Still stuck in the 1980s? The Unions and the Accord

by · October 14, 2012

This blog post first appeared at Overland Journal.

On 16 May 2012 there was a reunion at the Australian Council of Trade Unions congress gala dinner. The crucial players involved in the development of the ACTU and ALP Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s – Bill Kelty, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Laurie Carmichael – were all there. The keynote addresses were from Kelty and Keating, with the latter asked to commemorate the former’s work in the labour movement. While Hawke was the only one to literally lend his voice to the crowd, leading a rendition of ‘Solidarity Forever’, all were singing the praises of the 1983–96 federal Labor government and urging renewed collaboration between the Gillard government and the ACTU. A new collaboration was necessary, it was argued, in an effort to deal with the present ‘testing times for the labour movement and unions’.

Kelty is revered in the labour movement, no question. That night high-profile union leaders in the crowd took to Twitter expressing their deep admiration for him. ACTU Assistant Secretary Tim Lyons noted: ‘without question [Kelty is the] public figure I most admire. Proud I occupy a job he (& Carmichael) once had.’ Linda White, Assistant National Secretary for the Australian Services Union, said she ‘could hardly breathe’ at their first meeting, as she was ‘so much in awe of him’. Not one for muted praise, Paul Howes of the Australian Worker’s Union tweeted: ‘Just quietly – I love Bill Kelty – the greatest Australian unionist that ever lived’, and then, ‘If it wasn’t inappropriate I’d dry hump Kelty right now.’ The praise for Kelty was particularly focussed on his role in developing and implementing the Accord.

But for some in the room, and for other unionists following the conference hashtag #ac12 on Twitter, this public show of support seemed like staged theatre and far from the reality of the Accord’s legacy. Given the dramatic collapse of union membership in the late stages of the Accord period and after, and the declining share of wages compared to profits in that time, the idea of the Accord as the golden age to which we should return seemed bizarre. Moreover, the fact that the wide policy agenda detailed in the original agreed Accord failed to materialise was ignored. For unionists and left activists outside the ALP, the intervening years had led to critical reflection on the Accord and the consequences of labour-movement involvement in the corporative exercise. For those who thought there might be some public acknowledgement of the contradictions of the period by the officials of the labour movement, they were sorely disappointed.

Not only were the Accord and the economic rationalist reforms of the Hawke-Keating governments necessary, they argued, the outcomes were in the interests of all Australians. Kelty did not ignore that times were tough for working people in the 1980s, but this was celebrated as part of the responsible approach of the unions to the necessary restructuring of the Australian economy:  ‘we took the cuts, and we took the pains and we argued that this country would be better off in the future.’ Kelty overviewed the restructuring of the Australian economy in the 1980s, urging the labour movement to play a constructive role again. Yet there was little said as to why the Accord and restructuring were considered necessary in the first place, beyond the deployment of words like ‘flexibility’ and ‘high-value workplaces’, and whether working people were in fact better off 30 years later.

It was Kelty, Keating also argued, who ensured the national superannuation scheme and implemented the enterprise bargaining system – the latter of which Age journalist Clay Lucas says‘allowed the economy the flexibility and resilience to see the country through turbulent financial times’. They celebrated themselves – the parliamentary and civil society wings of the labour movement – as the true defenders of efficiency and tight economic management, and those most committed to addressing inflation first. As Keating argued, ‘few would realise that at the heart of the anti-inflation constituency was Bill Kelty – not some corporate wiz or a business council supremo … they wouldn’t have a clue how to break the back of inflation’. Keating continued that a lesser ACTU secretary ‘would have gone for the smother and hung on to the old system [of industrial relations] like a familiar old blanket’.

As an example of history creation, it was impressive. With union membership at historic lows, and growing inequality in Australia, watching the ACTU congress you could be moved to think these problems were unconnected to the economic and industrial policies of the ALP government of the 80s and early 90s. It would be wrong to suggest that union membership and growing inequality were solely, or perhaps even mainly, caused by the Accord, as similar outcomes occurred in countries like New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the same period without the utilisation of a corporative model. Yet one of the main ‘defences’ of the Accord as necessary is that things would have been worse had it not been agreed to – which of course cannot be proven. Yet the notion that the current state of the union movement is unconnected to what the union movement did in the closing decades of last century is equally a fiction.

The Accord was developed by the ACTU and ALP in order to try to solve the capitalist economic crisis of the 70s and early 80s, something the Fraser government was unable to do. In a period of renewed economic crisis today, it appears working people are again being asked by union officials and the ALP to sacrifice in order to save capitalism from itself. There is something that the labour officials do not understand, however: the Accord was able to be successfully implemented because of the high union penetration into workplaces. That the ACTU presided over a drop in union density from around 50 per cent of workers in 1983 to 18 per cent today means the unions’ ability to persuade working people that a ‘collaboration’ with the ALP is in their interests is far more limited, especially when the experience of declining real wages under the auspices of the Accord is within living memory (see graph below). Moreover, this crisis is different, and occurs on the back of not a long boom to which people thought we might quickly return, but at the end of decades of economic insecurity and restructuring and attacks on working on people.

