Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has begun to gives some details of his party’s industrial-relations policy. They are not very encouraging. Ideology taints industrial relations like no other policy area in Australia. On one hand, the Coalition sides with employers and goes out of its way to destroy any role for unions in the workplace. On the other hand, Labor panders far too much to large unions and their peak body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
In the past four years, the most draconian elements of Coalition policy have been ameliorated in the Senate by the Australian Democrats. The result has been a worthwhile shift in industrial relations law in Australia. Industrial relations are now conducted with a focus on the workplace, rather than on an industry-wide basis. In addition, those employees who wish it can take up individual Australian Workplace Agreements. As a result of Democrat insistence, however, unions still have a role in negotiating at a workplace level for those employees who wish it. Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith is impatient at the pace of change, but it is happening and the result has been beneficial: more flexible arrangements which suit individual workplaces, fewer wildcat strikes and increases in wages as workers share some of the spoils of increased efficiency.
The union movement detests this change. Unions would prefer the monopoly of compulsory or practical compulsory union membership. Union officials would prefer the power of being able to organise industry-wide, so they can threaten across-the-board industrial action.
Mr Reith wishes to outlaw industry-wide union action, and there is merit in that. But Mr Reith is wrong to attempt to deny union representation to those people in workplaces who want it. If workers want collective representation they should be allowed to opt for it and those individuals who want to opt out should be able to. Mr Beazley’s latest proposal would attack that freedom. Mr Beazley wants to remove the choice of individuals to have workplace agreements under the industrial-relations umbrella, leaving them only common-law contracts which could be easily overridden by compulsory collective arrangements.
The experience of the past four years has shown significant efficiencies in the Australian economy gained through industrial relations being negotiated at the enterprise level. Employers and employees have benefited. Mr Beazley should avoid a return to the inefficient, inflexible procedures of applying awards across whole industries irrespective of local conditions. He should avoid the prospect of handing too much power to a few union officials.
And the union movement must become more relevant to the new arrangements. It should have nothing to fear if it competently goes about representing workers’ interests. But those interests are not served by compulsory, industry-wide arrangements.