At the end of next week a 'special symposium' will be hosted by Macquarie University to mark the three decades since the ALP-ACTU deal helped to elect the Hawke Government in 1983. The good and the great of the Accord era will be there (Hawke, Crean, Kelty etc) as will many enthusiasts from the academic community.
The Accord was Australia's odd experiment in corporatism at the national level. Odd because the labour movement (or at least its leaders) seemed to embrace corporatism at the same time and, at least on the political side, with the same enthusiasm as it embraced the neo-liberal agenda then sweeping the anglophone world.
Whatever its merits, I found in my thesis that today's union leadership are split over the Accord. Split in intresting and important ways. Here is an excerpt:
The ACTU’s adoption of independence and external lobbying involves a direct rejection of the dependence and internal lobbying approach involved in the social democratic style Accord arrangement. The adoption of union revitalisation strategies is based in critiques of the impact of these social democratic arrangements on union vitality and membership engagement.
In fact, for the critics inside today’s union movement, the Accord is viewed through the lens of a contemporary focus on re-building membership. The Accord was good for working people, but it was, they say, bad for unions.
While a few interviewees found merit in both the Accord and the organising model, seeing them as appropriate responses to the circumstances of their times, most leaned one way or the other.
Current union officials were evenly split on the merits of the Accord, while former officials were either supportive of the Accord, often seeing it as a high point for the union movement, or offered no definitive opinion. It must be stressed, however, that the sample sizes are small, and the distribution of opinions is such that it is hazardous to draw strong conclusions about the relationship between the period in which interviewees held senior union positions and their attitudes to the Accord and its impact on union membership size. Nevertheless, the interviews contained much commentary and analysis that was suggestive of a generational shift in thinking on these issues.
Unsurprisingly, union officials with differing perspectives on the merits of the Accord tend to emphasise different aspects of the Accord experience. Supporters of the Accord tend to emphasise its policy successes, while detractors tend to see it as having adverse consequences for the union movement, in particular perceptions of unions being ‘too close’ to government and the impact these perceptions may have had on union membership numbers.
One interviewee, for example, argued that the problems with the Accord were outweighed by these lasting policy achievements: “Everybody knew whatever the criticisms were of the Accord and we’ve got plenty but there was an institutional position for unions within that, there was a seat at the table, unions were not just asked to exercise wage restraint but there was actually a negotiation which saw things like superannuation and Medicare, these sort of social benefits were part of the deal.
Another interviewee, however, argued that the ‘well-‐known’ negatives of the Accord tend to be forgotten by an older generation of union officials who remain nostalgic about the Accord era: “There’s always a perception that the old guys in this group (smaller unions) do want an Accord. I think a few of them hark back to it, look back with fond memories. A very fuzzy memory as well, they remember all the positive aspects and they don’t remember the negatives”
Other interviewees argued that it is the positives of the Accord that have been forgotten and that history has been re‐written by the union movement’s new leadership. An interesting part of this perspective is that it rejects the (apparently) widely held belief among contemporary union officials that the Accord was an era characterised by low levels of member involvement and mobilisation, and, consequently, declining union membership: “The Accord was the high point for the trade union movement both in terms of what it was able to achieve and how it was able to mobilise workers around it. I think the re‐writing of history bagging the Accord has been mainly by people who weren’t there. The collapse in union membership and all that post dates the Accord. Union membership pretty much held up during the Accord. It flattened in the 80s but didn’t start to decline until the 1991 recession.”
The contrary idea, however, that the Accord did involve a reduction in member mobilisation, was the more popular among interviewees. This idea that unions stopped doing all the member-‐engaging activities they used to do before the Accord is also evident in the interpretation many interviews placed on the meaning of union revitalisation. For instance: “It (the Accord) served the government better than the unions, quite frankly I think there is a whole range of things we stopped doing in that period.”
Some interviewees also attributed much of the success of the Accord to Hawke and his special, or unique, relationship with the trade union movement. Again, this line of reasoning is strongly supportive of the view that the Accord was a one‐ off, almost a temporary diversion for Australian unionism: “Hawke wanted that relationship to work, he wanted that relationship, and clearly he saw benefits both for his own government and for the union movement through the Accord. As I say, I think at the time it worked well.”
For interviewees that are strongly critical of the Accord, the link between membership disengagement and membership decline is almost an article of faith, and clear evidence that the corporatism of the Accord, while good in policy terms, was bad for unions in organisational terms.
For these interviewees, an obvious causal relationship exists: “I can only compare and contrast the union density numbers in Australia with the UK during the Thatcher period. We actually went down faster. Whatever else the Accord delivered it didn’t deliver sustainable union density.”
The link between member disengagement and elite negotiations between the ACTU leadership and the leadership of the FPLP is also taken as axiomatic by many interviewees. In this view, the Accord excluded not just members, but also the most senior levels in union hierarchies; it is as if a whole generation of lower and middle union leaders was disenfranchised by the Accord: “The Accord was a dismal failure. A combination of Kelty, Keating, the Metals, the NUW under Sword, made some very fundamental strategic mistakes. Rather than trying to capture the opinion of the workforce and lead it and develop it they came up with a model they said was going to improve the country and there was very little ownership amongst the union secretaries, union officials, all democratically elected, and more accountable than most politicians in many regards.”
The Accord processes, with their emphasis on top‐down management of the union movement, were seen as even less useful during the tough years of the Howard Government; several union interviewees suggested that union officials had to re‐learn the basics of unionism: “The structure of the Accord process almost relegated union members to the position of observers. What we have learnt through the Howard years was that workers have to be more than observers they need to be participants. Because the Accord was negotiated at a peak level between the leaders of the ACTU and the prime minister and treasurer of the day it wasn’t as inclusive and consultative and engaging as we need it to be in the new millennium. “
An interviewee with direct experience of the Accord era, denied that it was the Accord itself that was the problem, rather the fault was with union leaders that failed to use the opportunities created by the Accord structures and processes: “It’s crap; if your members weren’t involved you weren’t trying hard enough because the Accord provided a framework for really significant campaigns. Superannuation came because there had been a 4 or 5-‐year union campaign. The structural efficiency principle – great opportunity for unions to get not just real pay rises but also give workers real control over the working environment. It’s true a lot of unions just treated the Accord as ‘every six months I turn up and I get a pay rise’. But the more effective unions actually used it as an opportunity and won quite historical breakthroughs”
Perhaps the strongest criticism of the Accord by today’s union leadership, however, was that unions had become too close to government and therefore too dependent on the ALP. This criticism is related to the argument about membership disengagement by over‐reliance on elite leadership negotiation, but it goes further and points to emerging expectations that union members have for independence in the unions‐ALP relationship.
The concern was expressed by one interviewee as a reversal of the belief that the ALP wants independence in the relationship more than unions do: “The Accord was a fundamental error, not because it did bad things for working people, but because it was bad for the unions, it tied us and made us a government agency. Too close. Which is an interesting thing because there is always this view that the unions want to be closer and the party doesn’t. Often that’s not the case. Being too close hurts us as well.”
Recent Comments