Godfrey Moase, union organiser || There are a number of strategic lessons relevant to the international labour struggle to be drawn from the Australian union movement’s role in a generalised breakdown of worker solidarity in the 1980s and 1990s. This week I’ve set out five strategic lessons from an historical analysis of the neoliberal reaction against labour.
Power and authority are not the same
First, unlike the American and British union movement experiences of neoliberal reaction, Australian unions experienced a collapse in power and authority at different points in time. Australian unions lost power years before they lost authority.
Most union strategy in the Anglophone world tends to focus on attempting to regain authority as a means through which worker power can be rebuilt.1This is not to say that some forms of authority, particularly the legal authority unions can use to fulfil our mission, are not important. What I am contending is that there is no substitute for building worker power, independent of where legal authority lies, at key points in the capitalist organisation of work.
This task seems so immense, so overwhelming, that most union leaders I have dealt with have looked to the false mirage of authority as the only realistic way of restoring worker organisation. It has not worked for the last thirty years, and it will not work for the next thirty years. Groups of workers at strategic nodes of the economy will need to learn to trust each other and exercise power before anything else is possible. It is such workers creating a new culture of solidarity both with each other and with the broader class that will restore various forms of worker authority within the system.
The ongoing struggle for wages is existential
Second, the manner in which unions themselves approach the wage struggle is existential. Unions should not apologise for engaging in collective struggle for better wages irrespective of the laws. The key here is not even whether workers are successful in obtaining higher wages but rather the union movement should never again be complicit in a political strategy that attempts to either moderate wage increases or otherwise refrain from struggle for higher wages.
A layer of Australian communist union officials, in supporting the Accord process in 1980s Australia, correctly identified the need for unions to reach beyond the wage struggle to win qualitative changes to the wage labour relation including “occupational health and safety, skills and training, quality of work” and “democratic workplace practices”.2 The issue, though, was that in substance the Accord amounted to a retreat from the wage struggle as opposed to its transcendence.
The strategic reason for this is that such national pacts erode the foundations of worker power.3 The primary way through which the Australian movement exercised wage restraint during the Accord period (1983-1996) was agreeing not to take industrial action for wages higher than an agreed set limit.4 For all intents and purposes it was a no strike pledge.
In fact, leaders of the era such as former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Bill Kelty have written of the reduction in working days lost to industrial action and the return of industrial peace as one of the key achievements of their era. All this did, however, was help capital to simultaneously restore its profitability while decreasing the autonomous power of workers—paving the way for further and future working class disorganisation through the 1990s and into the 21st century.
The no strike pledge works by its very definition to reduce worker power as it operates in practice to narrow the scope for workers to act together—there is less space in a capitalist society for workers to communicate, cooperate and act if they feel they are bound by a no strike pledge.
The other disastrous element of having union leaders and officers actively enforcing wage restraint as the primary means of reining in inflation is that it undermined worker confidence and support in the institution of the union, and their trust in working together to push their common interests. Through this bitter experience of declining real wages coupled with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and early 1990s, workers turned inwards and withdrew their contribution to empowering each other.
Workers should not be expected to solve an inflationary crisis of capital when money can be taken out of the system through increased taxation of the oligarchic class. Ideally, such a wage struggle occurs on a class-wide basis but even on an industry or an enterprise level, as limited as such a terrain of struggle may be, the importance of continued wage struggle is foundational.
Solidarity is everything
Third, solidarity is everything. The PATCO and miners’ dispute were lost when it was clear these unions faced a determined and hostile capitalist state without mass strikes from other organised workers. Despite what I have written above in regards to the wage struggle itself, by far the most important strategic error of the Accord era in Australia was the strain and ultimate break the strategy placed on wage solidarity across the workforce. The demoralisation of real wage cuts lasted years, the impact of a severing of wage solidarity has lasted decades.
The most significant drops in Australian union membership occurred after the introduction of enterprise-based bargaining in 1993. After a decade of wage restraint under the Accord, highly unionised workplaces (hot shops) were straining for better wage rises.
