Do we really need to pretend we're shocked by Shorten's sweetheart deals with bosses?
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Version 0 of 1. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” So begins the famous preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World, the syndicalist group that former prime minister Billy Hughes treated as the Isis of the Great War era. Apparently, Australia’s conservatives are closet IWWers. Or, at least, that’s the impression created by the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. Related: If the trade union royal commission investigates Labor, it's in murky territory | Paul Karp How else to explain the horror at Bill Shorten’s sweetheart deals with bosses during his tenure at the AWU? The faux-outrage from the right about the AWU cozying up to employers is something to behold, given that conservatives have long insisted the Labor party distance itself from precisely those unions that win the best outcomes for their members. For instance, as Ben Schneiders explained in the Age in early 2014, “as a bargaining organisation, the CFMEU is wildly successful. In its last industry-wide agreement in Victoria, it secured pay rises and extra overtime allowances worth about 27% over four years”. After such widespread concern about the benefits or otherwise AWU members received from Shorten’s deals, you’d assume that the commentariat wants Labor to associate itself with the CFMEU and leadership. Readers will be shocked to learn that’s not the case. Here’s the Australian Financial Review from about the same time: In the 1980s it was the Builders Labourers Federation that the Hawke Labor Government deregistered. Today it is the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union that defies court orders, shuts down entire city blocks and outrageously intimidates workers who refuse to join its faux working class rebellion . Labor leader Bill Shorten must condemn the behaviour at one of his party’s affiliated unions without reservation. Well, no-one could claim Shorten’s own generalship, as displayed during his AWU years, represented any sort of “working class rebellion” – faux or otherwise. Yet, as Greg Combet says, we’re seeing the first example in history of a union leader pillioried for being too cooperative with employers. Which is not to say that there shouldn’t be outrage at Shorten’s evidence. It’s just that you expect the anger to come from the left, not from the right. Shorten describes himself as a “modern” union leader. He’s a practitioner of the moderate, business-friendly unionism of recent decades, in which there’s been a remarkable decline in industrial militancy. As Greg Jericho notes, A mere 16,900 working days were lost [to strikes] in the [most recent] quarter – a figure that sounds large, but it works out at just 1.6 days for every 1,000 employees. It’s a far, far cry from the days in the 1980s and early 1990s when as many as 106 days for every 1,000 employees a quarter were lost to strikes. During that time, we’ve also seen a massive drop in union membership. As recently as 1992, 42% of Australian workers belonged to a union. Today, that figure’s something like 13%, a decline so precipitous that you’d be excused for thinking it terminal. By contrast, the last period of sustained union growth took place between the mid-60s and mid-70s, when membership climbed from 2.1 million in 1966 to 2.8 million in 1977. Not coincidentally, that era also saw an intense strike wave, a series of battles even greater than those to which Jericho refers. It’s almost like when unions show they can win, people want to join them. It’s easy to dismiss tales of heroic pickets and mass strikes as a nostalgia for a bygone age. Jericho identifies the changed legal arena in which unions today must contend: Comparing the industrial landscape now with pre-1994 is almost pointless. In December 1993 the laws regarding strikes fundamentally changed when the Keating government introduced protected industrial action. This gave workers a legal right to strike but also narrowly defined the areas on which they could do so. For example, you could no longer strike in support of workers in another industry, enterprise or union. The Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 defined that a strike could take place if it was “about matters pertaining to the relationship between employers and employees”. Crucially, the strikes had to occur within the “bargaining period” of the enterprise agreement and only after certain levels of negotiation had occurred. The laws reduced strikes almost overnight. No-one can deny that unions now have the dice loaded against them. Over the last few years, the CFMEU has been slapped with millions of dollars in fines, mostly for practices (such as picketing) that would once have just been considered the normal business of unionism. But let’s not forget that unionists in the early 1960s also faced a harsh legislative regime, with the Arbitration Court equipped with so-called “penal powers” to discipline industrial militants. The union revival began when the Victorian leader of the Tramways Union, Clarrie O’Shea, simply refused to pay the fines levelled against him. O’Shea’s gaoling prompted hundreds of thousands of unionists to walk off the job in a statewide campaign that essentially re-established the right to strike in Australia. The comparison between then and now illustrates the movements’ evolution. A recent Fairfax profile noted Shorten’s friendships with the industrialist Richard Pratt and John Roskam from the Institute for Public Affairs: In the early 2000s even Kerry Packer, then Australia’s richest man, lent a hand to a Shorten idea by agreeing to revamp the union magazine, The Australian Worker, as a “lifestyle” mag, and to sell it on newstands. Meanwhile, as his political network continued to widen, industry moguls and steel mill delegates would happily turn up at Crown Casino for the annual AWU balls that Shorten founded. … Shorten seemed more than comfortable amid the trappings of wealth. Related: Industrial action is at near record lows but business will still blame unions It’s as difficult to imagine Shorten joining O’Shea in a Pentridge Prison cell as it is to picture the tramways leader clinking champagne glasses at one of the AWU’s swanky balls. The royal commission’s an obvious political stunt, a manoeuvre designed to generate footage of yet another Labor leader grilled by lawyers in a courtroom setting. Will it damage Shorten’s political standing? Who knows. He certainly came across as an uninspiring and slightly shifty bureaucrat, concerned more about his ambitions than anything else – but, then again, that’s pretty much the persona with which we’re familiar from his parliamentary career. For progressives, there are more important questions. In an era of growing workplace insecurity, and with a recession seemingly looming, what role will the unions play? Will they remain a platform for aspiring Labor parliamentarians – or will they dig in for a fight? |