If Australian unions aren't careful they risk losing much of their moral authority in the debate over workplace reform. If this occurs they could do long-term damage to their viability, whoever wins the next federal election.
Actions of the Australian Council of Trade Unions at the International Labour Organisation give an idea of the union risk.
The ILO is a division of the United Nations and carries responsibility for formulating and overseeing international labour standards. Its authority is mainly moral, which is heavily dependent on the ILO not interfering in member nations' domestic politics. Instead the ILO focuses on labour principles such as the elimination of slavery and the right to association. Only in extreme cases does the ILO condemn a country. This is usually where abduction, imprisonment and murder of union and business people is state sanctioned.
It's this moral integrity that enables the ILO to stay engaged in debate with all nations furthering the cause of improving labour standards. It's a delicate business for the ILO, requiring careful compliance with diplomatic protocols.
The ACTU president Sharan Burrow is a significant figure at the ILO. She is a member of the ILO governing body and president of the global trade union movement, the ICFTU, covering some 150 million union members in more than 150 countries. She's a recognised union strategist.
Yet in 2006 Ms Burrow had a formal complaint lodged against her because she authorised anti-Howard propaganda placed into the dispatch boxes of 200 ILO delegates. It happened twice. It's considered a serious breach of ILO protocol. If every union and employer body in dispute with its home government were to follow Ms Burrow's protocol breach, debate at the ILO would descend into cheap political point scoring, centred around shifting, national politics rather than international labour principles.
But the protocol breach proved to be a warm-up to the ACTU's application in June this year for Australia to be included in an ILO "shame" list of the world's worst workplace regimes. This list would rate Australia as worse than Columbia for example, where 72 unionists were killed last year.
It appears that the ACTU is seeking to use the ILO as part of its political propaganda campaign against the Howard Government. However, it's a campaign that's displaying an obsessiveness that's blinding Australian unions to basic facts.
For example, Australian unions allege that the Howard Government is breaching ILO conventions in relation to the right to unionise and to collectively bargain. Certainly Howard's laws have taken away Australian unions' previous position as a defacto institution of government in the setting and checking of wages and conditions. This role has been handed to the bureaucracy. And AWAs have enhanced the option of individual agreements as an alternate to collective bargaining. But it's pure political spin to claim that these changes breach ILO conventions.
The right to unionise and collectively bargain is protected under ILO conventions 87 and 98. These conventions require governments not to do anything that would prevent unions operating, or to prevent collectively bargaining. Under Howard's laws unions are free to operate and collective bargaining remains an option.
However, Australian unions are trying to claim that ILO conventions require collective bargaining and preference for unions. They infer that the change to unions' legal standing in the system and the option of individual agreements breach ILO conventions. But this is a perverse and false representation of ILO conventions.
The ILO is an important international institution. If unions lie about its conventions and drag it into domestic politics, they can bring the ILO itself into disrepute. Recently the Australian Government made a new commitment to the ILO, placing a permanent representative at the ILO's Geneva headquarters. However, since the ACTU's attempt to have Australia placed on the shame list, commentators again are claiming the ILO is a waste and should be ignored.
This does not help the cause of improving labour standards. What is required is a focus on facts and attempts to achieve cross-party political support on key issues. In misusing the moral standing of the ILO in a domestic campaign, the ACTU damages its own integrity.
ILO labour standards are about achieving safer work, eliminating poverty through higher levels of employment, the elimination of discrimination at work and other important policy outcomes.
These are difficult tasks in a changed and rapidly changing world of work. They are objectives that should not be distorted by domestic political manipulation exercises.
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