Saturday Extra

The Industrial Relations legislation was passed by the Senate last night, after heated debate. Belinda Probert looks at its significance.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: First up today, for some reflection from an historian on one of the more significant weeks in Australia's law-making life. It was a breathtaking list of legislation passed, the new anti-terrorism laws, the welfare changes, and of course the Industrial Relations legislation which was passed by the Senate last night after the government gagged debate and pushed it through.

Now it's not the first time that this government has tackled Industrial Relations; you might remember Peter Reith's Workplace Relations Bill six years ago, but those Bills of course, were watered down, or they were rejected by the Senate. Not this time. This time the government gets virtually what it wants. So it's a very interesting indication about attitudes.

Mr Howard has presented it as nothing revolutionary, just another step towards creating a more flexible workplace, which he says will result in lower unemployment. But for other, including my next guest, the Bill is very radical and it's in a sense, once-in-a-century radical, with other undertones as well.

Belinda Probert is the Pro Vice Chancellor now of the University of Western Australia. She has a long history as a labour historian. Welcome to the program, Belinda.

Belinda Probert: Thank you, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: The Bill that has just been passed, is it in a sense flying in the face of Australian history?

Belinda Probert: I think you could argue absolutely that that's the case. But we've been focusing on all the little details in it, but if you take it all together, what it represents is a major dismantling of the way in which for 100 years, we have quite deliberately chosen to manage the inevitable conflicts between workers and employers. So yes, I think it is a very major break with history.

Geraldine Doogue: Justice Higgins, in 1907 in the famous Harvester judgment, he announced that Australian workers were to be paid a fair and reasonable wage, rather than what could be extracted from a power struggle with their employer. And you say this was consciously chosen in a bipartisan, or it really was a tripartisan way, with everyone more or less agreeing that this was something that the New World could effectively step out and do. Give us more evidence of that.

Belinda Probert: Well this luckily one of the very well researched aspects of Australia's history, that as many people know, at the end of the 19th century, we almost had blood on the streets in industrial conflict in a period of a severe depression and people realising that this was a terrible way to resolve what was an objective conflict of interests between employers and workers. And that rather than bringing in the army and soldiers, and battling it out on the streets, that there had to be a better way. And the agreed better way, which is uniquely Australian, was that notion of in a sense, creating a legal framework within which the parties would come and argue, and make their case. And the decision would then be made by an independent judicial figure who would listen to all the arguments on both sides, because there are always arguments on both sides. And in very few other places is there anything remotely like that. And Harvesters, why you remember him so powerfully, is that having agreed on this system, hearing those wonderful words, tried to capture a moral framework which would guide the decision.

Geraldine Doogue: Where a man could support his family reasonably. But there's another strand which you argued in a recent essay on this, that it was also a consciously chosen route away from welfare, away from a notion of being good to the poor, it was something different again.

Belinda Probert: I think is also a very important issue, although of course welfare is a later concept, but it was absolutely the notion that individual security in Australia should hinge on a man's rights to employment at a decent wage, and if you gave him that, then he would not need other forms of welfare, which of course in those days would have been largely charitable. And also that that would make him a citizen with a stake in the country, so it was a complex notion of what you would achieve by doing this, and left us, in a sense, with much less later in the 20th century, for welfare provisions, because we didn't really need them. We had this system of ensuring that people who were in work, were paid a good wage.

The danger about it, the downside of it is that having relied so much especially on the Industrial Relations Commission as a place arguing out social values at work, that once it's taken away we have none of the kind of legislative provisions for things like paid maternity leave which you would find in Europe. So the danger is, we're very vulnerable to this kind of legislation.

Geraldine Doogue: And what do you say have been the flow-on effects of this system on society?

Belinda Probert: I think you could argue very strongly that Australia's success as a society of immigration and inclusivity and the way it has taken on such huge numbers of immigrants from different countries, is absolutely linked to the fact that on arrival they too became part of this wage fixing system. They could not be an underpaid class, they couldn't be a kind of second class ghetto; they might do unpleasant jobs, but they were paid award wages, they belonged to unions, they could not be paid less than Australian-born English-speaking workers alongside them. That I think is an absolutely distinctive feature of Australia's post-Second World War expansion and industrialisation, and very distinctive to the sort of ghettoisation of immigrant workers in the United States for example.

Geraldine Doogue: So what's your assessment then, as you sit back and watch at the end of this pretty remarkable week, what do you think the result of this legislation might be? Might it usher in some of the conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th century? Or have we really transcended that and moved to a completely different age?

Belinda Probert: I'm tempted to say I wish it would usher in some conflict, but of course one of the key elements of the Bill is to outlaw and make incredibly dangerous and risky, industrial action by unions or workers. I mean it's one of the key elements of the legislation. So I fear it won't, and I think also that it will take a while to sink in, just what the implications for individuals will be, as more people get caught in losing their rights to awards and losing their entitlements.

Geraldine Doogue: It must be though the result over time, and over that 20th century of maybe a distortion of those very rights that you've talked about, being instituted in a bipartisan way at the start of the century. Do you also reflect on whether there was a skewing of power beyond which its founders thought in favour of organised labour?

