Australians barely have the right to strike thanks to the Labor Party

It is well known that in Australia the right to strike is restricted for no reason. One telling example: Liz Truss prefaced her short-lived premiership of the United Kingdom with a promise to follow Thatcher’s lead in the trade unions. We noted at the time that even if all of her proposed reforms, called “the biggest attack on unions and civil rights” in the country since the 19th century, were implemented, it would still be easier to strike there than there. Here.

To put it very briefly and very roughly: workers can only legally go on strike in Australia if they are in the process of negotiating an agreement. Outside of this window (a window that appears every three to four years), either for safety reasons, or because of sexual harassment, or in solidarity with a co-worker who was unfairly fired, you can go eat a pine cone. If you are part of a workforce that does not have an agreement (which is the majority of employees), you do not have the legal right to strike. Always.

In addition, workers have many steps to go through in terms of votes and statements before they can go on strike. Meanwhile, even if this threatens First, the employer can unilaterally exclude the entire workforce from the business. Despite all this, the workplace judge, the Fair Work Commission, can still decide to suspend a strike if it “threatens to cause significant harm to the Australian economy or an important part of it”.

How did this happen? And what might Australia look like with a stronger right to strike?

Labor in error

In the current state of affairs, one culprit can be blamed: the Australian Labor Party (the Australian “Labor Party”, if you like). In 2007 the party returned to government, helped in no small part by John Howard’s comically punitive WorkChoices Act, and began working on Fair Work Actleveling the playing field between employee and boss. Except in all the cases where it’s not. John Howard led a campaign of intimidation against union power under the Labor Party. He needn’t have worried – apart from allowing more issues to be negotiated within the labor agreement, Labor felt little need to update Howard’s rules on industrial action.

But perhaps it’s unfair to blame the Labor Party for this – they simply supported the eternal law introduced by these big business shills in (gasp) come on then… ) Labor Party.

Screams asked Andrew Stewart, author Stewart’s Guide to Employment Law and law professor John Bray at the University of Adelaide, if 2007 was a “sliding door” moment for Australian workers, then he set an earlier date: 1993. In a cruel irony, this was the introduction of the “right to strike.” First of all, it started the atmosphere that we have now.

“If we ignore some fairly limited provisions at state level, this is the first time in Australian history that the idea of ​​the right to strike has been introduced,” he said.

Until this point, Stewart said, “strikes were as common in Australia as anywhere in the world.” And while he emphasizes that there are many reasons why labor relations are in the state they are currently in – declining union membership, changing workforce demographics, etc. – the number of strikes has dropped sharply since this reform.

Until 1993, it was technically always illegal to go on strike, so unions believed that “you might as well take one whenever you have serious concerns about a problem in the workplace”, leading to what Stewart called relatively “frequent but short” strikes. “And the fact is that during the first nine decades of the 20th century, employers rarely prosecuted employee unions in court,” he said.

Since the passage of the new laws, most (but not all) unions have taken the position that their members will only strike when it is legal to do so. On top of that, Stewart said, “employers have also become more willing to impose sanctions when illegal actions have been taken.”

None of this was intended. “Nobody in the Labor government in 1993 or in the Australian Council of Trade Unions thought, ‘Oh, this will limit the strike’,” Mr Stewart said.

What could have happened?

Much could happen if workers retained the ability (and willingness, which is a big caveat) to strike almost at will. What is clear is that Australian workers might be better prepared to withstand years of wage stagnation or the incredible transfer of wealth from workers to shareholders in recent decades, not to mention the rights-cutting party that is the “gig economy.” .

But the implications are potentially even broader. Consider the legacy of the NSW Builders’ Federation (BLF) under the leadership of the late Jack Mundy. The BLF did not simply abandon labor as a tactic to improve the wages and living conditions of its members; it introduced green bans to preserve parks and historic sites, and organized strikes in response to discrimination against gay students and Indigenous tenants in Redfern.

Imagine how much more could be done on, say, climate change in Australia if all working people were willing and able to similarly throw their weight behind the movement.

There’s also the issue of free speech, as labor lawyer Josh Bornstein discusses at length in his new book. We work for the brandWorkers are increasingly subjected to workplace conditions in which “they not only sell their labor to the company, but also exchange a crucial part of their citizenship” through contracts that limit what they can say or do in their free time. He points to the National Higher Education Union’s campaigns to defend academic freedom as “the most successful examples of resistance to corporate brand management.” It is no coincidence that the education sector currently has the highest rate of union membership in Australia.