Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Professor Roy Green
Director, Employment Studies Centre, University of Newcastle, Australia
11 August 1998
Thank you for alerting me to this international project which looks very interesting. I am doing some work on the role of delegate structures and organization in retarding the decline of union density in Australia. This draws heavily on the AWIRS 1990 and 1995 findings and also relates to the US union effectiveness debate and earlier UK incomes policy research, since it looks at both union organization and the external policy and legislative environment.
I am preparing an article on these issues with the following title and abstract: "Delegate Structures and Strategic Unionism: Analysis of Factors in Union Resilience".
This paper examines the pattern of trade union membership decline in Australia using the newly released AWIRS 95 data set, including the panel of surviving workplaces drawn from the 1990 survey. It confirms recent studies which suggest that the decline is more or less comprehensive, but points to some diversity in the longitudinal findings. In particular, the paper tracks the growth of delegate structures over the previous five years in unionised workplaces and the much slower rate of decline associated with 'active unionism'. While it has been argued, not least by Joe Isaac (1958), that workplace organization tended to 'atrophy' under compulsory arbitration, there is no automatic process by which it will correspondingly flourish under more decentralised bargaining arrangements. The AWIRS findings suggest that the future of unions will be determined by a range of factors, including their ability to build and coordinate delegate networks and the role of the state in providing legislative support for workplace organization and fair wages. This, not a return to centralised wage restraint, should be the focus of strategic unionism.Clearly research of this kind gains validity from the recent waterfront dispute in Australia which was a demonstration of the importance of union organization and tactics in a hostile political environment. I believe that this is the key explanatory variable to be investigated, once we abstract from external structural factors such as compositional changes in industry.
I hope I can get on board your project at this late stage. Would you like me to think of something more extensive to contribute?
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