Kelty’s advice to unions: ideas and values are essential
THERE’S no shortage of people with opinions on what the union movement is doing wrong and how it needs to change.
Unions are too militant. Or not militant enough.
They should do less politics and concentrate solely on delivering services to members. No, they should abandon the service-delivery model and get more political.
There should be fewer unions and they should be bigger and transcend industries. Wrong — unions need to de-merge and go back to representing specific occupations.
And so on.
Perhaps the most popular topic for debate is the relationship between unions and the party they helped found, Labor.
These fall into two obvious camps: those who believe Labor has drifted too far from its traditional base and needs to refocus on representing working people; and those who believe declining union density and the breakdown of traditional class orientations means the ALP should unshackle itself from the unions — effectively taking the labour out of the Labor Party.
The problem with all these opinions is that while everyone has an agenda to push, few are really speaking from any position of knowledge. (How to explain Martin Ferguson? . . . that’s an entirely different article.)
Avoiding the limelight
But there are some people whose views are worth pausing and listening to. One such person is Bill Kelty.
Having led the union movement through the Accord — an unprecedented period of economic restructuring during which unions delivered income restraint in return for ‘social wage’ dividends like Medicare and universal superannuation — few people are more qualified than Kelty to comment on the state of both unions and the Labor Party.
Kelty ended his official involvement in the union movement 15 years ago when he retired as Secretary of the ACTU after 18 years in the position.
For most of that time, he was one of the most influential public figures in Australia, but was never one to seek the limelight, and since leaving the ACTU Kelty has generally remained out of the public eye.
While he is an informal sounding board to some senior figures in unions and Labor, Kelty has always resisted the temptation to provide gratuitous public criticism or advice to his successors.
But occasionally he makes an appearance, giving a speech here or there, and it is always worth hearing what he has to say because despite the passing of the years, his breadth of knowledge about the role, strengths, and limitations of unions and the ALP is still unsurpassed.
Kelty made one of those irregular forays into the public last week when he spoke at a forum titled ‘Renewing the relationship between Labor and the unions’, organised by Open Labor in Melbourne.
Coming soon after the release of new statistics showing union membership in Australia falling to 15% (and 10% in the private sector), it was a timely appearance.
Coincidentally, 15% is also the same number for Labor leader Bill Shorten’s approval rating as preferred Prime Minister according to the latest Newspoll.
A unionist first and foremost
Kelty joined the Labor Party two days after his 16th birthday and has been a member for half a century, but his greatest affections lie with the union movement he led for so long.
Speaking as always with minimal notes, Kelty expressed optimism about both unions and Labor, despite the dire numbers.
But only if both the movement and the party were honest about their foibles and failures, were prepared to fix their problems, and stayed true to their historic missions and values.
Bill Kelty’s philosophy is to keep things simple, and it’s good advice for unions also.
To Kelty, the fundamental purpose of unions is the pursuit of dignity of working people, and that gives them a central role as a unifying force in social democracy.
Unions exist to create pressure and demand for change; political parties and the legal system are there to deliver it.
“Representing low paid people, who wanted better wages, that is union heaven.”
Another absolute fundamental, according to the Kelty philosophy, is that there must be constant investment in ideas and policies, and unions must be informed by genuine values.
Winning elections for their own sake isn’t enough without both.
“What you can no longer do is survive without an idea, without a value,” he said last week.
“You must have something which is your base and your resonance, the weight and the ballast, and the weight and the ballast always is cause, and you can’t substitute for cause.”
In tune with his philosophy of keeping it simple, Kelty has a basic answer to those who say unions are no longer relevant and can’t grow.
He suggested that the revelations of worker exploitation by 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut, Myer and other large employers were an opportunity waiting for unions.
The 7-Eleven scandal was “union heaven”, he said. And unions shouldn’t be afraid of militancy when it was required, either.
“If you were a union organiser, what would you want?” he said.
“What you loved best was someone to ring you up and say: ‘We’re from a factory where workers are underpaid’.
“Workers are underpaid? We’re there, we’re there!
“Representing low paid people, who wanted better wages, that is union heaven. And if you can’t do it as a union, don’t do it. Get out.
“Because that’s your job, that’s your prime job. That’s the job that you’re made for, your DNA’s made for, that’s what you do best.”
To those who say organising workers in new industries in the 21stcentury was too hard, Kelty again referred to history.
He reminded the audience that when he joined the union movement in 1970, he was told that it was impossible to organise Catholic school teachers.
“But they chipped away,” he said — and today the Independent Education Union has 75,000 members.
Unfashionable?
Kelty does not believe Labor and the unions should be lockstep on everything. He doesn’t see why ALP members of Parliament have to be union members, nor that the ALP should be a plaything of unions.
And he accepts that sometimes Labor will adopt policies it believes are in the national interest that unions may not support. And alternatively, unions may take positions in their interests of their members contrary to those of a Labor government, which must represent a broader constituency.
But having been part of the great ACTU-Labor team of the 1980s, he does not believe reforms like Medicare, the minimum wage, superannuation and enterprise bargaining can be achieved without that combination.
No doubt there are many who will argue that Bill Kelty’s era has long passed and dismiss anything that comes from his mouth as being from a distant time.
Kelty’s not on Twitter, and probably not on Facebook either. He may not even know what an internet meme is, and you can’t imagine him taking selfies with an iPhone 6.
He’s an old-style union official as unfashionable as the crumpled clothes he wears.
But fashions come and go; sensible, straight-talking — that never goes out of style.
Originally published by Working Life on December 1, 2015.
