AUSTRALIAN COMPULSORY ARBITRATION: APPEARANCE AND REALITY
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1971.tb01019.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1971 |
| Date | 01 November 1971 |
AUSTRALIAN COMPULSORY ARBITRATION:
APPEARANCE AND REALITY
CYRIL
GRUNFELD*
INTRODUCTION
MY
remarks in this article are directed mainly to one of the central
problems of contemporary Australian industrial relations
:
the reconcili-
ation of the virtues of the traditional compulsory conciliation and arbitra-
tion system with the necessities of collective bargaining based on what
I
shall call, ‘the new shop-floor powe8.l
Australia is in area almost as large as the United States but, mainly
owing to inadequate rainfall, about one half of the continent is unsuitable
for settlementq2 There
is
a large agricultural and pastoral industry, the
latter of which, having sustained the Australian economy for
so
long, is
now in a state
of
slow
decline, Its role is being taken over by the extensive
recent mineral discoveries and mining
boom.
In the isolated mining
towns,3 some of the most vigorous collective bargaining in Australia is
practised on the long-established pattern of Broken Hill.
Of
the more than
123
million inhabitants of Australia
80
per cent live in cities and no less
than
40
per cent in the great metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne.
*
Professor of Law in the University of London (London School of Economics and Political
Science)
;
Visiting Research Fellow, Research School of Social Science (Dept. of Law), Australian
National University, July 1970-March 1971.
I
refer to the different character
of
shopfloor power to-day as compared with pre-war
or
even
20
years ago. To-day, in advanced liberal democracies, this power does not necessarily
result from heroic sacrifices by employees and their families as in the past when there was
a
manifest need for union organization to sustain employees in any industrial sector in their collec-
tive struggle for a better share of the wealth they helped to produce. The new shop-floor power
results from the success which advanced modern societies have had in the running
of
their
economies, in the development of their industrial processes and in the refinement of key areas of
their industrial organization which has led to highly interdependent and,
for
that reason, highly
vulnerable industrial organizations and urban (and suburban) societies. In a word, the greater
the
complexity of an industrial society, the greater the disruptive power of determined groups
organized at particularly sensitive points within it.
In addition to the greater disruptive power which increased industrial sophistication has
conferred on certain sections of organized labour, parallel social developments have led to more
affluent and better educated employees more conscious of the shifts and nuances of power and
analytically more capable of applying that power most effectively; and in this activity not only
union officials but shop-floor leaders may be assisted by the writings and urgings of theorists of the
extreme left wing spectrum. An additional dimension of the problem of autonomous shop-floor
power is the possible infiltration into both the official leadership of key unions and the unofficial
leadership of the shop
floor
in key industries of men for whom industrial negotiation may have
a
second purpose of political opportunism of an indeterminate nature.
The new shop-floor power can be further magnified by the availability of new sources of
finance to rank and file employees being led into industrial action
or
extending such action, like
their
own
higher earnings and savings levels, levies from
other
affluent employees, instantaneous
income tax rebates
or
welfare payments to their families.
a
An excellent source
of
general, descriptive and statistical information is the annual
Yearbook
Australia.
CJ
E.
I.
Sykes, ‘The Mount
Isa
Affair’
Journal
of
Industrial
Relations,
Vol.
7,
1965
p.
265
330
AUSTRALIAN COMPULSORY ARBITRATION
33
1
Less than 10 per cent of the labour force are now engaged in agriculture
and sheep rearing and about
2
per cent in mining. About
28
per cent are
engaged in manufacturing in the private sector of the economy and more
than
25
per cent in the public sector, which includes the Commonwealth
and State public services, local government, primary, secondary and tert-
iary education, the railways, buses and tramways, electricity supply and
coal-mines as well as the public shipping corporation, Australian National
Line, and air corporations, Qantas and Trans-Australian Airways.*
The Australian labour force (including employees, employers, and
self employed) numbers nearly
54
million of whom nearly
43
million are
employed persons.6
A
little over 50 per cent
of
employed persons in the
labour force are organized in some 309 trade unions, of which the Australian
Workers’ Union isa by far the largest with
148
thousand members. While
about
72
per cent of union members are concentrated in the 31 largest
unions each with 20,000 or more members, only
4.9
per cent of the members
are distributed among the 202 smallest unions each with less than
2,000
mernber~.~
There are four central co-ordinating trade union organizations at the
federal level. The most important
is
the Australian Council
of
Trade
Unions with over 100 affiliated member organizations representing about
13
million employees. The
A.C.T.U.’s
agents at State level are the State
Trades and Labour Councils. The next largest central organization with
about
40
unions and 300 thousand employees is the Australian Council of
Salaried and Professional Associations, whose sun is rising steadily as
Australia moves towards a predominantly white-collar labour force. The
third and fourth organizations are smaller specialized organizations,
namely, the 150 thousand strong Australian Public Service Federation and
the
90
thousand strong Council of Commonwealth Public Service Organi-
zations.* All four central organizations maintain friendly relations and
regular non-binding consultation in
a
Joint Council for discussion and
action on matters
of
common interest. All four, but the A.C.T.U. in
particularYQ play the role
of
advocate, negotiator and mediator in the
*
For
a more detailed breakdown of the work force by industrial groups, see
Employed
Wage
and Salary Earners,
Preliminary Estimates, November 1970, Commonwealth Bureau
of
Census and
Statistics.
The trend, common
to
advanced industrial societies,
is
towards a predominantly white
collar work force.
‘Is’
should probably be replaced by ‘was’. An amalgamation is at the time of writing
(March 197
1
)
being arranged between the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Boilermakers
and Blacksmiths’ Society and the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union:
Australian Financial Revkw,
4
March 1971.
If
the amalgamation is consummated, a larger union than the A.W.U. will result
whose membership will be concentrated in the key metal industries and whose leadership will
include members of the extreme left wing. The A.W.U. itself is on the threshold
of
a
struggle to
wrest control from its long-established right wing leadership.
’
For
a full breakdown see
Trade Union Statistics,
December 1969, C.B.C.S. There has been
a
steady decline in overall unionization since it peaked at
63
per cent in 1953; see the statistics
since 1891 in Kenneth
F.
Walker,
Ausfralian Industrial Rtlations System,
1970, pp. 46-7.
See P.
W.
D. Matthews and
G.
W.
Ford (eds.),
Australian Trade Unions,
1968, Appendices
See
R.
M.
Martin, ‘The Authority
of
Trade Union Centres: The Australian Council
of
A-E.
Trade Unions and the British T.U.C.’,
Journal
ofhndurtrial Relations,
Vol.
4,
1962, p.
1.
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