The Actu Congress of 1991

Abstract

The biennial congress opened on Monday, 9 September, in Melbourne's cavernous World Congress Centre. As at the preceding congress,1 precisely 100 affiliated unions were represented at the opening session. In 1989 this initial figure, the product of an airline dispute, subsequently shot up to 120. In 1991, however, it rose no higher than 105;2 and the low attendance (by the standard of 1987, for example, when 142 unions were represented) was the outcome, not of some short-term contingency, but of the swelling sea change in the structure of Australian trade unionism which began with the reorganisation policy adopted by the 1989 congress.3 It was widely expected that a reworked version of this policy would spark the most heated debate of the congress; and so it did. But reorganization was not the only major source of tension in a congress with a distinctly defensive air about it. There was, above all, the deepening economic recession, with its soaring unemployment rates. To make matters worse, the Accord with the Hawke Labour government had been effectively suspended, owing to the refusal of the Industrial Relations Commission to endorse key elements; and the government's electoral fortunes, exacerbated by an unresolved leadership struggle and the rising confidence of a federal Opposition headed by J. Hewson, were in serious decline. The congress was marked by some noteworthy 'firsts'. It was the first at which a woman was elected to a full-time executive position; the first to be addressed by a private employer; the first to hear a speech from a non-Labour parliamentarian; and it was probably the first to open and end in song. There were also a number of notable retirements in particular those of L. Carmichael (ACTU assistant secretary) and J. Maynes (Federated Clerks) who, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, had played leading roles in the factional battles of a generation, and were effectively (in ACTU terms) the last of the old Cold War warriors. Appropriately, they not only retired together but did so in the year that the Soviet Union disintegrated. Equally appropriate in its timing, but more evidently remarkable in its implications for trade union politics, was the utter absence in this congress of open conflict that could be described in traditional, left and right, factional terms.