May 18 was not a good day for Sally McManus, secretary of the ACTU. The money the ACTU had spent during the election campaign based on the Change the Rules theme — estimated at somewhere between $10 million and $25m — had achieved nothing.
Then there were the efforts of volunteering trade unionists who doorknocked, canvassed for votes at polling stations and made the case for a Labor victory in numerous other ways.
Again, it’s hard to see what impact all that had. But like a defiant general observing the evidence of defeat on the battlefield, she tweeted the next day: “We will never give up. We will never stop fighting for fairness for working people and a better world.” The core question now is: what does Labor’s defeat mean for the trade union movement in general and for McManus in particular?
Three important conclusions emerge when answering this question. The first is that the Change the Rules campaign had no cut-through with the average voter. What rules? Why should they be changed? How would these rule changes affect me?
There was a complete lack of clarity on these issues.
The second conclusion is that spouting falsehoods about key features of the labour market is not an effective technique for winning over the hearts and minds of voters. McManus’s incorrect propositions about living standards, income inequality, labour’s share of income, precarious employment and other labour market features ultimately blew up in her face.
The third conclusion relates to the existential crisis that the trade union movement must now confront. The option of using legislative favours bequeathed by a sympathetic Labor government is off the table, at least for the next three years. State Labor governments can provide some assistance, but the main game is at the federal level.
Trade union membership continues to decline. It is now 14 per cent of the total workforce and less than 10 per cent in the private sector. Take out teachers and nurses, who belong to trade unions in part to secure affordable professional indemnity insurance, and it’s clear that the trade union movement is already on its knees.
But winning back members and recruiting new labour market entrants is hard work, requiring real resources and scope to demonstrate value for money to potential members. During the past 20 years or so there have been various efforts to kickstart recruiting drives using various models. Eager young people have been signed up for the task but most of these efforts have come to nought.
So apart from parts of the public sector, some occupational groups (nurses, teachers, emergency service workers) and some industries (large-scale construction, parts of mining, the tiny maritime industry), trade unionism is effectively an irrelevance to most Australian workers and families.
Let’s consider the Change the Rules campaign, which was always based on a discordant premise: the ACTU was arguing for the rules to be changed, but these were the rules that had been put in place by a Labor government based on the requests of the ACTU.
The ACTU’s complaints about the current rules as laid out in the Fair Work Act and in other statutes and regulations included, among other things:
●Restrictions on the right to strike.
●The lack of restrictions on the use of casual, fixed-term and labour-hire workers.
●Limits on multi-employer bargaining.
●The lack of emphasis on gender equity and the absence of universal domestic violence leave.
●The inadequacy of the national minimum wage (and the related need to move to a living wage).
Unsurprisingly, the Labor Party, under the leadership of Bill Shorten, had agreed, at least in general terms, to every demand for change made by the ACTU.
These changes, if implemented, would constitute a major re-regulation of the labour market, reminiscent of the 1970s and before, and would be entirely inconsistent with the needs of a dynamic, open economy.
Mind you, this fact didn’t seem to bother McManus or Shorten to any degree.
Then there were McManus’s ridiculous propositions about the labour market that don’t stand up to passing scrutiny. At various times she claimed that living standards had been falling for the past 30 years and that labour’s share of total national income was at a 50-year low. She argued that employment had become more precarious and that labour standards were being undermined by labour-hire firms and the gig economy. The ACTU put out a nonsensical pamphlet entitled Inequality in Australia: An Economic, Social and Political Disaster in which the fabrications bore scant relation to the actual facts.
Without going into the details — I have done this on many occasions — we have not seen falling living standards in the past 30 years; income inequality has not significantly worsened; and the incidence of casual employment has not changed in decades. The proportion of workers employed by the labour-hire firms is very small (about 2 per cent to 3 per cent) and the gig economy is likewise small.
Of course, if you are in the advocacy game, a bit of exaggeration often goes with the territory. But McManus’s proclamation of demonstrable falsehoods clearly has backfired. Had she concentrated on widely accepted labour market developments — sluggish wage and productivity growth, for instance — she would have been on firmer ground, able to make a constructive contribution to the policy debate.
Let me finish on the topic of the week when it comes to the trade union movement — what should happen to the Victorian secretary of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union, John Setka? There is no doubt that the Setka issue is a running sore for the Labor Party. It is also an issue for the ACTU.
The argument is that badly behaving trade union officials are rare and a few bad apples shouldn’t discredit the reputation of most officials, who work hard for the workers they represent.
The trouble is that there has been a sufficient number of instances to cast doubt on this proposition: think Craig Thomson, Michael Williamson and Derrick Belan, among others. There are also the known cases of unions accepting secret side payments from employers while dudding workers.
Some union officials consistently have overstated their number of members. And the actions of the reoffending CFMEU regularly attract large fines and despairing comments by judges of the Federal Court. At the very least, there is a strong case for the trade union movement to clean up its act if it wants to induce the sympathy of the public at large.
So where does this leave McManus? No doubt, she got off to a spectacular start, replacing a series of essentially unknown and ineffective ACTU secretaries. The left-wing press lapped up her idea of flouting laws she didn’t like. Whether the voting public was quite as impressed is unclear; after all, we must all obey laws even if we don’t like them.
She has gone out on a limb by attempting to prosecute the Change the Rules campaign through a series of disruptive protests as well as spending a lot of money. The campaign has failed. Whether she can survive the next three years remains to be seen.
