‘Less than zero’: union recognition and bargaining rights in Australia 1996–2007

Abstract

Strictly speaking, there has never been union recognition in Australia. Instead unions have for most of their history relied upon a de facto form of recognition granted to them by the system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration. When this system was forged, Australia was widely regarded as a progressive ‘social laboratory’. Amendments to this system in 1996 and then its effective eradication in 2005 by neo-liberal national governments saw union recognition and collective bargaining massively undercut. Between 1996 and 2005, a number of anti-union employers used a newly legislated form of individual contract to exclude unions from representation and bargaining, others locked employees out, while courts sanctioned these new strategies. When unions tried to organise in this hostile environment, employers deployed a wide range of new strategies including ‘one-on-one’ dealings with employees but also measures which were seemingly more accommodative to thwart unionism. In 2005 further limits were imposed on unions and collective bargaining. The effect was to make individual contracting easier to enter into and much harder for unions to engage in collective bargaining. Union recognition was attacked by a highly interventionist neo-liberal state and by those employers more than willing to reshape employment relations in the spaces that this state had opened for them.