Six things the next leader of the ACTU should do
Some friendly advice to the next ACTU secretary
THE ACTU may have lost some of the prestige it had in the Kelty and Combet years, but the secretary of the ACTU is still the titular head of the Australian union movement. Where the ACTU goes, unions will follow.
The next secretary of the ACTU will inherit an organisation that — in my opinion as a close observer, mostly from the inside for the past eight years — has lost its way. It is struggling to stand out from a plethora of third party and interest groups, lacks authority over its disparate affiliates, and is no longer taken seriously by sections of the media or senior levels of government.
A weak ACTU means a weak union movement, and a weak union movement is bad news for justice, equality and a fair go for all Australians.
The outgoing secretary, Dave Oliver was always a difficult person to work with and I often vehemently disagreed with the direction he took the ACTU. But after raising some objections several times in the early days of his term at the helm, I quickly learnt that he did not brook even mild dissent, so I mostly kept my feelings to myself.
In the end, the only honest way I could deal with my dissatisfaction was to leave the organisation, a decision I made with a heavy-heart after pouring blood, sweat and tears into the ACTU for seven years.
But whatever his faults, you could never question Dave Oliver’s commitment to the labour movement and Australian workers. Dave has rightly made the decision to step down to allow renewal to take place under the leadership of a younger generation.
The reinvigoration of the Victorian Trades Hall Council in just a couple of years under its young secretary, Luke Hilakari, shows renewal is possible.
I genuinely want to see the ACTU return to its proper place as an influential and credible player on the national stage, and in that spirit, here are six suggestions as to what the next ACTU secretary should do to achieve that goal.
1. Rediscover your moral purpose
Veteran Labor and union speechwriter Dennis Glover has a simple piece of advice for the union movement: “If you don’t know why, you will never know how.” In variations of a speech I first heard delivered to an ACTU conference in late-2015 on how to tackle the “uberisation” of the workforce, Glover explains: “When it comes down to it, the labour movement and the Labor Party exist for a moral purpose. Not a political purpose to get power for its own sake, or an economic purpose to raise productivity. A moral purpose.”
I’ve heard similar sentiments from Bill Kelty: “what you can no longer do is survive without an idea, without a value . . . 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.”
Implicit in both of those comments is that the modern union movement has lost a sense of why it exists. I suspect that if you asked half of the ACTU Executive what the purpose of the ACTU was, they’d reply: “to get rid of those Tory bastards in Canberra”. That’s not a bad short-term political objective, but what comes after that?
And you sense that the general public, the great unwashed that are not union members, can tell this as well. Ask them what unions are about, why they exist, and they’d scratch their heads. Most of the ACTU staff are just as confused.
Do unions still exist to represent workers in their workplace or are they just another part of the political machine? Should they seek to make the economy fairer, or to radically reshape it? Who should they be representing: a shrinking group of well-paid manufacturing workers, or the low-paid wage slaves of the new economy? Or are they just another part of the political machine? Is their role to fight for workplace justice or to provide low-cost superannuation and other financial services?
The current Build a Better Future campaign doesn’t help. It’s all very muddled, a scattergun approach that seeks to appeal to as many constituencies as possible but really has no consistent message in the end — pretty much like any focus group-tested political campaign you’ve seen in the past 20 years. And this lack of a clear, articulated purpose goes some way towards explaining why just 27% of the population say they trust unions.
It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s only a decade since Your Rights At Work, and no-one had any doubt back then about what the union movement stood for.
Ultimately, the central moral purpose must come from the top, so an immediate priority of the next ACTU secretary should be to go back to basics and articulate a clear and simple narrative that explains the purpose of the modern union movement. And really mean what you say.
2. Adopt a mature and independent relationship with the Labor Party.
The union movement created the Labor Party, and for most of the past 100 years the ALP has been the parliamentary arm of the labour movement. These historical ties are unbreakable and a source of pride from both sides. Some of Labor’s greatest leaders have come from the union movement, and the great social and economic reforms of the late-twentieth century were a product of the partnership between the political and industrial wings.
Under its rules, the ACTU is not directly affiliated to the ALP, although many unions are. However, several of the biggest unions in Australia — the teachers, the nurses, and until a couple of years ago, the public sector union — are not affiliated.
But in recent years, the relationship between Labor and the union movement has become one of unhealthy and almost parasitic co-dependence. The factional claws of many unions are so deep that the needs of the Labor Party have begun to over-ride those of their members, the workers they represent. At the same time, unions have become compliant in the face of some of the poorer decisions of Labor, such as the party’s decision to play dead on industrial relations at the last two federal elections.
Unions should be using their influence more effectively to force Labor to adopt and genuinely seek to advocate policies that will improve the lives of workers. This means more than simply repeating ad nauseum that Labor will protect penalty rates, but actually taking on progressive policies to improve job security and workers’ rights, fix the many glaring problems with Labor’s own Fair Work Act, and reversing other legislation that has made it more difficult for workers to organise and exercise their rights.
Labor has come to take it for granted that unions will pour resources into Labor’s campaigns — resources that are then not available to service or assist their members — and what do unions get in return? A pat on the head and instructions to go sit in their corner. The state of the relationship with Labor has led to a transactional style of insider politics with Labor governments that does nothing to build worker power and allows Labor to brush off uppity unions when it wants to.
How does any of this help to grow and independent union movement that has power and influence whether Labor is in government or not? What kind of message does it send to potential members when they see unions slavishly acting as a de facto campaign arm of the Labor Party and sending sizeable portion of their membership fees straight into Labor’s campaign coffers either directly or indirectly?
The next ACTU secretary needs to stand up to Labor and insist that the party cannot take the support of the union movement for granted, but must earn its respect. And she should also pragmatically accept that the other major progressive party, the Greens, do have a contribution to make and can be the union movement’s ally.
3. Make better governance a priority.
More by luck than good management, the Heydon royal commission has inflicted minimal damage on the union movement. But the stories that emerged from the royal commission are still disturbing: union officials on the take from builders, links to organised crime, nepotism and cronyism, outright theft and corruption, and a contempt for normal democratic processes or accountability to your members.
These cases may still be rare and the majority of union officials and elected officers are people of honesty and integrity, but only a fool would deny that there is a culture of poor governance that needs to change.
The past ACTU secretary had plenty to say about a “zero tolerance” approach to corruption, but precious little to show that there was action behind the rhetoric. For too long, the reflex action has been to deny there is a problem and attack the messenger — a head in the sand approach that does nothing to build public trust in unions, and is reflected in declining membership.
The next ACTU secretary should insist on being given the power to appoint a union ombudsman to independently investigate allegations of misbehaviour by union officials and show that we can and will deal with our own if there is wrongdoing.
They need to act by expelling from the movement any official who is found to be corrupt and to introduce enforceable codes of conduct for all union officials that will result in expulsion if breached.
The next ACTU secretary needs to be serious about governance because mud sticks and the day is fast approaching when it is going to near impossible to change perceptions that unions are run by a cabal of cronies primarily interested in building their own power and lining their own pockets. We all know that is miles from the truth, but those same stereotypes have taken hold in the US and done enormous damage to the labour movement there.
4. Be a builder, not a wrecker.
Tripartism is a horrible word, but it’s not necessarily a bad concept. At its best, tripartism sees workers, industry and government working together through consensus to achieve real outcomes. Workers and industry frequently have different views but nothing is gained by outright hostility. Bob Hawke, Bill Kelty and even Greg Combet had strong working relationships with key business leaders that they leveraged to advance the union movement’s agenda.
Economics is not a dirty word, and business is not always the enemy. There is much to be gained through a constructive dialogue with the business community, based on a shared understanding that economic growth and increased productivity will lead to higher living standards for all.
It’s a tricky line for unions to tread as they also seek to enforce corporate accountability. The union movement should never concede a backwards step when it comes to wages and conditions of workers, nor should it be a lap dog for the corporate sector or the government.
