Sally McManus should focus on falling union membership

Sally McManus: can she halt the ACTU’s decline?

ACTU secretary Sally McManus. Picture: Aaron Francis.

It helps to start with a bang. People notice. Sally McManus stirred a lot of commotion when she admitted on the ABC’s 7.30 program in her first big television interview to having no problem with “breaking” unjust laws.

For Malcolm Turnbull the remark was a gift: did McManus mean that, if it didn’t suit them, people could refuse to pay taxes or speeding fines? The effervescent Christopher Pyne accused McManus of “anarcho-Marxist claptrap”. Mistake or not, this singular comment from the new chief of Australia’s union movement grabbed attention her organisation has struggled to attract in recent years.

Individual unions have captured headlines, yes, but usually for the wrong reasons. The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union is notorious because of its alleged thuggery and links to organised crime. The reputation of the Health Services Union has been damaged by a litany of corruption scandals involving some of its senior officials.

Since at least the election of the Rudd Labor government in 2007, as the “peak body” representing workers across the country, the ACTU has drifted. It is widely seen to have lost its authority and purpose with a series of well-meaning but bland, timid leaders.

The organisation has repeatedly failed to stand up to bad behaviour in the ranks of affiliated unions; more significantly, it has failed to tackle an existential crisis. Basic survival must be the ACTU’s primary interest in an era when the percentage of the overall workforce belonging to a union is close to single digits. A downward spiral in membership could plateau at some low point. But the union movement shows no sign of revival as a whole.

Enter McManus as the new ACTU secretary: an energetic, articulate 45-year-old with a background as a left-wing union activist. She helped spearhead the successful Medicare privatisation scare campaign that hurt the Prime Minister’s election campaign last year. She is credited with victory in an equal pay case for community workers in her previous job as NSW secretary of the Australian Services Union. She has drawn praise from colleagues for her adroit use of social media.

Now thrust into a job she did not expect so soon, following the sudden resignation of her predecessor Dave Oliver, McManus has an unenviable task. Without remedial action, the ACTU — established 90 years ago, in 1927, and boasting a rich history of working hard to improve wages and living standards, with past leaders such as Albert Monk, Bob Hawke and Bill Kelty — risks irrelevance and death as an important institution.

Despite her obvious vigour, the signs are not encouraging under McManus’s leadership. She set some important markers, or goals, during an interview this month with The Australian’s workplace editor, Ewin Hannan.

McManus says she wants to lead a national union campaign with the purpose of pressuring Bill Shorten to commit to sweeping pro-worker, pro-union changes to workplace laws. She wants to fix what she regards as a power imbalance by easing legal restrictions on strikes, and reducing the bargaining power of employers.

She wants legal limits on the use of casuals in the workforce — something she regards as having contributed crucially to union decline over 20 years. She wants more powers for the industrial umpire — the Fair Work Commission — to arbitrate disputes. She wants to use ACTU resources to build a people’s movement. In short, McManus says: “We think there needs to be radical change.”

Let’s set aside for a minute the fact that the laws McManus wants changed are contained in the Fair Work Act passed by the Labor Rudd-Gillard government, and that both McManus and the Opposition Leader have rejected a recently arbitrated decision by the Labor-appointed FWC to reduce some minimum penalty rates for working on Sundays.

Was something missing from McManus’s to-do list? Most likely it is there, just a little understated: how to grow the union movement.

It is the same problem that dogged her predecessors Oliver, Jeff Lawrence, Greg Combet and even Kelty. In her 7.30 interview with Leigh Sales, McManus did address the “big declines” in union membership and the need to organise in new sectors of the economy. She also tweeted: “Join the resistance, join your union.” But her focus remains on seeking legislation for secure jobs and working conditions so unions can rebuild in a friendlier political environment.

The ACTU’s continuing lack of emphasis on membership growth through on-the-ground organising techniques alongside a heavy emphasis on “rights” disturbs some hardheaded thinkers in the union movement, among them current and former senior officials.

It is a strategy that places an immense reliance on the federal Labor Party in government to do the hard yards by creating laws that tip the balance the union way.

The weakness in this strategy is evident from history. Yes, conditions such as the basic wage, hours of work and maternity leave were ultimately settled by arbitration, and sometimes later guaranteed as minimum conditions by law. But unions bargained for them in the workplace first.

McManus rails against “unjust” laws — and yet, as The Australian’s Troy Bramston observed last week, Australia has one of the fairest workplaces systems in the world. Comparisons with Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi defying laws are silly. Australia remains streets ahead of the US as far as minimum conditions and union rights are concerned. The ACTU and its 46 affiliated unions are therefore, to a substantial degree, the victims of their own success — which is why they have shifted their focus away from industrial issues such as wages and conditions of employment.

Three decades ago, most of the workforce was unionised. A great deal, it appears, is now taken for granted by the 86 per cent of the working population not in a union. In the private sector, where most people work, the non-unionised majority is 89 per cent. It should be alarming for McManus, who wants to reach out to the younger generation as large numbers of baby boomers retire, that union membership in the 15 to 19-year-old age group is 6 per cent.

McManus can try overturning as many “unjust” laws as she likes, but the trend among workers who will replace the current crop suggests her organisation is on a path to representing nobody.

