WorkChoices-style policies now being pushed by IMF, World Bank
AUSTRALIA has emerged as an unlikely role model for a new wave of attacks on collective bargaining in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.
A new report says that labour market “reforms” being enforced by the so-called troika of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and European Central Bank have in part been inspired by the Howard Government’s assault on our rights at work from 1996 to 2007.
The report by the International Trade Union Confederation says workers’ rights are under renewed attack around the world under the guise of economic reform to deal with the fallout from the GFC.
It fingers the IMF as being behind this wave of attacks on rights at work, particularly collective bargaining, by demanding workplace deregulation as a condition of financial support for struggling national economies.
Social wage measures have also been undermined, the ITUC says in its new Frontlines report, Ideology without economic evidence: IMF attacks on collective bargaining.
The report has been published this week ahead of the annual Spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC. These meetings are attended by Finance Ministers and government officials from all IMF and World Bank member nations, and set the tone for government economic policies each year.
The ITUC report is the first detailed analysis of the deliberate actions by the IMF and other powerful institutions to use the economic crisis as a pretext to attack workers’ rights, wages, job security and social protection “as they continue a sustained assault on the wages and conditions of workers who remain in jobs”.
“Collective bargaining, a cornerstone of the relationship between a worker and employer, is threatened with elimination,” the report says. “A fundamental global right, set by the International Labor Organisation (ILO), is being violated.
“Social unrest and impoverishment are seen as mere collateral damage in this attack on workers’ rights; an attack which is undertaken without economic evidence that stands up to scrutiny.”
“Trust has been destroyed by austerity and draconian labour reforms.”
It says that many of the policy measures the “troika” are now insisting upon as a condition of financial support were first introduced in Australia and New Zealand in the 1990s.
The report notes that the IMF warmly praised the Howard Government for its Australian Workplace Agreements, weakening of the industrial tribunal and other measures that reduced collective bargaining and the ability of workers to join a union. As a result, Australia now has the fifth lowest union density in the OECD.
“Reforms to labour legislation by conservative Governments in the UK, Australia and New Zealand that the IMF praised in reviewing the labour market in Greece contributed to these record declines in union density… Reforms in Greece, Romania and other parts of Europe are now emulating this experience by combining moves from industry to enterprise bargaining with either tougher rules for union recognition or the promotion of non-union bargaining agents. More progressive Governments in the three Anglo-Saxon countries eventually rescinded at least some of these reforms.”
The report also quotes former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who describes WorkChoices as “an ideological attack on workers”.
“WorkChoices represented to me a total repudiation of what I regard as the basic philosophy of a fair go,” he says. “If it had been allowed to succeed and become the law of the land, the character of Australia would have changed. We would have not have been the country which could call itself the land of the fair go.”
By coincidence, a new front in the attack on workers rights has been opened up this week by Sydney’s biggest selling tabloid newspaper which is campaigning hand in hand with the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry to abolish weekend penalty rates and block an increase in junior wages.
The ITUC report says the “full frontal assault” on workers’ rights has been most aggressive in European countries like Greece, Spain and Italy, which are still on their knees after the near-collapse of their economies and where bail-outs from the “troika” of the European Central Bank, IMF and World Bank have been conditional on cuts to wages and pensions, alongside dismantling of collective bargaining and job security.
But it’s not just struggling European economies that are feeling the pinch. Since the mid-2000s, the IMF has been pushing Germany to weaken centralised collective bargaining and move towards an enterprise bargaining system.
The result has been that wage growth in Germany has not kept up with productivity, wages’ share of nation income is on a long-term downward trend, and the proportion of people in precarious jobs has jumped to about a quarter of the German workforce.
The ITUC is calling for a new reform agenda based on economic reality, rather than ideology.
“Trust has been destroyed by austerity and draconian labour reforms,” says ITUC General Secretary and former ACTU President Sharan Burrow, who is attending the high-level talks in Washington as an observer. “To rebuild trust, attacks on collective bargaining and workers’ rights must stop.”
