When you must 'conveniently belong'

You see the monopoly granted to the unions was that employees were prohibited from negotiating the conditions of their workforce arrangements with their employers. An employer, however, could either do it themselves or engage an “employer association” to negotiate for them. But only a union could negotiate on behalf of an employee. Furthermore the Industrial Relations Acts, because all the state and federal Acts were virtually mirrors of each other, further entrenched this monopoly with a further “you beaut” provision called “the conveniently belong” rule.

The effect of this rule was to stop the formation of new unions, because workers could “conveniently belong” to an existing union. This carved up the union territory so that neither workers nor employers had any choice as to who they could deal with. So if an employer and the employee wanted to change work conditions, then it couldn’t be done unless the relevant union were prepared to agree to it.

More than anything else this provision has been the under pinning of the involuntary union membership model because it enabled the unions to extract a monopoly rent. "Yes we will agree to a change, and since you can’t get the changes you want without our approval, the price of approval is union membership."

The basis of our system is that every industry and the work within it is covered by an Award, which is the minimum set of conditions that applies to the worker’s employment. There are hundreds of them, they are all very similar and they are all dysfunctional. You will be pleased to know that the Rudd Government is currently rationalising all this so that instead of hundreds of dysfunctional awards, we will soon only have 21 dysfunctional awards. The original awards were written in the times past when the social community model in Australia centred on the concept of a 40-hour week, worked 9am-5pm Monday to Friday, with a bonus Saturday 9am-12pm.

So strong was this view, and so widely supported in the community, that employers were expected to be punished if they required their employees to work at night time, Saturday afternoons, Sundays or god forbid, on a public holiday. The punishment for employers who required work done outside of “ordinary time hours” was that they had to pay a penalty rate of double time or double time and a half on public holidays. This was to discourage them from employing people at what were universally regarded as anti social times.

Please note that the penalty rate was never meant as a reward for workers. It was designed to stop employment, not reward it.

But today we live in 24-hour, seven-day a week 52-week a year world. Our standard of living is hugely higher as a result of it. We demand and expect to utilise the services in the health, hospitality, tourism, transport, retail mining and manufacturing industries at any time. It is no coincidence that it is in these sectors where trade unions memberships are highest.

All of the work done in these sectors are governed by Awards which mandate, as they did 60 years ago, that they should only operate for about 40 hours a week from Monday to Friday during ordinary time hours. Yet we know that these industries go all the time and we know the people working in them are not earning double time at night times and on weekends. What is happening?

Well here is how it really works. Take the example of Coles or the Woolworths Groups for example. No criticism of them is implied in this example because they have simply responded rationally to a dysfunctional system and what they have done is, in my view, in the interests of their employees. Between them they have nearly 200,000 employees. They have done a deal with the union which allows them to largely avoid paying penalty rates for weekend and night work. At most they pay time and quarter, not double time, for some employees only on Sundays. This is tremendous advantage to these retail oligopolies.

Their smaller competitors are stuck on Award conditions and have much less flexibility with their rosters. But it comes with a price. Try getting a job at Coles and Woolworths and not join the union. This deal with the union means that it is in Coles’ and Woolworth’s interest to ensure that everybody joins the union. But it is not Coles or Woolworths which pays the price, it’s the workers who involuntarily pay the union membership.

More or less the same situation occurs in all the major employers in all the 24:7:52 industries mentioned before. That is why the majority of current union memberships are clustered in these industries. The employers need to do deals with the unions to allow workable rational workplace arrangements and in return they ensure that workers join the relevant union. The workers have no choice in the matter.

The Building and Constructions industry was a little different in that the major construction firms in each state - who did the lions share of the State Labor Government tendered work - all made it a condition of contract for their subcontractors that all employees on the building sites join the relevant union.