Australian Exceptionalism: The Role of Trade Unions in the Emergence of Enterprise Bargaining

Abstract

Both the international/comparative and Australian literature on the decentralisation of bargaining has typically portrayed unions as reactive or impotent and globalisation and employers as the key agents of change. None of the current theories which explain decentralisation as the product of globalisation, employer-led ‘low-cost flexibility coalitions’ or the ‘strategic managerialism’ of the Business Council of Australia (BCA) can fully account for the shift to enterprise bargaining in Australia during 1990/91. Unlike other nations where a decentralisation of bargaining has occurred, it was the union movement which actually engineered the change through two industrial campaigns which forced a reluctant Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) to introduce enterprise bargaining. The erosion of union solidarity behind centralised wage fixation and a power struggle between the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the AIRC, not the pressure of the BCA, were the key factors behind the shift in ACTU policy. However, the union movement created the space for a new wage system without developing an alternative regime leaving a policy vacuum to be filled by the BCA and a ‘low-cost flexibility’ coalition congealed among employers as fears of a wage explosion receded: the formation of a ‘low-cost flexibility coalition’ and the domination of the BCA throughout the 1990s were therefore as much a consequence as a cause of the decentralisation of bargaining in Australia.