Vanguard May 2013
Ned K.
A feature of workers’ struggle in Australia at the moment is for greater security of employment. This struggle occurs at the workplace, industry, community and national levels.
At the workplace level it appears in enterprise bargaining disputes over security of hours of work, or winning restrictions on the use of labour hire or casual labour, or continuity of service when one contractor replaces another to perform work already privatised by governments.
At the industry level, security of employment struggles are a major issue for state and local government workers where governments of both Labor and Liberal persuasion are reversing hard won ‘no forced redundancy’ policies.
At the community level, there is an increase in security of employment struggles which are framed in the media as anti-457 Visa struggles.
At the national level, unions and the ACTU launched an on-going campaign to retard and reverse the growth of insecure work.
Extent and causes of insecure work
Struggle for more secure employment has been a constant for workers in Australia since 1788. Significant gains were made in the 20th Century with workers winning some protection against dismissals, better redundancy provisions and clauses to limit the encroachment of part time and casual labour. However, from the 1970s and 1980s in particular, imperialism launched, with willing helpers in federal and state parliaments, major attacks on employment security previously won through struggle by workers.
ABS figures below tell the story.
For example, in 1978 the ratio of part time to total employment was 15%. In 2011 it was 29%.
In 1982, casual labour was 13% of the total workforce. By 2010, it was 28%.
In 2011, 50% of Australia’s part time workforce was engaged for less than 20 hours per week.
In the last few years, official unemployment in Australia has been about 5% to 5.4%. However under-employment, the number of workers looking for more hours of work, has sat at about 7% meaning that over 12% of workers at any one time are either unemployed or underemployed.
This is covered over by the politicians and media who keep telling us that Australians are still better off than workers in Europe where official unemployment is averaging 12%, a staggering 19 million without a job.
Attacks on unions
The growth in insecure work by imperialism and their politicians’ neo-liberal policies has been largely successful due to their attack on workers’ mass organisation, trade unions. Since the 1960s union membership in Australia has declined from a peak of about 60% to 18%. In the private sector, the figure is even lower at 13%.
The attack has taken many forms, including deregistration of militant unions, closure of organised manufacturing workplaces, privatisation of union jobs and the growth of individualised work contracts.
In Australia today, 40% of the workforce do not have the limited protection afforded by the Fair Work Australia National Employment Standards. Over 1 million workers are independent contractors, and 43% of these have no control over the work they do. They are under what the law calls ‘sham contracting’.
60% of waterfront labour, once a union stronghold, is now casually employed. Even in areas like universities, previously seeing themselves as ‘middle class’ not working class, there are currently 67,000 people employed on a casual or fixed term contract basis.
Workers fight back
Despite the situation outlined above, workers are fighting back. The defeat of the Howard Government through the Your Rights At Work campaign, led by workers and communities at the grass roots level, was a significant victory. In individual industries, such as contract cleaning through the Clean Start campaign and the Baiada poultry dispute in Victoria, workers have struggled and won better job security reflected in collective agreements.
Union membership in areas of predominantly female employment such as nursing, disabilities and community services, and child care is on the rise.
On a national scale, the ACTU secretary Dave Oliver has pledged on behalf of unions and the 2 million members they represent that the ACTU federal election campaign is not primarily about returning a Gillard Government to the spoils of office. It is about building the long term organising capacity of workers and to be a stronger union movement on September 15, 2013, the day after the federal election.
Oliver is on the correct track. The whole issue of insecure employment is really about power and which class has the upper hand. As workers become united and stronger through collective action, the balance of power between the ruling class of imperialists and their agents, and the workers and their allies, shifts. This opens up new possibilities for workers who have a country and indeed a world to win!
As Marx famously said about the myriad of struggles by workers under capitalism, “Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of workers.”
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Further reading:
http://workinglife.org.au/2013/04/11/heres-some-ways-we-could-fix-insecure-work/
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