Enterprise-based bargaining, with the active engagement of many union leaders at the time, was presented as the way in which to achieve this aim. Organised union workers generally exited industry-wide wage and conditions setting instruments known as Awards, leaving unorganised workers behind.5 The net impact of this change is that it severed the wage struggle in union hot shops from outcomes for the wider working-class. This was disastrous for relatively unorganised cohorts of workers with their wages going backwards compared with workplaces engaged in bargaining. More and more of these relatively unorganised workers who remained on Awards for their wage rates left the union movement even before the conservative Howard government’s extreme regulation of association from 1996 onwards.
For the union hot shops, however, enterprise-bargaining has been a self-defeating Faustian pact. Fundamental union values were sold to the dark gods of capital in return for higher wages. Unsurprisingly, this pact has not worked for the union hot shops over the decades.
The loss of largely Award members depleted the capacity of Australian unions to serve the needs of hot shops as well. Furthermore, the opening up of higher wage gaps between Award workplaces and those covered by enterprise agreements has led to perverse incentives.
The union wage premium places stronger incentives on local corporate management to attack unionists or more proactively resist workers organising at new workplaces. It becomes more immediately cost effective at the level of an individual firm to engage in union-busting conduct.
In fact, this form of decentralised bargaining may be one of the structural drivers of the union-busting industry in the US. This tendency makes the daily lives of rank-and-file unionists immeasurably harder than it needs to be. Delegates have to fight for their legitimacy, workers get dragged into spurious disciplinary meetings, good unionists get fired. When daily intimidation becomes an economic proposition for the managerial class at the level of the firm (as opposed to abstracted across the economy at large) then workers more generally live lives of unfreedom.
Then there is the hardship caused by the indirect approach—management finding other ways to recover the wage premium without a direct assault on organisation. Through bargaining this might mean so-called productivity trade-offs for a wage premium. This could involve workers sacrificing workplace conditions, including fundamental trade union rights, allowing less staff to do a job, forcing up the pace of work, allowing a second-class of workers on site (either through two-tier agreements or the unregulated use of contracting/labour hire) or expanding the hours of work to name but a few.
Alternatively, this could be achieved outside of bargaining through industrial re-structures. A firm could set up a lower cost subsidiary to do tranches of work. It could outsource whole service lines or functions to another corporation. It could shift work between existing workplaces based on its wage premium, or it could invest in a new green fields operation to get the same work done on a cheaper basis. When the latter occurs, there is never any shortage of politicians lining up for a photo opportunity cutting a ribbon on a new building.
Through these indirect approaches, the islands of relative worker privilege recede. As these dynamics play out there are fewer ways of squeezing productivity through stretching workers, fewer conditions for workers to trade offs, and fewer workplaces covered by active bargaining. Decentralised bargaining, therefore, is a means through which the elite can defend and expand existing labour market inequalities. This is further compounded, especially in federations like the US and Australia, where there are multiple and separate labour regimes that further fragment workers along other artificial lines of division—such as private and public sector workers.
Further, when workers do take forms of industrial action in relation to their bargain, they find there is less solidarity to help them win. More often than not, other workplaces are not directly impacted by the wage outcomes (even as they are indirectly bound together), generally without years of meticulous organising and luck other workplaces are not in a position to take strike action. In short, it leaves workers more isolated than they should or need to be. The breaking of wage solidarity is an open wound carried by the working class. Repairing this trauma is an urgent strategic priority.
The breaking of wage solidarity is an open wound carried by the working class. Repairing this trauma is an urgent strategic priority.
Ongoing strike action is vital
The fourth strategic lesson from the 1980s is the need to continue forms of collective action. Separate from the internal maladies of wage restraint, the curbs on workers taking strike action has its own negative consequences. Capitalism is not a thing but a process, it is in motion and constantly changing. Left to its own devices it dehumanises.
