Bastion of wage slavery

IN the light of yesterday's Government announcement on the detail of its industrial relations reforms, the political and public relations battle from here is really about who owns the high moral ground.  The Government says it is promoting individual rights under employment contracts.  The unions claim they have to protect workers from being screwed by bosses.

But in this traditional environment of worker versus bosses ideology, it might seem an odd thing to allege that unions have become both the last bastion of wage slavery and lobbyists for institutionalised exploitation.

This has occurred because of unions' objections to, and attempts to destroy, the independent contractor community.  And in objecting to an independent workforce, unions are significantly out of step with the progress of society towards achieving equality between people.

Central to the legal and moral position of unions is the employment contract, which is indisputably a legal contract of control and hence inequality.  Any legal finding of the employment contract must discover that the employer has a "legal right to control" the employee.

Labour law theorises that as a consequence and by virtue of legal status, employees will and must always be exploited by employers.  This allegedly is the nature of capitalism, corporations and globalisation.  To counteract this inevitable exploitation employees must reject their individuality at work and act collectively.  Unions and industrial relations systems are the institutions that manage the collective behaviour of employees and the only way exploitation can be prevented, so the theory concludes.

This moral underpinning of labour law and unions is held by its believers with a passion and sincerity that is real.  It is why the believers' heap vitriol and scorn on the Howard Government's IR reforms.  They genuinely believe that without unions having state-sanctioned authority to manage the actions of employers and employees that employee exploitation must occur.

However, there has been a massive shift away from employment.  Large numbers of people now work as independent contractors, are self-employed or consultants.  They have one thing in common.  They earn their living through the commercial contract, not the employment contract.

What binds them, even though it's not intellectually analysed, is that the commercial contract is a contract of equality.  Each party to the contract has equal bargaining rights recognised and enforced at law.

These independent workers now constitute about 1.9 million people in the Australian workforce and represent more than 28 per cent of the private sector.  They are spread from the lowest paid of the workforce in traditional blue-collar jobs, right through to the highest paid of professionals.  Their position will be entrenched under the Independent Contractors Act planned for November.

But unions reject this.  They reject that the commercial contract is or can be a contract of equality.  They reject that the commercial contract can be used by individual workers to earn their living.  Instead, unions insist that the independent workforce must be a sham and an employer conspiracy, particularly in traditional factory and lower paid jobs.

They have one clear objective and that is to eliminate the use of independent contractors.  Globally, unions have long tried to use the International Labour Organisation to create international conventions that would declare independent contractors to be employees.  They have failed three times in 10 years but are trying again in 2006.

Australian state governments have repeatedly tried to change legal definitions to declare independent contractors to be employees.  NSW, Victoria and Queensland have created fall-back positions where they selectively regulate independent contractors as if they are employees.  Each one of these has occurred on the demand of unions and will be overridden by the Independent Contractors Act.

In effect, unions insist it is impossible for any worker to be independent.  They insist that laws must be created to force every worker to be a dependent employee.  This is perverse.

For generations, Australians have moved to create a society of equality.  Women are no longer legally subservient to men in marriage.  Skin colour no longer determines one's legal position.  But at work, the status of the employment contract continues to create legal differences between people thus enforcing notions of class based on employers and employees.  Unions maintain that consequently class warfare is inevitable and that they must lead employees in a class war.

But when people reject this class consciousness and class warfare, when people reject employment and seek to be independent and legally equal at work, unions says this is a sham and must be stopped.  Effectively, unions say that the law must stop equality.  In saying this, unions have truly become the last bastions for the enforcement of class consciousness, class warfare and wage slavery in the workplace.

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