Belinda Probert: I think certainly you can make a case at certain points in the 20th century about the way in which the system encouraged everybody to join unions and unions to operate in particular ways that were very kind of bureaucratic, perhaps you could say. But what we have seen was the system able to adjust to that, that as we know, it was Paul Keating who said we now need a system of enterprise-based bargaining, we've got these awards which underpin the standards in the society, but we need also to recognise that in particular workplaces employers and employees should be able to talk about their needs as a particular kind of workforce, and come to their own agreements.

I must say I was one of the people who was alarmed about where that might go, given it did start to move away from very shared standards, but I think what we've seen and what the evidence shows, is that enterprise bargaining has been, on the whole, enormously successful, that Australia has been a productive, growing economy, and the evidence is not at all that places with good enterprise agreements are in any way held back by that. So there's an example of yes, the system was too rigid, but here was a way to change it by keeping the underpinning. And we're clearly going to go further in that direction. And really what we're talking about is more flexibility, but within a framework where we have agreed on some floors and some constraints.

Geraldine Doogue: I wonder whether you agree with Senator Andrew Murray from the Democrats, who sat on the five-day Committee of Inquiry looking at this, that there's actually a major political motive in play that hasn't been discussed, almost at all, around this Bill, and I'm quoting him now: 'It is apparent that the Bill will disadvantage the ALP, the Coalition's main competitor. There are several elements of the Bill that will ultimately weaken the union movement, quite possibly see a decline in membership, and that this will impact financially on the ALP.' What's your take on this?

Belinda Probert: I do think that this is a very, very political piece of legislation, and that there is a danger of it doing very substantial damage to the ALP, and because of what it does to unions. There's an awful lot of pages, but as many commentators have pointed out, hidden in there are a whole series of attacks on the capacity of unions to organise.

Geraldine Doogue: The capacity of people to even choose collective bargaining if they want to.

Belinda Probert: Absolutely. That is one of the most extraordinary elements, that even in America this right is enshrined that if employees wish to collectively bargain, they may. We have absolutely got rid of that. But interestingly, I think again it's a two-edged sword, that what has been so striking ever since this legislation was clearly in the form that we now see it, emerging earlier in the year, was the extent to which Greg Combet has emerged as such an important figure, somehow managing to speak not just for trade unions or in a narrow sense, but speak for an awful lot of people; I think it's been very interesting those campaigns and the advertisements and his own public role, how much he's managed to step into a space that the ALP really should be in more broadly.

Geraldine Doogue: Well I wonder what you think about whether it's an idea that he clearly represents his constituency, but this is what you were hinting at, I suspect, an idea about groups versus individuals, of course that's really in play at the moment in Australian life isn't it? It would be a brave person who'd call where we are exactly on that spectrum, wouldn't it?

Belinda Probert: I think that's very true. People who have yet, because we've been going through a period of rapid growth and essentially a booming economy, that people who have not had to think about the role of trade unions especially young people, may well begin to think as they experience this new regime, they will be waiting in a sense, for a discourse somewhere out there which tells them This shouldn't be happening to you, and if you don't want it to, these are the ways in which you need to think about yourself and your relationship to the workplace.

Geraldine Doogue: I wonder if they will? Because it just flies in the face of everything else they're being invited to do, isn't it?

Belinda Probert: I agree, and if you talk to young people, they're no pushover. I don't think that's the problem, but the question of how they will interpret it politically is wide open.

Geraldine Doogue: Before I let you go, how do you imagine this WorkChoices Bill will affect you personally at your university, UWA?

Belinda Probert: Well interestingly, the university sector found itself in the very curious position of being practiced on earlier this year, with the introduction of what are called the Higher Education Workplace Reform Requirements, where we have been told that we must do a certain number of things in order to get some of our normal funding from the Federal government. And these things include telling us that we must not negotiate directly with unions, that we must have direct staff representation, that we must not let unions use our accommodation without charging them rates, that we must not ... a whole series of constraints about the way we should work with our workforce.

Now in our case, we have, and I'm involved in enterprise bargaining at the University of Western Australia, we have what are charmingly called 'robust discussions' with the union in exactly the way you would expect, and we accept that, and we respect them, and we hope that they respect us, and we have a good agreement which we think captures the kind of best standards we can possibly give to our employees in the current environment. And we're essentially being told 'You mustn't do that any more; you're not allowed to have those kinds of discussions, you must actually make it hard for unions to represent your employees.' So it is a very remarkable situation of being told, not being given the flexibility which we're encouraged in a way, to think this is all about, it's giving employees and employers flexibility. We're actually not allowed to do the thing which we would like to do. It is an extremely bizarre situation to find ourselves in.

Geraldine Doogue: OK Belinda, well look, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. Belinda Probert is Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia and the essay that she wrote on this recently was in The Australian Financial Review on Friday, November 19th, if you would like to check that out.

Publication

Title: Farewell to the Fair Go
Author : Belinda Probert
Publisher: Financial Review 21/10/2005

Guests

Professor Belinda Probert
Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia