How Labour Made Neoliberalism

Abstract

Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this paper focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983Australia ( -1996 is used as a case study to illuminate labour's active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be 'written in' to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.

Tactical evaluations: Everyday neoliberalism in academia

“…Australia’s political ideology, one that Pusey (1991: 231) describes as ‘Benthamite’ (utilitarian), has encouraged an acceptance of knowledge that appears objective and pragmatic at the expense of a moral vocabulary more conducive to social democracy. Humphrys and Cahill (2016: 7) note that such utilitarian rhetoric was central to encouraging labour unions to comply with central wage indexation during the Accord years (1983–96). The erasure of the performativity of political acts through appealing to rationales such as economic efficiency circumscribes questions of government within the framing of management expertise.…”

The performance of the Australian welfare system in a time of neoliberal economic reform

“…Coalition governments from the 1990s. This amounted to dismantling a large part of the "wage earners' welfare state", the uniquely Australasian system of compulsory quasi-judicial centralized wage arbitration (Buchanan & Oliver, 2014;Castles, 1985Castles, , 1997Castles, , 2001Castles, , 2010Deeming 2013Deeming , 2014Humphrys & Cahill, 2016). The phasing out of centralized wage determination and the introduction of enterprise bargaining was first achieved by Labor under Keating in the early 1990s, through the 1991 National Wage Case and the 1993 Industrial Relations Reform Act (Kelly, 2009, pp.…”

Theorising French neoliberalism: The technocratic elite, decentralised collective bargaining and France’s ‘passive neoliberal revolution’

“…Particularly striking, though, is the active role played by left-wing governments in the neoliberalisation of the French economy. But what distinguishes the French case is that the ‘intrusion of market values’ (Lallement, 2006, p. 56) in labour relations was mediated, not by a politically engineered consensus like the Australian ‘Accord’ 4 (Humphrys & Cahill, 2017) or by an ideologically driven attack on collectivist values and institutions like in the United Kingdom (Baccaro & Howell, 2011; Hall, 2011), but by negotiations between non-state actors. Because the transformation of labour relations in France rested on such a process of micro-corporatist legitimation , it was both uncoordinated and ‘ contractualised’ (Lallement, 2006 – my emphasis).…”