Peak Union Campaigning: Fighting for Rights at Work in Australia
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Bradon Ellem |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2011.00878.x |
Peak Union Campaigning: Fighting for
Rights at Work in Australiabjir_878264..287
Bradon Ellem
Abstract
Many peak unions are in crisis, their traditional reliance on economic or political
exchange with employers and the state undermined through falling union mem-
bership and the collapse of national bargaining systems. New methods, chiefly as
agents of mobilization, and new sources of power, including community organi-
zations, are often advanced as solutions. In Australia, where trade unions faced
a fundamental and immediate threat from a national government after an
election in 2004, the ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign signalled a shift in peak
union strategy. Although this campaign unseated the government in 2007, its
legacy is unclear: reviving the power of peak unions and conceptualizing the
means to do so remain difficult.
1. Introduction
In all Anglophone countries, peak unions face threatening times. Typically,
peak unions are confronted with the general problem of losing power due to
historically low levels of union membership. They also face more particular
problems, because years of merger activity mean that some peak unions may
appear less important to affiliate unions than in the past, a problem exacer-
bated by the sustained hostility of many states and employers to industry-wide
bargaining.
In response, some peak unions have been seeking to reinvent themselves, be
it as partnership bodies, organizing centres or drivers of coalition politics,
shifting away from the traditional activities of the past as ‘agents of exchange’,
that is, in bargaining and lobbying for affiliate unions with the state and
employers (Briggs 2004). However, threats to peak union power and uncer-
tainties as to peak union purpose remain. How and why, and to what effect,
peak unions do change are questions thus far little explored and still less
theorized. These concerns lie at the core of this article.
Bradon Ellem is at Work & Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School
and a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Business, Curtin Business School.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2011.00878.x
51:2 June 2013 0007–1080 pp. 264–287
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2011. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
In Australia, where peak bodies have a long history and where union
decline was very marked in the 1990s, unions faced a fundamental threat after
a national election in 2004 delivered untrammelled political power to a
government long committed to de-unionization. The ‘Work Choices’ laws
were the high point of a decade of antagonism to collective bargaining. In
response, the country’s peak unions co-ordinated a three-year campaign, the
‘Your Rights at Work’ (YR@W) campaign. For the largest State-based peak
union in the country, Unions New South Wales (Unions NSW), the threat
faced was at least as marked as for any of the State-level peak unions in
Australia. This organization had a century-long and, by its own standards,
successful history based primarily on political exchange with the state, medi-
ated by Labor Party governments. Faced with Work Choices, the leadership
sought to develop new strategies, as have peak unions elsewhere, based
around a new kind of mobilization with long-term planning, ‘community’
engagement, new structures and marketing.
The YR@W campaign achieved its major goal. In November 2007, the
federal government was defeated. Exit polls, political parties and subsequent
electoral analysis confirmed that industrial relations had been the decisive
issue and that YR@W had been vital in changing voting patterns (Lewis
2009; Spies-Butcher and Wilson 2008). However, the impression remained
that YR@W could have delivered still more than electoral success. YR@W
leaders and activists had envisaged a campaign that was about more than
defeating the government, insisting that the campaign’s structures would
continue beyond the election of 2007.
This particular study invites a more general reflection on how peak unions
change and why, even amid apparent successes, there remain limitations to
that kind of change. To address these questions, the article draws on the
findings of a number of accounts of contemporary peak union campaigning
in other countries and a range of theoretical and historical studies of peak
union power and purpose.
2. Understanding peak unionism
Why do peak unions exist at all? In general terms, unions formed peak bodies
to enhance the power, and sometimes broaden the purpose, of individual
unions. At particular times and for particular reasons, unionists have believed
that there are functions that only a peak union can carry out. The local trades
and labour councils so common in the UK and the United States, and national
peak bodies such as the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the American
Federation of Labor (Clinton 1977; Eimer 2001; Martin 1980), are testament
to this belief. These bodies had their equivalents in nineteenth-century Aus-
tralia. The peak unions formed in the two most populous colonies (New South
Wales and Victoria) are among the oldest such bodies in the world (Brigden
2004; Markey 2004). The national peak body, the Australian Council of Trade
Unions (ACTU), was established in 1927, just 26 years after the country’s
Peak Union Campaigning 265
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2011.
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