Covid and the New Accord
Written By: Antonella & Bob Briton
During the current pandemic, the modern world has had to adapt the way it operates. Ranging from face-to-face meetings moving towards online meetings, interviews taking place online to dance classes from home, we find a way to live under lockdown. However these are only the superficial changes experienced during the health emergency. But are all changes during COVID a sign of well-placed government concern and progress? Or are some designed to weaken the small protections we have left?
The capitalist class has acted fast to make sure that capitalism can be “rescued” temporarily by making sure the market isn't stagnating. Hence why they have made sure to provide a supplement to workers earnings and boosted welfare payments in Australia. It is why sectors of industry have received staggering amounts of corporate welfare and why payments have been made to employers to keep workers on the books. But there have been many left behind in the process.
“The ACTU have done nothing to help international workers during this pandemic, It would claim it has no brief to do so”
International students are one of the most heavily exploited by the state and by employer groups. They regularly have to pay a lump sum of $3000 every three months and keep up with the expenses of studying, all while only being allowed to work twenty hours per week. During this pandemic how have international students survived? Many have had to leave the country with nothing in their pockets, while the employer groups and the state sit back with the millions of dollars these students have made them. Some have stayed here in Australia as they cannot afford a plane ticket back. Often they have been left to sleep in churches so they don't have to sleep on the street. Neither their governments back home nor governments here have helped them cope through this pandemic.
The predicament of International students is emblematic of the real attitude of Australian governments. Workers are expected to fend for themselves and struggle for a place in a labour market characterised by insecurity, unemployment and under-employment.
“The Builders Labourers Federation was deregistered for the same crime of bucking the Accord and the ideological impact on unions was devastating”
The ACTU and its forces have done nothing to help international workers during this pandemic. It would claim it has no brief to do so. But its support for workers during the COVID crisis has also been softened markedly. Unfortunately, they have even cooperated with a planned attack that takes us back to 35 years ago when the Prices and Incomes Accord was introduced by the Labor government headed by Bob Hawke. Now the question is, what is the negotiation going to be based on?
We saw the Prices and Incomes Accord promise workers a transportable, compulsory superannuation scheme, a hike in welfare payments, Medicare and other benefits. This was sold as a “social wage” to make up for conscious “wage restraint” on the part of unions. Bob Hawke had set out his pro-corporate thinking in his Boyer Lecture of 1979. Union pursuit of wages was portrayed as primitive and short sighted. A “new” vision for the unions would be to seek a “win/win” with employers and the government to compensate workers through the so-called social wage. This would be negotiated at the very peak of government, industry and the trade union movement. In these new circumstances, what would be the point of on-the-job organisation? Evidently unions believed this and retreated from workplaces. They have never fully returned.
The Accord was rehashed through several versions during the Hawke government. Each was less generous to workers than the previous one. The guarantee that wages would be increased by at least the rate of inflation was scrapped. Medicare ended up as a national health insurance scheme out of which huge private fortunes were made at taxpayer (i.e. the workers’) expense. Superannuation has not given low-paid workers security in retirement and has been used to lessen government responsibility through the age pension. “Self-provisioning” began to replace the understandings behind the “welfare state”. The promise to index income tax to prevent workers on modest incomes paying higher rates of tax never got off the ground.
Of course, Communists don’t believe that workers and their trade unions should limit their concerns and demands to increased wages, either. Lenin struggled against this trend called “economism” for several years. Communist work in the trade unions must take up the big questions of capitalist control of the economy and society, as well. But this is not what Hawke and his backers had in mind with the Accord.
“When the overwhelming majority of the trade union movement endorsed the Accord in 1983, over half of the Australian workforce belonged to a union, now that figure is 14 percent”
The Hawke government deregistered the pilots’ union and brought in the air force to break their strike. The Builders Labourers Federation was deregistered in NSW, VIC and the ACT for the same crime of bucking the Accord. The ideological impact on unions was devastating. For the first time in their history they accepted that increased wages cause inflation and other ills in the economy. They explicitly accepted the idea that workers and bosses had common interests.
The end result was a marked reduction in the share of GDP going to wages and a sharp rise in the share going to profits. That was always its intention. In the US and the UK, this same anti-worker end was achieved by the use of baton-wielding police and court action. Under the Accord, it was achieved by giving ambitious and opportunist trade unionists a seat at the big table. More than one commentator at the time likened the Accord mechanism to Mussolini’s Corporate State.
As a sweetener for a new Accord, Scott Morrison has advised that the current government will not be pursuing enactment of the Ensuring Integrity Bill, which was specifically designed to undermine strong union leadership (as shown by divisions of the CFMMEU) and deregister an organisation based on offences committed by officials. Some of these “offences” would be committed as a result of legitimate defence of workers’ interests. Is this a win? Maybe a temporary one. But we musn’t forget that we did not win the “prize” because we fought for it. The decision was made because of the ACTU’s collaboration with the Liberal government to “simplify” (strip) enterprise agreements and “take us back to the basics”. It was achieved by “putting our weapons down” (unions and employers), which suggests that unions have retained their “weapons” where, in reality, they put them down more than 35 years ago. The bosses, meanwhile, retained theirs and have used them with increased frequency.
When the overwhelming majority of the trade union movement endorsed the Accord in 1983, over half of the Australian workforce belonged to a union. Now that figure is 14 percent. If the combined backing of over half the country’s workers delivered such an ultimately unattractive deal, why would the leaders of the ACTU be willing to sit down and talk it through again? In some cases, it may tickle their ego to be party to such high level discussions. Others might see it as an opportunity to have input in circumstances where their industrial muscle doesn’t warrant it. Seemingly none of them can see past the “logic” of capitalism as its servants seek to restore post-COVID profits at the expense of workers. This is the great monolith of a problem that Communists must set out to smash and replace with class conscious militancy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/scott-morrison-walks-away-from-union-busting-integrity-bill