The next ACTU secretary should actively seek to engage with the business sector and the government of the day, to listen before forming a judgement, and to be open to exploring shared paths to economic prosperity. A good leader is pragmatic and focussed on results, not picking fights for the sake of picking fights.
5. Value substance over the superficial.
In its heyday in the 1980s, the engine room of the ACTU was its economic and social policy team, and the power of its policy and ideas gave the ACTU the confidence and ability to deal with industry and government from a position of strength. Bill Kelty, who had a towering intellect to go with his strategic and political brilliance, led from the top of course.
Today, the ACTU likes to see it itself as a campaigning organisation more than anything. But it should not be forgotten that good campaigns come from good policy.
One of the most depressing things in recent years has been to see that policy role in the ACTU decline sharply as the industrial and research team has been relegated to almost an after-thought, often out of mind and out of sight.
There has been an exodus of good staff and the ACTU has struggled to attract the best and brightest policy thinkers, and so has failed to make a real impact on many areas of national debate through innovative and constructive policy. Too often, it is verging on being missing in action at worst, or irrelevant at best, in many of the big picture economic and social debates.
To the frustration of everybody, there has been little integration of policy and campaigning, and as a result, much of what has come out of the ACTU in the past couple of years has been almost superficial, betraying a lack of policy development.
The next secretary needs to make it clear that strong policy work is welcome in the ACTU and invest in the industrial and research team to show that they mean it.
6. Put secure jobs at the centre of everything.
The first piece of advice on this list was to rediscover the ACTU’s moral purpose. Perhaps the place to start is to ask what is the number one thing that worries workers these days?
The answer is it’s the same thing that makes it so hard to recruit workers as union members, that leads to exploitation and wage theft and poor health and safety, and family breakdowns: the decline of secure jobs.
Whether it is casualisation, so-called independent contracting, zero hour contracts, labour hire, outsourcing, privatisation and franchising, the rampant use of cheaper migrant labour, de-industrialisation and the impact of the sharing/gig economy and technology, the rise of insecure work and shifting of risk onto individual workers has had a profound effect on living standards.
It’s not the fault of any one government, but the result of years of concerted work by the business community to water down the workplace protections and collective consensus. Governments have been too compliant with this agenda as they chase the holy grail of economic growth.
But the day of reckoning is approaching. No-one apart from the wankers in their expensive suits in Collins and Pitt streets, believes this crap about workplace flexibility being good for all of us, or the imperative of competing with low-wage economies in Asia, or the trickle-down propaganda that giving the corporate sector another big tax break will somehow deliver better living standards for ordinary workers.
The evidence is staring everyone in the face that the only people benefitting from the modern workplace system are the already very wealthy. The rest of us are not much better than slaves. At the same time, our economy is stagnating and the fiscal situation worsens because wages are standing still or declining.
But fix the crisis in insecure work and you will go a long way towards fixing the economy and alleviating many of the social problems that accompany economic disenfranchisement. This should be the moral purpose of the ACTU and the union movement.
Indeed, a ready-made campaign is waiting to be taken down from the shelf and dusted off. The decision to halt the Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign in mid-2012, just when it was starting to get traction must be the worst mistake made by the ACTU in the past decade or more. Another five years down the track and just imagine how powerful such a campaign could have been in halting the decline of union membership, countering the mud flung by the royal commission and redefining the economic narrative of Australia away from business first to workers first.
A solid, focussed campaign for secure jobs would restore the image of unions as the champions of Australian workers. It would bind the movement together over an issue that is common to every workplace, white and blue collar, public and private, unionised or non-unionised.
It would provide the opportunity for genuine reform of our workplace laws to protect workers and their right to organise. And it would make a real and meaningful difference to the lives of millions of Australian workers and their families.
So if only one of these suggestions that was picked up by the next ACTU secretary, I fervently hope it is this one: put secure jobs at the centre of everything.
