The Labour movement and incomes policy : origins and development of the accord

The Hawke Labor government was elected for its third term of office in 1987. It owes much of this success to its Accord with the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The purpose of this thesis is to elucidate what consolidates and sustains the bargained bipartite relationship that is the core of the Accord and central to its viability as a cooperative incomes strategy for the industrial and political wings of the Australian labour movement. The thesis begins with an examination of what the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party and the ACTU each sought to achieve from a co-operative incomes policy. The following chapters trace the origins and development of the Accord, beginning with the difficulties that arose between the Whitlam Labor government and the ACTU that prevented any similar agreement. The post-Whitlam period brought about a change in attitude by both the unions and the FPLP that made the Accord possible. The thesis examines the reasons why Australian unions changed their approach from maintaining living standards primarily through nominal increases to the industrial wage to embrace a collective centralised incomes strategy that included the industrial wage, employment and the social wage. The effective point of wage negotiation then lay with the ACTU. This thesis examines the basis of ACTU wages policy and the reasons why the strategies that were pursued to gain its implementation failed. This failure led directly to the Accord with the FPLP. The following two chapters examine the reasons why and how the FPLP reached similar conclusions about the necessity for a collective incomes policy with the unions in 1979 and the subsequent negotiations that brought them to formal agreement on the Accord with the ACTU in 1983. The Accord has proved to be a flexible process that remains relevant nearly six years after its inception. The operations and renegotiations of the Accord that have occurred over this period are examined to determine why this has been possible. A discussion about the relevance of corporatism to the Accord follows. This concludes that, while there may be some aspects of corporatism that can be related to the Accord process, the imprecise nature of corporatist theory raises doubts about its utility as an explanation for the bargained bipartite relationship that is the essence of the Accord. It is suggested that it is more satisfactory to regard the Accord as a contemporary embodiment of traditional Australian labourism; that is, the balancing of economic, electoral and social objectives by the trade union movement and the ALP to achieve what is politically and economically possible through Labor in government