Of course this critique says nothing about how we need to collectively act in order to protect wages and conditions. Or how we can rebuild a labour movement confident to fight both on the nuts and bolts of individual industries, and on the wider economic and political questions that refuse to go away. The 99% is moving, seemingly everywhere but here, but to think that Australia is so very different from Quebec’s student demonstrations or New York and Oakland’s Occupy movements or Spain’s Asturian miners is naive. Those places have different histories, yes, but they are also places where not that long ago the Left bemoaned the fact there was so little struggle. Each of them is a place where politics has changed quickly – and change in Australia is a certainty. The question is not one of whether things will transform, but what kind of independent Left voice there will be for working people and those that have suffered under decades of neoliberal restructuring when that change comes. Given the Accord’s role in undermining and attacking working people, and its continued endorsement by most of this country’s union leadership, we cannot rely on the ACTU to provide that kind of voice.

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Discussion8 Comments

  1. Andras says:

    Sorry this is simplistic twaddle. Reason for decrease n membership can’t be blamed on Accord.

    It can be blamed on lazy union people who relaxed, thought all was being delivered, just didn’t go out to meet with members and potential members to discuss Accordand consult with member demands .

    They showed they couldn’t chew gum and walk at same time.

  2. David Irving (no relation) says:

    Yes. Well. The Accord (and all that went with it) is why I haven’t given Labor my first preference vote since Hawke’s first term.

    While I’ll concede that the “reforms” of the Hawke and Keating governments have a lot to do with the Australian economy being in better shape than most others (at least in the short term), they still failed to address the fundamental contradictions of growth capitalism.

  3. Neale says:

    The Accord was developed and implemented by people who wanted a seat at the big table. Those underfoot were to do as they were told. Wages share of GDP fell from above 60% to around 52% under the Accord.
    Real wages fell, labour productivity rose dramatically. Howard consolidated this but did not alter the direction of the trend. We work harder for less. The Accord process thus achieved what was required. Now unions are swept aside as the others don’t need them at the table any more. Workers are bearing the weight of our risk society. Owners and managers choosing to take the gains

    • Very much agree with this Neale. And the idea of having a seat at the table is one seen by the key players of the Accord as the key reason to get involved. But as you say, a seat at the table to achieve what? And does a seat at the table what the ALP is in government effectively mean the union leadership became part of the state, a state that ultimately must manage capitalism in the interest of capital?

  4. Blair says:

    I think this is a pretty thought-provoking article! Although, I guess, it doesn’t really do much more than say, ‘the Accord has /something/ to do with the fact that unionism isn’t as widely prevalent in Australia, and that people are (to use the good old term) being more exploited now’, I think it brings a welcome focus on our current form of economic organisation.

    This article makes me wish I hadn’t squandered this year of my honours course in political science. I’d really like to investigate just what the relationship between the Accord/rise of neoliberalism as a political phenomenon/discourse and the concrete operation of our economic organisation is…

    • Well that is what my PhD is on Blair! This short article is really just a vignette to highlight that that union movement still seems to want to defend the Accord era as one of gain for workers, despite the fact that this was the same period in which neoliberalism was rolled out. The often repeated mantra is that real wages may have dropped but the social wage, in particular through super, made up for this. Though I’ve never seen empirical work to test that. I’m not sure it is true that the Accord was the main reason for the drop in union density, as density dropped in other countries in the same period (in countries where there was no Accord like arrangement in place like the UK and NZ). Although clearly the Accord was a brace on the unions that may have done little to resist the drop in density. However, the Accord did change how unions operated (reduced day to day struggle as the Accord set much policy previously decided at the local level), it oversaw a restructuring of awards to increase profitability, and the period oversaw union amalgamations (which some argue got rid of things like delegate structures in more militant unions). I wonder whether the question is not only whether the Accord is directly responsible for the massive drop in density towards the end of the Accord era and just after, but how the Accord has had longer-term impacts that meant unions were unable to effectively fight WorkChoices (and WorkChoices lite from the Gillard Government).

  5. Chris Field says:

    Some in the union movement have been trying to rebuild the movement using organizing strategies as distinct from unions as a third party service for paying members. This approach had some success in campaigns such as Clean Start. However it is hard going. The big end of town see the dangers to their power in campaigns like Clean Start. Why? Because the campaigns are not based on leaving everything in the hands of paid and remote union officials but based on workers experiencing their own collective power and learning that no matter how many twists and turns in their campaigns, they can make substantial gains. The problem is that not enough union leaderships are embracing this organising approach, too often getting lost in individual enterprise bargaining rather than thinking big and developing campaigns that unite across an industry and reach out to potential members.

  6. Elizabeth Humphrys says:

    Hi Chris, I very much agree and have been thinking about campaigns like Clean Start quite a bit lately. Supply side organising seems a really innovative approach for those sort of industries. I wrote something for Overland Journal’s blog on it last fortnight by the way: http://overland.org.au/blogs/left-flank/2012/10/a-living-wage-shapes-up-against-6-835-billion-in-profit/.