Bad medicine: The Accord process repeats

Dave Riley

One hundred and fifty years ago, on April 21, the eight-hour-day movement began in Australia when stonemasons and building workers marched through Melbourne.

The young working class of this country proved its industrial worth as one trade after another won the right to shorter working hours. Australia became one of the first countries in the world to win the eight-hour day and, towards the end of the 19th century, its working class was one of the most highly unionised.

By the end of the 21st century, however, Australian workers were registering the longest working hours in the OECD and the trade union movement’s industrial coverage had collapsed. Furthermore, the new Work Choices legislation intends to marginalise unions completely by replacing any semblance of collective bargaining with individual contracts.

What happened?

This was the question asked in a recent ABC documentary on the eight-hour-day movement by the Radio National Hindsight team. While many factors bore down on the trade union movement over time, Hindsight singled out the Accord experience as the most salient.

The Price and Incomes Accord was hailed by the ALP as a new way of working with the trade union movement, such that it became the cornerstone of the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating federal governments after Labor’s victory in 1983. The Accord was sponsored by the union leaderships as a means to broaden the “relevance” of unionism by trading off various wages and conditions, to enable greater workplace “efficiency” and economic restructuring, for social gains in areas such as superannuation, Medicare, and taxation. The Accord process integrated the trade unions into national policy by making them a partner in government — at least that was the rhetoric.

The Accord was “supposed” to be tripartite, with the employers joining the unions at the table for the “consensus” making. But that never happened and the unions instead became an arm of the federal government.

While the Accord had some very vocal opponents, the union leaderships worked, in the main, to marginalise them and the Accord was sold to the movement’s ranks as the core industrial strategy. Two by-products of the movement’s restructuring through the Accord process were the loss of union democracy and on-the-job combativeness.

In the Hindsight program, John Robertson, now the secretary of Unions NSW, said: “The Accord process wasn’t managed well by the unions with their members, and I think what you saw — and everybody talks about this — is that at the point of our most influence in our history we went into our biggest decline in terms of members. I think this was due to the way the whole Accord process was managed.”

Robertson, a union organiser at the time, went on: “Guys I’d worked with on building sites were calling me all sorts of names because of the way we were dealing with the second-tier agreements to get wage increases and those sorts of things. We weren’t being told how we ought to be communicating with our members about this stuff. We were being told that you have to go out there and there has to be trade offs and those sorts of things, and we started to disconnect.”

Robertson admitted that the unions “went out there and told people this is how it has gotta be. And it was almost this thing that the medicine doesn’t taste nice but you have to take it because it’s good for you.”

But it wasn’t. The Accord, promoted as the pinnacle of trade union relevance and political strength, sacrificed the working class’s independence. Contrary to what Robertson suggests, the major problem with the Accord was that it embodied the trade union movement’s collective deference to the Labor government.

Unfortunately, with little thought to what happened in the past, the same “Accord process” is being embraced by the movement leadership — with some exceptions among militant unions. In the face of Work Choices, we are being told that our best strategy is not use our own collective strength and organisation, but to rely on an ALP election victory. That medicine still tastes bad, and it is still not good for us.

[Dave Riley is a member of the Socialist Alliance-Green Left Weekly editorial board. The Hindsight program can be heard online or as a podcast at ].

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