Over time, capitalism tends towards ever greater inequality and the relative immiseration of ordinary people. This has been the bitter experience of the working class in the Anglophone world this century. This relatively automatic process that springs from the programming of capital accumulation requires the conscious action of people to disrupt it. It requires the power of workers in action for a new social balance to be re-asserted.
This is not to assert the exclusive domain of economic action but rather to highlight its necessity. The strategic difficulty, however, of finding a way to get the engine of worker activity motoring again does not detract from its necessity. There can not be a radically transformed society without workers having a greater demonstrated appetite and confidence to walk off the job.
There are signs that this is organically occurring across Australia, US and the UK. Industrial action in Australia has been trending upwards with the number of disputes tending to increase each year since the lows of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns.6 In 2022, the UK lost more days to industrial action than anytime since Thatcher was Prime Minister, and 2023 saw more US workers strike than at any time since Reagan was President.
These sorts of statistics can fluctuate significantly from year to year but it is the responsibility of any effective union leader (formal or informal) to formulate strategy for membership dialogue and critique that responds to this emergent tendency nascent and uneven as it is.
Political organising is not a substitute for workplace organising
Finally, political organising cannot substitute for worker power at the point of production. If there is a critique to be labelled against my intervention it is that it tends towards economism, in that it emphasises the economic struggle of workers as the primary means to achieving a democratic socialist future at the expense of political and electoral organising.
I am not anti-political but rather believe that the emancipatory political horizon for union workers opens up through lived experience at the job and critical workplace organising in response to this experience. It is a necessary part of three pointed struggle for socialism that must stand on its own terms even as it is in organic connection with the political and theoretical struggle.
Like English radical unionist Tom Mann, my concern is “that we should attend to the first job in the right order, and thus make it easier to do whatever else may be necessary”.7
Radical union strategy comes from working through how to meaningfully progress the economic struggle in a manner that is in dialogue with broader radical political and theoretical work for change. Even then political and social movement organising are necessary within the union movement but their sustained success depends on rebuilding relationships of solidarity at work.
This may appear, at first blush, contradictory but it is not. It is as simple as asserting that while economic, political and theoretical struggle are all important and must be in dialogue with each other, when it comes to the economic pole, the economic struggle itself is the foundation.
One of the key strategic errors the union movement made in the 1980s in Australia was turning towards the electoral and parliamentary domains in a manner that undermined workplace communication and cooperation between workers. Problematically, this created, or at least reinforced a trade union culture where great authority over the health and impact of the entire labour movement was placed in the hands of the parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor Party.
As Mann wrote of his time organising in early twentieth century Australia, the “typical Labor politician” is filled with the idea that “the return to the legislative bodies of an additional number of Labor men” is paramount while “all else is secondary and relatively trifling”.8
Imagining the political arena and electoral campaigns as the pinnacle of union work has resulted in workers giving up their power or the opportunity to build power in return for investing authority in a relatively small group of politicians.
This is a strategic dead-end.
In a capitalist society such a small group, even where they sit at the top of the state, do not have the power on their own to overcome the organised and motivated owners of capital. Moreover, parliamentarians “are necessarily creatures who cannot think about problems outside their relevance to the next election”.9
And yet politics is vital. The state is the most critical single institution in capitalist society. Without a strong state, a capitalist market could not exist. The state is a field of struggle where the outcome impacts the life chances of millions. Winning government however, is not the same as winning power. As Arendt observes, every government “needs a power basis”.10
Winning government is winning some authority. It’s useful. It’s necessary. It’s just not a substitute for worker power. There are countless historic examples where the authority of the state has been used to repress workers attempting to build power together, or to support workers cooperating. Union shearers getting together in rural Queensland to form the Labor Party in 1891 did so because of their brutal experience of the way in which colonial governments repressed Australian union militancy, strikes and general strikes of the time. US Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt greatly assisted the labour organising upswing in the 1930s by sending in the National Guard to protect sit down strikers with the United Automobile Workers at the Ford plant in Flint, Michigan. Yet in both of these examples the actions of the state comes after the autonomous activity of workers.
