By Peter Goldie
With the Howard government's attempts to reform the waterfront, and major disputes in the mining and construction industries, 1998 has been a tumultuous year in industrial relations.
And according to the director of Monash University's National Key Centre in Industrial Relations, Professor Gerry Griffin, Australia will be confronted with the consequences of recent changes in industrial relations for many years to come.
The latest round of changes to industrial laws came into effect in July this year with the introduction of the second phase of the Howard government's Workplace Relations Amendment Act. All awards that had not been redrafted through negotiation by 1 July were automatically stripped back to cover only the government's prescribed 'core' activities.
The recent changes are part of a broader agenda, one aimed at encouraging the substitution of the collective union-management relationship in the workplace with a relationship between the individual worker and management. It can be seen as the logical continuation of policies formulated under the Keating government, which introduced enterprise bargaining in non-union companies through its Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993.
This contemporary industrial environment has pushed Monash's National Key Centre to the fore. "It is our job to try to make some sense of what is happening, to disseminate that information and to provide our resources to help steer clients through the morass which is our current industrial relations scenario," Professor Griffin says.
One sector with a keen interest in the centre's research is the trade union movement. A Unions in Crisis conference convened by the centre in July attempted to draw together recent research, assess membership satisfaction with union activities and investigate falling rates of membership.
Among the speakers were unionists such as Mick Cottrell from the Maritime Union of Australia, one of the main players in the docks dispute. One aspect of the dispute that received little attention at the time was the relationship between police and unions organising the blockade of East Swanson Dock in Melbourne and other flashpoints around the country.
Addressing this relationship, researcher Mr David Baker, a lecturer at Monash's Centre for Police and Justice Studies, found a precedent-setting relationship which allowed more effective dispute resolution processes such as court appeals to take their course. "The magnitude of the 1998 maritime dispute means that defined procedures of negotiation have formed a precedent for police and union cooperation in controlling picketing," he concluded. "The mutual restraint and non-confrontational strategy of police and picketers maintained the peaceful and conciliatory relationship."
Professor Griffin says one of the National Key Centre's major goals is to disseminate research findings to practitioners and the wider community. This is done through publications and working papers and gatherings such as a public sector restructuring and industrial relations conference in December. The centre will present research on subjects such as the industrial relations implications of privatisation and competitive tendering in local government.
According to Professor Griffin, such work is important because the implementation of the rationalist agenda and the ability of unions to respond will have major impacts on the structure of Australian society.
"Having done away with a system of setting national award rates and having significantly downgraded the role of the Industrial Relations Commission, we are now left with a system of distinct winners and losers," he says. "Some are doing well under the deregulated system, while others are losing touch with the winners."
Professor Griffin says some unions have the size and capacity to cope with the increased activity necessary to fulfil the new industrial demands. For example, the construction industry won a 15 per cent rise over two years, oil industry workers gained significant improvements in pay and conditions, and even waterside workers, after their bitter dispute, recorded significant improvements in conditions while generally maintaining wage rates and their coverage of the ports.
"Compare these to sales industry workers at Coles-Myer, for instance," Professor Griffin says. "They were able to secure only four per cent a year over five years in return for significant losses in conditions, including the loss of penalties for overtime.
"There are others - manual workers, the poorly skilled, less trained and less educated people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and women. Many of these people are in casual employment and they are the real losers."
Professor Griffin says he would put the number of such workers who are "up the creek" - only just surviving on minimum wages and conditions - at about 1.5 million.
The social significance of such developments is not lost. A litany of individual, family and community breakdown and social distrust and crime is often recited. Professor Griffin fears that it is in such an environment that support for groups such as One Nation can take hold.
"These thousands of individuals can feel extremely abandoned by the system," he says. "They not only feel betrayed by their government and politicians but also feel their own organisations, their unions, have been largely unable to defend them."
Australia will be confronted with the consequences
of recent changes to industrial laws for many years to come,
says Monash researcher, Professor Gerry Griffin.
The National Key Centre in Industrial Relations will hold a Public Sector Restructuring and Industrial Relations conference on 10 and 11 December. The venue is Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne. For more details, call (03) 9903 8700.