MOVING APART: POLITICAL STRATEGIES ADOPTED BYUNIONS AND THE ALP TO MANAGE THEIR DIMINISHEDRELATIONSHIP

Trevor Cook

Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

City Road, Chippendale, Australiatrevor.cook@gmail.com

INTRODUCTION

In Western democracies during the twentieth century the nature of the links between unions and political parties of the left have helped to shape national politics. Valenzuela (1991) argued thatsocial democratic relationships encouraged corporatist political cultures and modest, incrementalapproaches to economic and social reform. Valenzuela’s description of the social democraticrelationship centres on the creation of a single, national political party by a united, national unionmovement, which allowed for the early emergence of a stable wage-bargaining process. With somequalification, this description clearly covers Australia, as well as the UK and New Zealand. TheUSA is the major example of Valenzuela’s pressure group model where there is no formalaffiliation and both the national union movement and the Democrat party value their independenceand is wary of the risks of a closer relationship.In social democratic relationships, unions seek to influence outcomes predominantly throughinternal party structures by playing a significant role in the selection of parliamentary candidatesand through party policy deliberations that are to some extent binding on MPs. Under the pressuregroup model, there is a much greater emphasis on the use of public campaigning and lobbyingtechniques to influence the party and encourage it to support agreed positions in parliament. Inaddition, unions and parties put a much greater emphasis on their independence, and are much moresensitive to the perceptions of that independence held by their core constituencies, members andvoters respectively.Throughout its long history, the unions-ALP relationship has been marked by tensions and episodiccrises. Nevertheless, the formal, organisational relationship between unions and the ALP remains.While there is no real prospect of these organisational links being severed in the immediate future,there is evidence that the relationship is undergoing profound change. The successful Your Rightsat Work (YR@W) campaign, run by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) against theHoward Government’s WorkChoices legislation, was a new political strategy for the Australiantrade union movement in terms of its scope, scale and impact. Never before had Australia’s unionsspent so much money over a protracted period (2005 to 2007) to directly influence political debateand electoral outcomes, alongside the ALP but not through it. It is generally believed that unionsspent between $20 million and $30 million to ensure the election of an ALP Government in 2007(Muir 2008), compared with just $17 million the ALP received in public funding for the 2004election (Mayer 2006). YR@W can be seen as an expression of a newly emerging relationship thathas some similarities with the pressure group model.The research discussed in this paper seeks to understand the dynamics of the changing relationshipfrom the perspectives of participants. Do they perceive a permanent change in the relationship?What are the broader implications of that change, if any, for the political behaviour of unions and

the ALP?