The other big weakness of downplaying organic union growth and focusing on “rights” is that Labor simply cannot be relied upon. Unions created the ALP in the 19th century as a political offshoot to legislate change in Australia’s parliamentary democracy. Despite Labor’s success, and most notably the advances that occurred during the Hawke-Keating government years, with ACTU co-operating under an official Accord, the party has mostly been out of government since Federation. Labor has also evolved, recognising it must broaden its appeal beyond the union base to attract majority support.

Not long ago, John Howard led a Coalition government for 11 years and passed legislation that curtailed union rights, even if the harshest of his laws where thrown out with him. That’s 11 years of purgatory and a recipe for continuing decline if the best answer unions have is to wait for Labor’s return.

The Turnbull government, despite its wobbles, could still win the next election and rule for a long stretch. Union thinkers with heavy hearts argue it would be foolish in the extreme for the ACTU to continue the focus on tipping the balance its way with new or revamped pro-union “rights” that can be overturned by a future conservative regime when Labor is next out of power.

One observer puts it this way: “It’s like they’re putting their eggs in one basket. Unions are meant to be industrial organisations, and yet the ACTU seems to be spending more time on changing laws.”

Tim Lyons, a former assistant ACTU secretary who unsuccessfully challenged Oliver for the top job in 2015 after smouldering in dissatisfaction over the organisation’s direction, wrote in Meanjin quarterly last year that a “narrow focus on politics” permanently damages unionism in the minds of members and non-members alike.

“The union becomes not something about your work and your life, but an organisation that periodically tells you how to vote,” Lyons writes. “Compounding this, the message is that it’s voting that’s important, not joining a collective that has its own power.”

Lyons, who quit the ACTU but still works for unions, says there is much irony in unions deliberately positioning themselves in the public mind as a campaigning arm of the Labor Party they founded to take part in electoral politics on their behalf. He advocates returning to a focus on work and organising: “There is no future for trade unionism if people experience it as internet memes and random-issue phone calling and door-knocking about how every election is very likely the end of the world.”

Writing in the Australian Review of Public Affairs in February 2015, Griffith University’s David Peetz poses the question: are unions part of the solution or part of the problem? Throughout the 20th century, Peetz argues, unions helped maintain workers’ share of the economy by campaigning for wage increases and improvements in conditions. During the Menzies era, they were at their most buoyant. The collapse of manufacturing and workforce fragmentation was still a way off.

According to Peetz, the decline in union density in recent times has put unions in a weaker position to counter rising inequality and declining worker power. Despite a strong relationship with Labor during the Hawke-Keating Accord era, he argues unions were relegated to the role of “just another interest lobby group” in the Rudd-Gillard years. After 2007, he says, unions were often ignored by the ALP government, in comparison with the Accord years. They have since failed to develop an alternative vision.

The ACTU became a powerhouse when Hawke was its president in the 1970s. In the 80s and 90s, while it was an Accord partner with Hawke and Keating Labor, it was Kelty as secretary who sought to make unions more independent and self-reliant by pushing them into a large-scale program of mergers that transformed old, craft-based unions into industry super-unions.

Kelty also spearheaded the push to enterprise bargaining, away from arbitration, and to industry-based superannuation. He did these far-sighted things in large part because he accepted such reforms were essential if Australia was to modernise its economy. But enhanced self-reliance for unions was also intended to help them survive in a difficult, changing job market, and to create independent organisations, ideally in touch with members, that could remain effective during periods when Labor was not in office.

When Combet took over as ACTU secretary, he created a very effective mass campaign machine to overturn Howard’s Work Choices laws. It proved instrumental in turning public opinion against Howard, leading to his ouster from power in 2007.

But Combet did not stick around to oversee the aftermath — he jumped ship to a safe Labor seat. His successor, Lawrence, toyed with various strategies. He spent a lot of time negotiating the detail of Labor’s Fair Work Act. But critics claimed he was a technocrat, and marking time.

When Oliver took over in 2012, he refined Combet’s campaign model, using union funds on a big scale to transform the ACTU into an almost permanent fighting ­machine to aid Labor.

All the same, the ACTU’s authority weakened. A side-effect of Kelty’s earlier creation of super-unions was that behemoths such as the CFMEU and Shorten’s former Australian Workers Union did not need the ACTU any more because they could do their own bargaining and political lobbying. Yet the ACTU needed the CFMEU in particular, which in large part is why various ACTU leaders have lacked the courage to distance their organisation from rogue behaviour and even alleged criminality by construction union officials, despite the firm contrary views held by Hawke and others.

The alternative, if an offended CFMEU walked away from the ACTU, would be costly in terms of numbers to support the left-controlled ACTU, and in lost affiliation fees that keep the organisation financially afloat.

It is for similar reasons that the ACTU leadership was tardy in acting against the corruption in the HSU. The ACTU remained publicly silent when the giant right-wing Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association was outed for cutting the weekend penalty rates of workers at Coles — a reprehensible act in union terms.

McManus now takes control of this weakened organisation struggling to find its way. She seeks to carry on Oliver’s campaign model — though more aggressively, by pushing Labor to beef up its pro-union position. The risk is very high that membership will continue to decline and unions will lose their critical mass. That would gut the ACTU.