Stuff the Accord! Pay Up!

Workers' Resistance to the ALP-ACTU Accord

Liz Ross

• Publisher: Interventions Inc
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780648760399
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

CHAPTER 1

The Accord – ‘A Transitional Program for Socialism’?

Described by the AMWU’s Laurie Carmichael as a ‘transitional program for socialism’, the Accord emerged against a backdrop of workers’ uprisings around the world.¹¹ The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a worldwide wave of uprisings: a surge in workers’ struggles in France, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Britain; student uprisings; the massive anti-Vietnam war protests; and the explosive arrival of the black, women’s and gay liberation movements – all culminating in the revolution in Portugal in 1974. The growth of the left included the revitalisation of a revolutionary left. Trotskyists who rejected the Stalinism of Russia and China wanted instead a new society won by workers themselves. Much smaller than the hegemonic communist parties, they were nonetheless able to play a role in some of the key struggles. Australia reflected all of this in local movements, left wing parties and protests, many involving workers. This peaked in 1974, with the highest strike figures since 1919, and it scared the ruling class. In 1976, the year before he became Governor-General, Zelman Cowen talked about the many challenges to authority:

People mass, march, sit in defiance of government and law, there are clashes with police … involving the mass resistance of people protesting about various political and social issues … the use of industrial power for objectives which cannot be remotely described as industrial.

There was even ‘a desperate concern with an increasing resort to violence’ in Western society, where people must think they were ‘in the middle of a civil war with those forces which wish to overturn it.’¹²

Cowan correctly pointed to the revolutionary nature of the struggle and the desire by many to overturn Western society. But it was not to last. The Portuguese revolution marked the highpoint; its defeat signalled the success of the ruling class counter-attack. Wanting to crush working class incursions on their power, bosses also noted that world capitalism was moving into economic crisis. The post-WWII boom had come to an end, and profit rates were falling. The rate of profit fell from around 17 percent at the end of the 1960s to around 9 percent by the mid-1970s and 6 percent in the early 1980s, rising to 9 percent again in 1986. In order to restore profit rates, employers had to cut into workers’ share.

In Australia, the Whitlam Labor government came to power in 1972 on a reforming program but quickly implemented measures designed to punish the working class for capitalism’s failures. By 1974, defying a massive strike wave, the Bob Hawke-led ACTU was quick to respond to the signs of a worsening economy with restraint, promising cooperation on all government measures. In particular, they signed on to the Autumn 1975 national wage case decision to implement quarterly indexation, which would gradually reduce real wages and bind unions not to pursue higher wages outside an individual enterprise or industry. Tom O’Lincoln points out:

Once the unions had committed themselves to trading industrial peace for periodic pay increases, their officials were required to police the agreement and pressure increased on shop stewards to do the same.

The Hayden Budget of 1975 cut spending, public works and social welfare, while the government launched an ideological attack against workers, accusing unions of ‘bloody-mindedness’ in ‘pricing thousands of Australia workers out of employment.’¹³

With Labor more on the nose with its supporters, the ruling class saw – and seized – its opportunity. Gough Whitlam’s government was summarily dismissed by Governor-General John Kerr on 11 November 1975, a coup engineered by Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal and Country Parties’ Coalition and their ruling class allies. The dismissal was met with an outpouring of anger on the streets. Millions of workers marched and struck around the country. Rather than turn this into a serious industrial campaign to unseat Fraser, the ALP and ACTU led workers into a purely electoral campaign, running the slogan ‘maintain your rage.’ Whitlam lost in a landslide to Fraser on 12 December.¹⁴

Class tensions simmered and often exploded during the Fraser years. The Coalition could not deliver on its promise of smashing the unions and significantly driving down wages and conditions to restore profits. When the resources boom of 1979 was met by a wages push from workers, the unpopular Fraser government was under threat; 1981 saw a breakout by Telstra workers, sparking a more generalised wages push and the formal end of wage indexation.

It seemed possible that the heady days of the early 1970s were returning. But it was not to be. Instead, by 1982, the world economy was again moving into recession. In Australia, the resources boom went into freefall: production dropped, unemployment and inflation rose, and profits fell. Fraser quickly imposed a wages freeze and rebuffed several ACTU offers for wage restraint deals to restore the economy. Workers initially responded with anger to the wage freeze and rising unemployment, and the momentum for action continued among unions and other social forces. For example, thousands marched in Melbourne in a militant ‘Stop the City’ protest over unemployment which ended with a stormy invasion of the ruling class Melbourne Club.¹⁵ However, more unions were in retreat, choosing ‘to forgo pay increases, to accept voluntary retrenchments, early retirements and Christmas shut-down in an effort to protect employment.’¹⁶ Strikes and street marches were seen as disruptive barriers to boosting profits; buckling down to raise productivity became the union officials’ mantra. When the union leadership backed the bosses’ arguments that workers’ wage rises were to blame for the crisis, and that increasing profitability and industry protection rather than shorter hours (on full pay) would help create more jobs, workers’ confidence collapsed.¹⁷

