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Managers of Discontent Tom Bramble the Establishment of Mass Trade Unions in the 19Th Century Made the Working Class a Force to Be Reckoned With

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Managers of Discontent Tom Bramble the Establishment of Mass Trade Unions in the 19Th Century Made the Working Class a Force to Be Reckoned With Managers of discontent Tom Bramble The establishment of mass trade unions in the 19th century made the working class a force to be reckoned with. The subsequent rise of the Labor Party transformed Australian politics. Yet the fruits of both developments have been ambiguous. Unions are institutions firmly located on the terrain of capitalism, devoted to improving the terms on which labour power is sold within the existing class system rather than striving to transform it. The ALP is devoted at best to modest reforms within the established social and political framework. Given that both operate on this basis, it is not surprising that the full-time representatives of labour’s interests became a conservatising layer which accepts the existing order and tends to restrain workers from militant struggles which might challenge it. This chapter considers the characteristics of the labour movement bureaucracy in the trade unions and Labor Party. The union bureaucracy When workers come into conflict with their employers, their industrial action can force management to enter into negotiations, leading to agreements (or industrial awards) specifying wages, hours and working conditions. As collective bargaining and arbitration became central to industrial relations in the quarter century before World War One, unions appointed full-time representatives to negotiate for them. These officials developed valuable expertise but, as a result of their removal from the general work force, they have come to play a separate and distinctive role within the labour movement: part of the union but not part of the working class. Their work experiences are different and their wages and conditions are generally better. Over time this layer of negotiating officials has developed into a labour movement bureaucracy which in modern Australia consists of the unions senior officers (secretaries, assistant secretaries and presidents), field staff (organisers), and professional advisers (lawyers, economists, health and safety specialists etc).1 Traditionally most union officials have hailed from the same blue-collar constituency as their members, sharing many of the same life experiences until becoming officials. Most have come from working-class families, had limited formal education and worked in traditionally blue-collar occupations for a number of years before becoming paid officials.2 Since the 1970s, however, the social origins of union officials appear to have become increasingly detached from those of rank and file union members, with many no longer working in industry for a decade or two before becoming organisers. A much larger proportion of union officials nowadays possesses a university education and is appointed into union positions on graduation. In 2001, 39.4 per cent of union officials had a university degree or higher degree, compared to only 23.3 per cent of full-time workers.3 Union leaders must, to some degree, satisfy their political constituency, the members of their unions. Failure to do so risks their hold on office as they may be defeated in elections, may lose control of the union due to an internal revolt, or may over time lose their power base as members simply quit, possibly to join rival unions. The fact that they have to respond to their base means that there are important pressures from below on union officials. Theselimit the conservatism of even the most hidebound of officials and opens up space for arguments in favour of militancy. How much officials actually do respond depends partly on how remote they are from the rank and file. Generally speaking, the higher up within the bureaucracy, the less likely they are to reflect and respond to members’ needs. Thus the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU, the peak body of Australian unions), elected by ACTU conferences dominated numerically and politically by other paid officials, is more insulated from the rank and file unionists than is a branch organiser. In contrast, organisers must face members on a daily basis. 1 Class and struggle in Australia seminar series, Australian National University, October 2004 2 Tom Bramble There are other pressures on union officials, however. When employers and governments deal with unions, by negotiating with rather than repressing them, they expect something in return: that the officials help maintain industrial harmony. During the crisis over the sacking of the Whitlam Government in November 1975, for example, the Melbourne Age warned that union leaders had a formidable responsibility to restrain unruly crowds of workers whose spontaneous strikes and rallies were threatening to roll back the ruling class attack on the ALP Government.4 Thus the officials face pressure both from members and from their industrial partners, capital and the state. Caught between these two social forces, union officials tend to vacillate; their task is to sustain a delicate balance between grievance and satisfaction, between activism and quiescence.5 C. Wright Mills called the labour leader ‘the manager of discontent’.6 Negotiations become a means to divert workers’ grievances into stable channels, robbing them of their potentially explosive content. Union officials seek to maintain good relations with employers because they themselves benefit from continued negotiations, regardless of the outcomes. Broking between capital and labour is the reason they exist. Further, their pay and conditions are generally more congenial than those of the rank and file. Other than the top weekly income band of $1,500 plus, where representation amongst union officials in 2001 was marginally lower than amongst all full-time employees (7.7 per cent as against 8.1 per cent), many more union officials were paid $1,000 to 1,499 per week (38.3 per cent as against 17.0 per cent).7 They therefore have a material interest in avoiding a return to the workplace whence many have traditionally come. These processes are further institutionalised by the legal framework of industrial negotiations. Many enterprise agreements, the arrangements that govern the conditions of employment for millions of Australian workers, contain dispute prevention clauses which prohibit unions from taking industrial action (strikes, work bans, go slows etc.) during the life of the agreement. The 1996 Workplace Relations Act, by stipulating that strike action is only protected from legal penalty during negotiations over a new agreement, further stymies the ability of workers to use their most powerful weapon, the strike. Union leaders must police their members to ensure that their organisations are not laid open to prosecution by the courts for breaching the Act. Australian union leaders are also caught up in the finer points of the arbitration system. Since the late 1890s, the Australian state has maintained industrial tribunals which accord unions and their officials an assured role as workers’ representatives. Although there is a countervailing tendency when rank and file workers assert their industrial power through strike action, the presence of arbitration tribunals encourages union officials to depend on the machinery of state.8 Even in the 2000s, at a time when the tribunal system has been undermined by enterprise bargaining, union officials often use legal mechanisms rather than industrial action to defend or expand membership coverage. In return for state-sponsored protection, union officials are legally obliged to uphold industrial peace, that is to minimising strike and other direct action by members. The fact that many union leaders are members, if not office-holders, in the ALP also affects their preparedness to wage struggles, particularly when these bring them into conflict with ALP governments. In June 2001, the Labor Council of NSW, on which the State’s unions are represented, organised a mass picket of Parliament House in Sydney to protest attempts by the Carr Labor Government to wind back workers’ rights to sue employers responsible for injuries at work. Just two days later, the Council signed an agreement with the Government that allowed it to push through the majority of its cuts to workers’ compensation. In June 2004, the leadership of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union backed off at the height of an industrial campaign to win large pay rises, limits on workloads, contract teaching and class sizes, despite popularly supported strikes, stopwork meetings and rallies.9 They feared the dispute might cause a major rupture with the Labor State Government and jeopardise the ALP’s election chances nationally. Managers of discontent 3 To be sure, union officials are sometimes willing to lead militant struggles, either because pressure from the rank and file makes this inevitable or because union structures are threatened by employer or government attacks. In both cases, however, the maintenance of their bargaining relationship with employers, is more important to them than winning disputes. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when working class self-confidence was high, the main threat to the bargaining relationship came from wildcat action by rank and file union members who chafed at the industrial leg-irons clamped on them by restrictive tribunals. Union leaders sought to put themselves at the head of worker militancy, the better to control it. In 1969, officials of left wing unions in Victoria led a virtual general strike to free one of their number, Tramways Union leader Clarrie O’Shea, from jail. A union pay push in 1974 notched up around six million strike days at a time when rank and file members were demanding wage rises to keep up with runaway inflation. At other times, union leaders cracked down hard on the membership revolt. Union leaders in the car industry, for example, were often called upon by government and employers to discipline their members and to get them back to work. For the most part, they were only too ready to oblige. As a result, the workers became almost as angry at their conservative union leaders as they were about the conditions of work in the factories.10 Since the late 1980s the balance of power between employers and union leaders has shifted.
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