Solidarity reconstructed: The impact of the Accord on relations within the Australian union movement

Abstract

Unions’ strength and identity is determined primarily by the extent to which they can nurture effective solidarity amongst wage earners in general and between networks of unions in particular. The experience of inter-union coordination throughout the Accord years has strengthened political solidarity across the movement (demonstrated most recently in the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign). The movement’s industrial solidarity has been in secular decline since the peak union leadership enthusiastically embraced enterprise bargaining in the final phase of the Accord in the early 1990s. The key challenge for unions today is to broaden the ambit of political solidarity and to revitalise industrial solidarity in an era of increasing workforce diversity and working life transformation.

‘Fair Work’ and the Modernization of Australian Labour Standards: A Case of Institutional Plasticity Entrenching Deepening Wage Inequality

“…However, the substantive role of awards in shaping pay outcomes has mutated through a range of reinterpretations, including through lower percentage award wage rate increases for trade‐ and university‐qualified workers in comparison to minimum wage earners, resulting in a compression of award wage rate relativities (Buchanan et al . : 3–2; Healy ); the lack of objective criteria (such as qualifications) in classification definitions (Oliver and Walpole ); and the resulting tendency of employers to place employees on the lowest possible classification (Wright and Buchanan : 67). As a result, award wage rates have become less meaningful as an instrument of comparative wage justice (Buchanan et al .…”

“…The success of campaigns such as these depends on creating new bonds of solidarity between workers and clients or customers, and between workers and the general public (Buchanan et al . ). But these bonds are tenuous and require constant political mobilization with all the risks that this entails.…”

Australian unions and collective bargaining in 2014

“…Unions continued to face issues of increasing nonstandard work, wage inequality and other attacks on the social fabric which have significant implications for workers. As noted by Buchanan et al (2014), '[t]he key challenge remains to identify the new contours of solidarity in the labour market and working life' (p. 304). A central issue for the future is the extent of the Federal Government's assault on trade union freedoms.…”

How Labour Made Neoliberalism

“…It is not simply that the Accord assisted the introduction of neoliberal policies through its various effects, although it did have that result (see, e.g. Buchanan et al, 2014: 301). Rather, it is to argue that the agreement also embedded a consent for the neoliberal project to take place, with the Accord significantly weakening industrial solidarity leading to ‘not just deepening wage inequality, but the isolation of unions from a workforce increasingly subject to the vagaries of the market’ (Buchanan et al, 2014: 302).…”