Previously, the Left had opposed these right wing arguments and anti-worker solutions. But O’Lincoln explains that many on the left had long given up on revolution and were more intent on reforming capitalism. Whitlam’s defeat and the increasing employers’ offensive, coupled with splits within the Communist Party and a shift to the right in the wake of an overall decline in workers’ struggles after 1974, meant that most of the organised Left, including the Labor Party and its left wing, were shifting rightwards too.¹⁸ These factors undermined the independent union committees of rank and file workers and shop stewards or shop committees in workplaces, ceding more control to union bureaucracies. Without this independent rank and file organisation, the impact of the economic crises left the militants ideologically disoriented, industrially weakened (even jobless) and effectively paralysed. They were no challenge to the officials’ reformist and electoralist solutions. Many rank and file militants actually supported them.

Federal Labor continued its rightward direction after another electoral loss in 1977 and began entertaining ideas of a prices and incomes policy, or social contract between Labor and unions to regain workers’ support. Labor MP Ralph Willis’ senior economic adviser, John Langmore, presented a prices and incomes discussion paper to Labor’s caucus, similar to one he’d drafted earlier for the Papua New Guinea government. Informal discussions began with caucus leaders, the ACTU and major unions before it was presented to the Labor Economists Conference in May 1979. In a paper on the ‘Role of Incomes Policy’, Willis emphasised that ‘an essential aspect of a viable prices and incomes policy must be that it has a more equitable distribution of income, wealth and power.’

The social contract proposal was debated at the ALP’s national conference in 1979. Some Left unions argued that it was just a disguise for wage restraint, but Left opposition was quickly neutralised; the conference voted unanimously in favour. A Labor government would, the policy outlined:

With the understanding and cooperation of the trade union movement, develop and implement a policy which will encompass prices, wage incomes, non-waged incomes, the social wage, taxation reform and elimination of tax avoidance and which will achieve a more equitable distribution of our national wealth and income, with the commitment to supporting the maintenance of real wages by quarterly adjustments and the passing of the benefits of increases in productivity.¹⁹

The Accord in a nutshell!

Langmore described this social contract policy as: ‘a realistic basis for consultation between the Labor Party and the trade unions about the moderation of wage claims’ in return for various social wage, taxation and other policies. By the time of the 1980 elections, which Labor lost, this was the agreed position of both Labor and the union leaders. A working party of Labor MPs and ACTU officials met from 1981 to refine the paper. The resulting Statement of Accord, stronger on rhetoric than detail, was completed in June 1982, further revised and extended, then endorsed by caucus and a combined unions conference held during the election campaign in February 1983.²⁰

Meanwhile, the Communist and Left Labor leadership of the AMWU had begun a process of re-educating members in the wake of the Whitlam government’s defeat in 1975. Starting in 1976, the AMWU leadership brought out The People’s Budget and went on to publish a series of pamphlets – Australia Uprooted, Australia Ripped Off, Australia on the Rack and Australia on the Brink.²¹ These pamphlets, with their lurid ‘pulp fiction’ covers, forecast the death of the Australian economy – unless workers looked to the national interest rather than their own and collaborated with employers to modernise to lift production, productivity and profits. A key mechanism, introduced in Australia on the Rack in 1981, was a joint government–union prices and incomes or social contract policy, one that the unions argued could favour workers. The CPA explained in its paper, Tribune:

There is always an incomes policy in existence … There is one now [under Fraser] – a diabolical one that means workers get robbed … The question arises whether the Labor Party formulates an incomes policy with consultation or regard for the trade union movement.²²

But posing Fraser and Labor as the bad and the good misses the point of such incomes policies. British workers had discovered under their 1970s Labour government that signing onto such a policy would cause losses for workers if profits were the ultimate aim. Tom Bramble notes that these policies, with their nationalist proposals, struck at the heart of workers’ strength and, in every case, ‘eventually derailed the alternative – a class struggle response.’²³

The 1981 ACTU Congress cemented the unions’ acceptance of a social contract. Driven by the manufacturing and other Left unions to abandon their earlier unease abo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Accord – ‘A Transitional Program for Socialism’?
• 2. Unions and the New Right
• 3. Lights Out in Queensland
• 4. The Accord and Women – ‘Sold a Lemon’
• 5. Robe River – New Right or Accord Neoliberalism?
• 6. The BLF – ‘A Challenge they Must Crush’
• 7. The Public Sector – Strung up by the Accord
• 8. Pilot Unions – ’You go out and it’s War’
• 9. Then There Were Three
• 10. Workers’ Capital? Superannuation and the Accord
• 11. Enterprise bargaining – Accord Mark VII
• 12. ‘The Accord Gospel: Profits, more Profits’
• Acronyms
• Endnotes
• Bibliography