Labor scheme to sell out workers to unions
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Janet Albrechtsen
AS always, the most prescient observations about Labor come from within Labor. When the Kevin Rudd-Julia Gillard leadership ticket won the day back in December last year, one Labor insider said they looked like “the spider and the fly”.
He added: “The spider was a red-back,” alluding to Gillard’s scarlet locks. Last week, when Rudd admitted he was not across the detail of Labor’s industrial relations policy, a policy that puts unions back in charge of the workplace, he basically confessed he had been caught in Gillard’s union web. And his problem is our problem.
Under Labor, workers will be caught in the same web, conscripted to the union cause. If you are a worker, you can expect to be paying bargaining fees to unions with a nice moiety flowing through to the Labor Party.
Labor is playing funny games. Contrary to Rudd and Gillard endorsing bargaining fees in the past three days, Gillard backflipped late yesterday, denying they would be allowed. Let’s wait to see that in Labor’s IR policy before we get too comfortable.
This aspect of Labor’s IR package has gone largely unnoticed. As I wrote in Inquirer on the weekend, unions wanted it that way and are furious their secret agenda has been exposed. Equally disturbing, the Howard Government has done a poor job in unmasking this union scam, which promises to radically reshape the Australian workplace.
If Rudd is right that IR will determine the next election, the full ramifications of bargaining fees deserve greater attention.
So here’s a recap. First, Labor’s IR policy statement, Forward with Fairness, says: “Collective agreements will be at the heart of Labor’s industrial relations system.” It says a collective agreement will rule a workplace when agreed on by a majority of workers who turn up to vote. That means in a workplace of 1000 workers, if 100 workers turn up to vote and 51 workers vote yes to a collective agreement, that agreement prevails. The vote of 51 workers will bind all 1000 workers.
Second, and this is not in Labor’s policy statement, the unions plan to charge all 1000 workers a bargaining fee. This will deliver truckloads of cash to the unions when they are financially strapped and suffering from record low membership.
Even better, the plan will also boost union membership because unions will set a bargaining fee at a level higher than membership fees. Understandably, workers will be tempted to join a union rather than pay the higher bargaining fee. And as the ALP collects a percentage of union fees, each new member of an affiliated union means more money for Labor.
The figures are potentially staggering. Let’s take two examples.
According to Grace Collier, a former union official who is an industrial relations specialist in Brisbane, a union contact in Telstra told her yesterday that unions extract on average just more than $455 in fees from each of the 9880 (26 per cent) union members who make up Telstra’s 38,000 workforce. So unions collect $4,497,041 from Telstra union members each year. Collier’s union contact is predicting that, under a Rudd government, a higher bargaining fee for Telstra’s 28,120 non-union members. Pegging it at $500 (he suggests it may be $800) will pull in an extra $14million for unions that negotiate collective bargaining agreements for Telstra workers. (At $800, it rises to more than $22million for those unions.)
Collier points to a smaller workplace, a private hospital in Brisbane she helped restructure. Of the 220 full-time nurses on a collective agreement, 30 are union members who each pay $416 in union fees, delivering the relevant nurses’ union a total of $12,480 each year. Under Rudd’s IR policy, if the remaining non-union members pay a bargaining fee of, let’s say, $500, the union will collect an extra $95,000. Now repeat that in small workplaces across Australia. No wonder they wanted this issue under wraps until after the election.
With bargaining fees exposed, Rudd was forced to respond on the weekend. He said if employers agreed to a compulsory bargaining fee being included in a collective agreement and agreed to collect it for unions, where was the unfairness?
Either Rudd does not get it or else he is treating us as dopes. The unfairness is that employers may well agree to tax workers. It’s no skin off their nose and by agreeing to the union’s biggest earner, bargaining fees, the employer may offer reduced benefits for workers. If the employer refuses, then, according to Collier, Fair Work Australia will be able to step in and impose bargaining fees in a collective agreement. The unfairness is that workers who did not vote on, and may not want or need, the collective agreement will be bound by its terms and be charged a fee for the privilege.
Unionists tell us it is all about dealing with the so-called freeloaders who receive a wage rise without contributing to unions who negotiate the collective agreement. In fact, workers across Australia secure wage rises without the help of unions or collective agreements. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 24 per cent of workers in the private sector are on registered collective agreements (only 15 per cent of those workers are union members) and 39 per cent of private sector workers are on individual contracts. In other words, Australian workers are able to secure wage rises for reasons other than union muscle. That will all change under a Labor government where the plan is to re-unionise the Australian workforce by stealth.
When Rudd revealed he was not across the detail of Labor’s IR platform, it was a devastating admission from our alternative prime minister. Indeed, his efforts to pull the union movement into line have been laughable. During the weekend he warned unions that they “will survive or die based on their ability to compete”. Compete? Rudd’s IR policy hands unions a new monopoly to negotiate collective agreements and to charge all workers for their efforts.
It is becoming painfully clear that domestic policy has never been Rudd’s focus. Indeed, in his first big interview with The Weekend Australian Magazine after becoming leader, he was asked by Christine Jackman to nominate his greatest strength as alternative prime minister.
Rudd pointed to his knowledge of China gleaned from his diplomat posting and travelling there “probably more than 50 times” since.
It’s neat that Rudd is across the China challenge and is no doubt chuffed to hear that a new biography is due to be translated into Mandarin. But while he was delivering speeches in Washington at the Brookings Institution last month on how China would “shape the history of the Pacific century”, back home Gillard and the ACTU were putting the finishing touches on a plan that effectively introduces compulsory unionism.
From Gillard’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. As one Labor frontbencher told The Sydney Morning Herald, she wants to be the “darling of the union movement”. Whether Rudd wins or loses the election, this is the power base she will ultimately draw on to swallow up the fly. The only question is when.
