The pursuit of self interest

Walmart, for instance, among the largest of US employers, pays most of its employees so little that many are forced to seek income support; thus taxpayers are subsidising the wealth of a family which in aggregate is among the half dozen richest persons in the country.

These facts have been acknowledged for centuries, let alone decades and celebrated in songs like “Joe Hill”, sung by Paul Robeson to the workers on the Sydney Opera House when he visited, having been let out of the USA after accusations that he was a communist because he lobbied Presidents about civil rights leading to relentless persecution by Hoover’s FBI. They are expressed in Bob Dylan’s “North Country Blues”.

Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut,
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen.
'Til a man come to speak
And he said in one week
That number eleven was closin'.
They complained in the East,
They are paying too high.
They say that your ore ain't worth digging.
That it's much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.

The drive to minimise union influence is based on the proposition that unions are a break on productivity and allowing union organisers into workplaces leads to intimidation; to restriction of worker’s choices. The former Australian government’s WorkChoices legislation was supported by phoney statistics purporting to show that individual contracts, not union brokered awards, led to higher productivity and by equally phoney arguments that those workers gained higher wages.

IR academics such as David Peetz who pointed out the errors of these arguments were attacked vigorously by the Howard Government. Andrew Leigh (On Line Opinion, October 8, 2008) rightly quotes Peetz in pointing out that the decline in unionism is a major factor in the extraordinary growth of inequality where company executives receive huge salaries and bonuses, even if their company fails, while workers have to put up with meagre if any increases with consequential impacts on society as a whole.

The decline in unionism is not simply the result of employees independently deciding that unions are not bringing them benefits and are alienating them from management which would otherwise reward them fairly. The decline is largely the result of aggressive campaigns by company management involving intimidation in the workplace and achieving support of conservative governments which legislate to put as many barriers as possible in the way of unions.

The argument that unionism too often involves involuntary demands to join and that people should be able to choose whether they financially support certain activities is nonsense. Joan Baez and others tried to refuse to pay their taxes because they went to support the cost of the unjust conflict in Vietnam: she was quite properly, though unfortunately, told she did not have that right. A civil society involves everyone contributing to the common good, whether they use all the services or not. It is something that those in gated communities have shut out of their minds.

Of course not all unions have been blameless in their actions and their campaigns, let alone in their daily actions in the workplace and elsewhere. But how different is that from any entity of any kind, government or non-government, professional or blue collar, political or anything else? To claim union thuggery as something unique, as threatening the fabric of civil society, even if it be a union of university students or teachers or nurses, is no more than cant.

Chris Lewis (On Line Opinion, October 15, 2008) rightly draws attention to Judith Brett’s argument that the WorkChoices legislation was nothing more than a determination by Howard since his youth in the 1970s to defeat the union movement. The arguments for “WorkChoices” were supported by groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who actively promoted the shonky statistics. There was the same vigour as in attempts to destroy the waterfront union by bringing in former soldiers at the behest of the Farmers Federation. That this should be done when days lost through industrial disputes had reached the lowest in history is astounding. And so pointless.

That no attention was paid in the waterfront arguments to the number of containers that crane drivers move every hour, to the impact of forward information, delays due to queuing problems outside the control of the crane driver or position on the wharf of containers relative to trains, trucks and ships is par for the course.

As consultant Gabrielle Gouch (Ockhams Razor, ABC Radio National May 17, 1998) said, “if everybody in the stevedoring industry had put more time and interest into absorbing some facts, analysing and solving some of the logistic problems, instead of concentrating on industrial relations and continually rewriting the Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, we'd all be better off.”

What is relevant is not the injustice which might attend the requirement to join the union representing the Coles and Woolworths employees, as Graeme Haycroft (On Line Opinion, October 7, 2008) seems to argue, but that employers seem unwilling to take up with the union the way it functions. After all the employees are both employees and union members. Or is that just too naïve?