In short, politics matters but it’s no substitute for workplace struggle. The labour movement needs an updated and coherent political strategy that amplifies rather than marginalises worker power. Such a political strategy, however, needs its foundation in relationships of collective solidarity at work and should involve workers having agency within political organising as opposed to being largely passive recipients of political outcomes.
The power of any radical socialist government, after all, will be dependent on the organised power of workers to achieve its ambitions. Trade union political organising, in other words, should be based on principles of direct member democracy (rather than being the exclusive domain of an elite class of staff leaders within a union).
Organising is a process not a strategy
Finally, the strategic prioritisation of workplace organising is more complex than declaring the labour movement’s return to the workplace. Afterall, the Australian, UK and US movement defeats of the 1980s, resulted in a common call to organise in the workplace.
This turn to organising in the 1990s, however, not only failed to rebuild worker power but by the early 21st century had mostly exhausted itself. The reason is simple. It is not because workers cannot organise but rather because organising is a process consisting of a multitude of tactics. Processes need to serve a broader strategy, and yet for many unions in the Anglophone world this process was assumed to be the strategy. As Jane Holgate notes, organising as it was applied in UK unions reverted to a “toolbox of tactics”, mostly geared towards recruiting new members.11
Organising as it was applied by unions in this period, therefore, degenerated into a set of tactics that attempted to substitute for a lack of class-wide strategy. It resulted in much colour and noise but did not itself shift the decline of worker power. Organising became the noise after defeat.
Even the most effective and militant organising only achieves durable social change as part of a broader radical strategy. Unionists, therefore, must themselves cohere these strategic lessons into a radical strategy for the wider labour movement.
This post is located within the second chapter within the first of three parts for the overall project. Part One is Solidarity as Strategy and takes a broader view of solidarity and how it can still emerge within and against a fundamentally inhumane system. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.
1 This is a dominant tendency as opposed to an all-encompassing norm. There have always been exceptions to this role, and increasingly from the late 2010s onwards there are signs that this dominant tendency is loosening, particularly given the rise of worker-to-worker organising. Another significant drawback of this approach is that it ignores the economic power the capitalist class holds over the state.
2 Max Ogden, A Long View from the Left: From the CPA to the ALP, a lifetime of fighting for Australian workers’ rights, Bad Apple Press (2020), p. 129. Ogden’s writing, in particular, highlights the gap between the strategic intention of some Left unionists in entering to the Accord with the Australian Labor government and actual results, results which arguably are constrained both by competing visions of the Accord and the broader material constraints on possibility.
3 Paulo Freirewrote about this very process in 1970 in Pedagogy of the Oppressed long before the Accord between the ACTU, and the Australian Labor government was instituted in 1983. See p. 121 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in particular.
4 If you want seven different views of the Accord gather three Australian unionists together. For a comprehensive account of the period, however, see Elizabeth Humphrys, How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project, Haymarket Books (2019).
5 These unorganised workers generally became known as Award workers. Awards refer to minimum industry wages that are products of decisions from Australia’s web of industrial relations commissions. For much of the 20th century prior to the neoliberal era, Awards set market rates for most workers before they were degraded to a minimum safety net. Prior to the introduction of enterprise bargaining in 1993 in Australia, most workers were Award workers and therefore it was not a useful category.
6 See Australian Bureau of Statistics, Industrial Disputes, Australia, June 2025 accessed at https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/industrial-disputes-australia/latest-release#:~:text=During%20the%20year%20ended%20September,of%20129%2C500%20working%20days%20lost. It should be noted, however, that 2025 is presenting mixed results for the Australian labour movement as far as days lost to industrial action goes that somewhat moderates this tendency.
7 Thomas Mann, The Way to Win: Industrial Unionism, Barrier Daily Truth Press (1909).
8 Ibid.
9 Kohei Saito, Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism can Save the Earth, Weidenfield & Nicolson (2023), p. 231.
10 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1972), p. 149.
11 Jane Holgate, Arise: Power, Strategy, and Union Resurgence, Pluto Press (2021).
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