Accord VII: Collective Bargaining In a Labourist Framework

Abstract

Abstract The Accord of 1983 gave substance to Australian labourism as a partnership in government between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Hawke Labor Government to deliver real wage maintenance ‘over time’ for all workers through a system of centralised wage-fixing and full wage indexation. Accord VII, on the other hand, offers a decentralised system of enterprise bargaining that delivers variable wage outcomes across and within industries. The paper finds limited coherence between the outcomes of Accord VII and corporatism in the Panitch/Winkler mode of labour subordination and the greater association with the Crouch concept of bargained corporatism because it delivers some positive benefits to labour. The paper concludes that the political linkage between the ACTU and the ALP places Accord VII more in the context of traditional Australian labourism predicated on union support for wage restraint in return for select benefits to a ‘labour aristocracy’, continuation of the safety-net and a protective Labor government. In 1990 I described the Accord as ‘an alliance or partnership in government between the Australian trade union movement and the Australian Labor Party’ in the ‘labourist tradition’, a strategy to achieve their economic, electoral and social objectives through Labor in government (Singleton 1990). The several configurations of the Accord since 1983 have seen the original agreement transformed from centralised wage indexation to the current Accord VII two-tier system of decentralised enterprise-based productivity bargaining, supported by a safety net based on maintenance of the award system and increases for those unable to secure a result through enterprise bargaining. The original Accord sought equitable outcomes from centralised wage-fixing. Accord VII, while claiming the advancement of equity is central to its wages policy, is premised on equal access but variable outcomes across and within industries. The paper will examine the capacity of Australian workers to achieve wage increases under Accord VII and analyse whether the outcomes give credence to a corporatist critique of this latest version of the Accord as the tool of capital to induce wage restraint from labour or alternatively, whether the two-tier system embodied in Accord VII upholds the labourist underpinnings of the original Accord that sought to manage the capitalist state to the advantage of working people through Labor in government (Singleton 1990, Chapter 11).