ACTU recipe for back to the future on IR legislation

ACTU secretary Sally McManus has delivered a masterclass in class-war rhetoric that provides a blueprint for workplace division dressed up as consensus. In her address to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Ms McManus confirmed the worst fears of employers that the ACTU would use the outcome of the Albanese government’s Jobs and Skills Summit to deal itself back into the heart of the nation’s workplaces. This includes support for a broad definition for the multi-workplace bargaining regime now being put into legislation by Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke.

Industry-wide bargaining has been sold by the ACTU and government as a way to improve the negotiating position of marginalised workers in low-paid jobs. But, despite calls from major employer and industry groups to do so, Ms McManus has refused to say the mechanism should be restricted to small business, be voluntary or prohibit strike action against companies not directly involved in disputes. Ms McManus said workers needed the right to strike in support of multi-employer pay claims or their bargaining power would be “almost zero” in workplace negotiations. She said having the option to take industrial action was different to taking it, and she cited Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden as developed nations where workers had the right to bargain with multiple employers but had lost fewer working hours to strikes per person than Australia. The reasonableness of Ms McManus’s argument is undermined by the partisan nature of her attack on the conservative side of politics, which she said “had come to believe their own caricatures” of what the union movement was about. This is no surprise given the trade union movement is by definition an extension of the Labor Party.

Ms McManus’s key arguments remain rooted in the industrial relations battles of decades ago, dating back to the creation of the HR Nicholls Society by John Stone, Peter Costello, Barrie Purvis and Ray Evans. Ms McManus described the industrial relations policies championed by the HR Nicholls Society as a 30-year war that had delivered falling real wages, an inequitable share of productivity gains, job insecurity, income and wealth disparities, and one of the most gender-segregated workplaces in the OECD. Her message follows in the tradition of Bob Hawke, who denounced HR Nicholls Society members as “political troglodytes and economic lunatics”, and union official John Halfpenny, who was sued for defamation after referring to the group as “the industrial relations branch of the Ku Klux Klan”. Aside from questionable calculations for income distribution, Ms McManus failed to acknowledge the deep problems that led to the creation of the HR Nicholls Society in the first place. This included a mining industry held back by featherbedding for unions and rife with productivity-sapping demarcation disputes. Waterfront reform was a key achievement of the HR Nicholls Society but many of those gains have since been squandered, leaving Australian ports among the least efficient in the world.

What is more notable is the lack of vigour that exists in politics or business to prosecute further reforms in IR to build on the successes of the Hawke-Keating and Howard years. Since the success of the ACTU campaign against the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation in 2007 there has been little appetite for reform. This has led to atrophy of the enterprise bargaining system that was designed to lift productivity at a workplace level. The ACTU showed itself to be an untrustworthy partner with the Coalition when it walked away from negotiated reforms with the Morrison government and instead threatened to stage a re-run of the Work Choices campaign against it. The ACTU position now is to return to a more centralised system of wage setting across industry.

Together with a return of pattern bargaining, it is instructive to note that one of the first IR changes proposed by the Albanese government has been to scrap the right of employers to terminate enterprise agreements, something in part designed to strengthen the hand of maritime unions in a long-running dispute with tug-boat operators on the waterfront. Anticipating a fight, Ms McManus says she expects in coming months the “Liberal Party and some of its supporters in the business lobby press play on the same old rewound cassette from the ’80s” with “relentless, repetitive, ridiculous anti-union rhetoric”. “As we try to fix the wages crisis, job insecurity and the gender pay gap, we will be subject to the language of the 30-year war,” she said.

But it is Ms McManus and the ACTU that are pushing a back-to-the-future approach to workplace relations despite knowing the perils faced by business because of the current global economic circumstances. In Ms McManus’s own words, these perils include continued global insecurity; a war in Europe; attacks on democracy and the rise of autocracy; the increasing concentration of wealth; and the existential threat of climate change. Rather than answers, the ACTU offers a recipe to make things worse.