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Qualitative interviews, with open-ended questions, were used because they allow interviewees toemphasise and explore the aspects of the relationship most important to them, and thus providedeeper and richer insights into a relationship that is rarely discussed frankly, and in a consideredway, on the public record. The limitation is that the sample size is inevitably small and makesextrapolation from 24 participants to a relationship that includes thousands an exercise that must beapproached cautiously. Further research will augment these interviews with close examination of the public record, participant biographies and policy formulation case studies.Interviews were conducted with 24 senior participants in the unions-ALP relationship between November 2009 and February 2010. All the interviewees have had lengthy experience in senior roles in the unions-ALP relationship. I had pre-existing relationships, sometimes extending back several decades, with about half the interviewees. The interviewees who participated provided agood coverage of most of the usual divides in the labour movement: right / left, union / MP, state /national, white collar / blue collar, ALP affiliated / non-affiliated.Given the nature of the relationship, many interviewees had held senior roles in both unions and theALP. Eighteen interviewees are currently, or have been, senior elected union officials. Of these, 11hold, or held, positions with ALP-affiliated unions, 4 with unions not affiliated with the ALP, and 3with peak organisations (all of which had previously held positions with individual unions). Elevenof the 18 union interviewees hold, or held, national union positions, while seven, hold or held, state, but not national, positions. In addition, 12 of these 18 union interviewees have served on the ACTUexecutive. Eight of the interviewees are, or were, parliamentarians (seven national and one state).Two other interviewees have been unsuccessful parliamentary candidates. Ten of the intervieweeshave held a range of other relevant political roles. Four of the ten have held senior positions withthe National ALP, three have held senior state ALP positions (but not national), two have beensenior Ministerial advisers federally and one has worked for several unions over a long period incampaigning roles.The sample does have some potentially important weaknesses. Union officials were far morewilling than MPs, particularly Ministers, to participate. This disparity may be due to different time pressures and to a greater concern for confidentiality on the part of current politicians. Only 3 of the24 interviewees were female. For resource reasons, three-quarters (18) of the interviews wereconducted in NSW (mostly Sydney). Two of these 18 were with Melbourne based union officialswhen they were visiting Sydney. Three interviews were conducted in each of Melbourne andCanberra (one with a WA MP).A further important qualification is that the interviews were conducted at a particular moment intime and may reflect those circumstances to an extent that can mask or distort underlying trends.For instance, none of the interviewees anticipated anything other than a second term for KevinRudd. Given recent political events, the tone and content of these interviews might be somewhatdifferent if re-conducted now.All interviews were audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed. These transcriptions wereanalysed to identify common themes. The analysis in this paper is built around some of thosethemes. All interviews were conducted on the basis of confidentiality. Most interviews wereconducted in the interviewee’s office or an adjacent room. In order, to meet the requirements of theinterviewee, three interviews were conducted in a restaurant or café.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Scholars in Britain largely ignored the relationships between social democratic parties and unionsuntil the rise of New Labour (Ludlam, Bodah and Coates 2002). In one of the few major studies inthis area before the electoral triumph of New Labour in the UK in 1997, Lewis Minkin (1991:658),argued: “this is a relationship which, contrary to much mythology, is becoming more not lessintegrated”. In essence, Minkin argued that the relationship was resilient because both sidescontinued to receive important benefits from it.Globalisation and neo-liberal policies created a more hostile environment for unions (Peetz 1998,Rachleff 2006: 458, Teicher et. al., 2007: 126), and led to a loss of membership and weakened wage bargaining positions (Frege and Kelly 2003: 8). Scholars have also recognised that union declinehas varied greatly in its size, nature and impact across countries (Frege and Kelly 2003: 8), with theimpact of globalisation on unions being less severe in many Western European countries than in theUK, USA, Australia and NZ. Accounts of these union setbacks usually include a perceived declinein union influence on social democratic parties. Piazza (2001: 413) described as ‘conventionalwisdom’ the idea that globalisation has prompted de-linking of social democratic parties andunions. Many other scholars have also argued that the links between political parties and unions inWestern Europe have been in decline over recent decades (Howell 2000: 201, Moschonas 2002:319, Rueda 2007: 2).Valenzuela (1992), a Chilean scholar, argued that the circumstances of their creation have anenormous and lasting impact on the character of labour movements. He used a typology with fiveforms: social democratic, pressure group, contestatory, confrontationist, and state-sponsored. Thecontestatory category refers to countries where the labour movement is split along ideological,religious, or other, lines. The confrontationist and state-sponsored categories are found in countrieswhere there are authoritarian regimes. The first two of these forms are, however, relevant to thisdiscussion; the social democratic form in which “unions link up to form basically one nationalorganisation that in turn connects itself with a single, relatively strong party” (1992:55) and the pressure group form in which “unions link themselves with a pre-existing party or fragments of it”(1992: 55). Pressure group links are much looser and less formal than they are in the socialdemocratic model.Valenzuela argues that because unions in countries with social democratic type unions-partyrelationships were able to achieve a high-level of consolidation early in their histories, throughdirect employer negotiations, their leaders, and those of the parties they aligned with, adopted “amoderate socialist viewpoint with an incremental and reformist style of political action” (1992: 69).Valenzuela also argued that the close links between unions and parties in the social democratictype, together with this moderate and reformist style, lends itself to the development of corporatismin democratic societies (1992: 69).Valenzuela’s pressure group type is based on the experience of the USA (1992: 77). Valenzuelaargued that during the 1960s the relationship between American unions and the Democratic Partycame to resemble the relationship between the British Labour Party and unions during the same period. Nevertheless, he argues, the lack of a formal, organisational link remains an important anddistinguishing difference. American unions must always “exchange electoral support for individualcandidates for their promises of support for union causes at the legislative and governmental level”(1992: 78). In Britain, Valenzuela argues, unions can pretty much take it for granted that Labour members of parliament will vote for the option most favourable for unions amongst those optionsunder consideration (1992: 78). The organisational link, or its absence, therefore, is highly