A week ago, I gave everyone a heads-up on the the rumblings happening down in Australia. The government has unleased a broad attack against the labor movement–but unions are fighting back. An old friend of mine, Chris Warren, is head of the Media Extertainment and Arts Alliance, a federation of media unions. I asked him to give us the scoop and he obliged below:

“First, a warning: You can skip all this and go straight to the campaign web site of the Australian Council of Trade Unions which is at www.rightsatwork.com.au

Second, by way of background:

* Until the early nineties, wages and conditions were regulated by industry wide awards that were handed down by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission or by parallell state industrial commissions. These awards applied whether workers were union members or not. Generally, these often reflected agreements between the employers and unions within national wage guidelines handed down by the commission in annual or biennial National Wage Cases.

* In the early nineties, the then Labor Government created an additional layer of collective agreements. These were negotiated between the employer and a union and sat on top of the award structures. A collective agreement could be no less than the award but had no upper limit and, for many unionised workers, provided significant real wage rises through the nineties. The awards continued to be varied by annual adjustments called Safety Net Adjustments.

* The conservative government has been in office since 1996 and has brought in significant anti-union legislation, including a new layer that are called Australian Workplace Agreements. These are individual contracts which take a worker out of the collective agreement or award. On balance, they must be no worse than the relevant award, but given that collective agreement rates are significantly higher this is no help in unionised industries. Award entitlements can also be cashed out: For example, in our industry, employers are requiring people to reduce annual leave for cash.

Employers are allowed to make it a condition of employment that a worker signs an AWA. Although it is unlawful for an employer to make promotion conditional on an AWA, many employers do.

However, AWAs have not been common as they’re a lot of work for an employer with limited benefit. Because we haven’t had a recession since the early nineties (thanks largely to Chinese demand for input commodities such as iron ore) there’s been little market drive to push down wages.

This package of changes was limited because the government required the support of centre parties to get their legislation through our Senate.

As you know, the conservative government won control of the Senate at the last election and is embarking on wide-ranging industrial relations changes, including:

• Removing employment conditions from awards, including superannuation and
• changing the way the mininum wages and safety net adjustments are made so by setting up a new “Fair Pay Commission” that will produce significantly lower adjustments to the minimum wages
• Requiring that AWAs only need to be better than minimum wages and conditions, rather than better than the relevent award for the industry and making it administratively simpler for employers to use AWAs
• restricting right of entry for unions and introducing secret ballots for industrial action
• abolish unfair dismissal laws and redundancy pay for people who work in a company with less than 100 employees
• abolish the state systems (all the states have Labor Governments), including (probably, but still unclear) state occupational health and safety rules
• make it easier for employers to engage people as non-employee contractors and outlawing unions from collectively bargaining on behalf of contractors.

As you can see from web site, the trade union movement has been strongly fighting this proposal. Fortunately, we don’t have the sort of divisions you have in America and all unions are within the ACTU, which acts very much by consensus.

We’ve launched an advertising campaign, campaigning among union members (about 25 per cent of workers are still union members) and with community groups. There’s some evidence that unions are seeing an increased membership as a result of the campaign and concerns about the law changes.

The government’s popularity has dropped and the Prime Minister’s approval rating has fallen.

Nonetheless, for the Prime Minister and the senior figures in the government destroying unions has been a long-term cause and we do not expect him to back down easily, if at all.”

End of Chris’ report. Thanks, digger. And we’ll keep on top of this.

By the way, if you’re reading this and you are outside the U.S., please do send me reports on critical labor fights around the world. I’d love to report on such fights because, after all, global fights are going to be critical for the survival of labor everywhere.