Liberty, productivity and jobs: workplace relations under the Howard Government.(How Good Was Howard)(John Howard)

THE TITLE for this assessment of the Howard government's workplace relations record includes a point often neglected about these matters. Labour market regulation basically restricts personal freedom, and provides an institutional framework within which serious infringements of individual liberties--even crimes of violence--are perpetrated.

Discussion of the Howard government's workplace relations record nowadays tends to centre on "WorkChoices". The Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act was enacted in late 2005, after the Senate's composition changed on July 1, 2005, following the Coalition's sweeping 2004 election victory. This Act, and its voluminous associated regulations, came into force in April 2006. A well-financed and well-organised Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) campaign throughout 2007 focused on it to defeat the Howard government, and is claimed--rightly or wrongly--to have been important in doing so.

Two things however need saying. First, there is much more to the workplace relations debate than WorkChoices, important though that was. Second, it is impossible to debate the Howard government's record without examining the history of industrial relations (as it used to be called) in Australia. That history is inextricably intertwined with our history as a whole. Over the past thirty years or so, what were seen as immutable verities in this area have gradually crumbled, on a two steps forward, one step back basis, as public opinion has increasingly questioned them, and the public status of trade unions has inexorably declined. WorkChoices was a culmination--although, in my opinion, an unnecessary and undesirable over-reach--of that thirty-year-long process. Neither the Howard government's record, nor the likely future performance of its successor in the area, can be sensibly assessed unless that is understood.

THROUGHOUT MY LIFETIME, attitudes to trade unionism (which has been central to Australia's industrial relations debate ever since the 1904 "Deakinite settlement") have been a test of more general social and political allegiances. Those sympathising with "the workers", or the downtrodden more generally, defended trade unions' role in--so they argued--improving their conditions. A trade union-based Labor Party was portrayed as the political instrument to that end. The industrial relations institutional structure, and trade union privileges within it, were seen as the legal instruments.

Thus, when my mother (having been rendered a single parent) returned to teaching in 1942, she soon joined the Teachers' Union. When I entered the Commonwealth Public Service as a base-grade clerk in 1954, I was immediately asked to join the Administrative and Clerical Officers' Association, and readily did so. Later, dissatisfied with ACOA attitudes on issues unrelated to its members' interests, I resigned and joined the Professional Officers' Association. By the late 1960s I had resigned from that also; nevertheless, for fifteen years I had implicitly accepted it as natural to belong to a union.

Until the late 1970s or early 1980s hardly anyone seriously considered abandoning the industrial relations structure built up over the previous seventy-five years. The one academic economist who had persistently questioned that structure during the 1920s and early 1930s, Edward Shann, had committed suicide in 1935. He had despaired at the social and economic destruction then being wrought by an award wage system that prevented employers from (legally) cutting wage rates in order to afford to offer jobs to the unemployed.

The first major postwar shock to the wide acceptance of these arrangements came in the form of (adapting Maynard Keynes) "the economic consequences of Mr Clyde Cameron". As Minister for Labour (1973-75) in the Whitlam government, Cameron backed union claims before the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (hereafter referred to, in that or subsequent guises, as "the Commission"). The result was a major economic "wage shock". Minimum weekly award rates for adult males leapt by 18.2 per cent in 1973-74, by 30.5 per cent in 1974-75, and by a further 14.9 per cent in 1975-76. Female award rates rose even faster. Inflation soared; the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 13.1 per cent in 1973-74, by 16.7 per cent in 1974-75 and by 12.8 per cent in 1975-76. Unemployment more than doubled.