When you must 'conveniently belong'

Every one denies this of course, but it was, and still is, an implied condition of tender of the Labor State Governments that all these sites are union sites. Who do you think pays the election expenses of Labor politicians? Mind you when non Labor governments occupied the Treasury benches, they were reluctant to change the status quo, even though the effective compulsory union membership money only ever went to their political opponents.

Although the Howard Government tried to address this problem, in the clumsiest of ways, whether future state conservative governments will stop this practice is moot.

In summary, apart from a brief moment in the WorkChoices era where the union monopoly was at least addressed - if not stopped, the future relevance of the union movement will be entirely related to the extent that unions can continue to gain the involuntary membership of workers through legislative fiat.

In my opinion it is looking good for them. The Rudd Government is entrenching the dysfunctional Award standards with all the penalty rates under which no modern business can possibly operate. The approval of all variations to that standard looks like it is going to be the exclusive preserve of the Industrial Relations Commission under whatever new name it will be given.

There will be two sets of rules. A simple set for unions and a complex and largely unworkably expensive set of rules for those employers who will be deluded into thinking they can alter the Award dysfunctionalities without the unions. This was how it was before WorkChoices. Most large employers will find it easier to use the union system to gain workable arrangements in return for making their employees join the union.

The small employers will just continue to breach the Awards as they have always traditionally done.

Apart from the 5-6 per cent of workers who would join a union voluntarily, in what way can the unions be relevant to those who join involuntarily because their employer has made it a condition of employment. The relevance of unions in my view has not changed. They were never relevant to those who were involuntary members.

All that is happening is that the incidence of involuntary membership has been slowly declining. Whether it continues to decline will be determined by what special privileges are accorded the unions to allow them to extract their monopoly rents from the unwilling workers of Australia.