Unions as Bearers of Industrial Regeneration: Reflections on the Australian Case

Abstract

Under the aegis of one of the West's more successful and enduring social contracts of the postwar period, manufacturing unions and the peak union council in Australia have launched a comprehensive campaign, including targeted industry policy and direct intervention at enterprise level, to rescue and modernize the country's crumbling manufacturing sector. This new unionism confounds industrialrelations theorists' pessimism over the movement's ability to go beyond its craft origins to directly address managerial issues. But beyond this, the movement is demonstrating its comparative advantage over government and corporate management in making and implementing industry policy, given the traditionalism of government organs, corporate particularism, the structural and institutional fragmentation of industry, and the substantive requirements of an effective industry policy. If the union movement does represent the primary bearer of an industrial renaissance in the future, then the latter is likely to imply basic organizational change for industry and the unions themselves, including a radical shift in power to organized labour over strategic decision-making and the production process at enterprise, industry and national levels.