The process of determining wages and working conditions has been decentralised. The focus has shifted from comprehensive centralised union awards to enterprise agreements and individual contracts. Non-union agreements and individual contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements – AWAs) were strongly promoted by the Howard government. Awards that previously provided comprehensive coverage of wages and conditions were gutted and rendered almost meaningless.

Decentralised bargaining

The right to strike and take other forms of industrial action, the right of trade unions officials to enter a workplace, the right to recruit, and other fundamental trade union rights were removed. The Australian Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act with its building industry police force (ABCC) went even further by denying a section of the workforce other fundamental democratic rights not even denied suspected terrorists or criminals. The ABCC has spied on, hounded, interrogated and taken to the courts individual workers, union officials and building unions. The ABCC remains intact with all of its powers and the punitive provisions that accompany them.
Labor was elected with promises to repeal WorkChoices, modernise the award system, legalise pattern bargaining, transfer the ABCC to its new Fair Work Australia industrial relations umbrella and other measures to create “fairer” workplaces.
The Rudd Labor government passed legislation to phase out AWAs and then more recently its Fair Work Bill, which comes into operation on July 1. The Industrial Relations Commission is in the process of stripping, merging and writing new “modern awards”. In no way will these restore awards to their former role providing a centralised system for determining wages and conditions across industries and occupations.
The Fair Work Bill provides for a new system of “good faith bargaining”, which is essentially a system of voluntary conciliation and arbitration, with the Commission having certain powers to step in. Employers will be obliged to negotiate, but not reach agreement with trade unions. There are no guarantees that it will be trade unions at the negotiating table. The legislation is vaguely worded, and unions will only know what it really means when it has been tested in practice or in the courts. It could well prove to be a job creation initiative for the legal profession.
Pattern bargaining – where enterprise agreements with common demands and outcomes are negotiated across workplaces – remain essentially outlawed. The government has not restored the rights of trade unions to centralised negotiations for industry-wide agreements. This considerably weakens their capacity to defend workers’ interests, particularly in workplaces where the union is industrially weak or has no representation.
Even with the most generous interpretation, Labor’s industrial relations laws fall far short of the expectations of the Your Rights @ Work groups that united trade unions and the community in struggle to defeat the Howard government.

Trade union rights

Minister Julia Gillard has no intention of abolishing the ABCC. In fact, its inclusion under the Fair Work Australia umbrella suggests that its fascistic provisions could be extended to other industries where workers and their trade unions are considered too militant for the employers’ and government’s liking.
The right to strike and take other forms of industrial action remain in practice just as illegal as under Howard. The right to take “protected action” – meaning unions and workers will not be sued for damages or fined by the courts – is limited to a very short period during the negotiation of a new enterprise agreement. Even these provisions are subject to cancellation by the Commission.
Actions in defence of conditions being breached by an employer, following the victimisation, sacking or the death of a worker, in support of other workers’ struggles such as not crossing a picket line, remain illegal. Political, environmental and international solidarity actions are also illegal – punishable by heavy fines and damages cases amounting to millions of dollars. Employers, with their huge resources behind them, have taken to using the courts as an economic weapon to drain union funds.
Individual workers are powerless, their strength lies in their unity, in their ability to collectively bargain and take united action in defence of their interests. Without the ability to take united action the source of their power is drained. That was the aim of WorkChoices; to render trade unions powerless and ineffective, and to eventually destroy the trade union movement as a whole.
The Howard government failed in its objective to destroy the trade union movement but it has had some successes in seriously weakening the movement’s capacity to fight and prevent the introduction of individual contracts, the ongoing casualisation of the workforce and the assault on wages and employer theft of working conditions.
Gillard has indicated that she has no intention of further legislating in these areas. Any further reforms will have to be wrung from the Rudd government through struggle, and by rebuilding the community campaign.
This raises serious questions for Congress as to the direction of the future struggle for trade union rights and the relationship of trade unions to the Australian Labor Party. Howard has gone, Labor is in. Where next? Should trade unions consider standing candidates, forming alliances with or supporting candidates that support the trade union movements such as the Australian Greens and the Communist Alliance?

Jobs and entitlements

There are many other pressing industrial issues facing delegates this week. These include wages and working conditions, forms of work, the protection of workers’ entitlements and job protection.
Trade unions have co-operated with employers facing economic difficulties by making sacrifices and agreeing to wage reductions and shorter hours of work to avoid sackings. Some bosses have unscrupulously exploited the current climate of job insecurity to impose wage cuts and longer hours and unpaid overtime. In the highly casualised sectors employers have been able to sack workers freely, leaving them high and dry with few job prospects and no entitlements.
Once the recovery sets in, the trade union movement faces a big struggle to fight the inevitable demands of government and employers to restrain wages and deny workers a return to their former working conditions. Wage rises, in particular for those on low and middle incomes, are essential for the restoration of living standards and as a stimulus to the economy to assist in the recovery. Wage rises enable people to buy more, they increase demand for goods and services, which in turn generates the recovery. It is no use increasing production if no one has the money to purchase what is produced.
Amongst the many other important items being considered by Congress are tax and social security. The below-subsistence unemployment benefit of $225 for a single person affects all workers, not just those who lose their jobs. It strengthens the hand of employers offering low paid work under appalling conditions, especially during periods of high unemployment, and thus exerts a downward pressure on the wages of those with jobs.
The question of workers’ entitlements is another big issue which is far from being resolved, despite the many trade union campaigns and attempts to protect them. Companies go belly up, the banks head the list of creditors and workers miss out again and again. Directors are still free to siphon off funds to other companies before they go bust, so cheating workers of their entitlements. The law does not stop them then doing the same thing again and again to other groups of workers.

Rebuilding the trade union movement

A number of factors including industry restructuring, anti-union laws and attempts at social peace with employers and the promotion of individualism have contributed to decline in trade union membership levels – now at around 15 percent of the workforce in the private sector – down from a 60 percent high some 40-50 years ago.
The need to rebuild a strong, militant united trade union movement has never been more urgent. The Howard government, with the assistance of the corporate sector whose interests it served, did a great deal with promises of “choice not to be union” and attacks on trade unions as “interfering third parties” to dissuade young people and others from becoming union members.
The Howard government waged an all out ideological war to blur class consciousness, to present class struggle as dead and convince workers that employers had their interests at heart. Of course nothing is further from the truth as anyone working in a factory, hotel, café, call centre, on the docks, a construction site, down a mine, or stacking shelves in a supermarket knows.
One of the crucial tasks ahead is recruit, recruit and organise.
The class struggle is not dead. Nor is trade unionism. The struggle will continue, and during such difficult and insecure economic times as these, it becomes even more important to protect workers’ rights and jobs and rebuild the trade union movement.