In this Laurie Carmichael joins with other union leaders in a 1966 seminar organised by the ACTU to discuss automation.
This excerpt from Laurie emphasises the impact of automation on wages and wage relativities, wages policy and bargaining.
This may well be one of the first of such discussions among Australian unions.
Automation and the Unions
Australian Left Review, December 1966-January 1967
WITH the further development of automated techniques in Australia, the trend away from the concrete concepts of the basic wage and margins in arbitration will further increase. The total wage concept now adopted in principle, with its less tangible and more abstract concepts of “economic content” and “work value” will be carried further, compounding the already difficult processes of substantiating argument in the arbitration system.
This will aggravate the growing difficulties of arbitrationists within the trade union movement. The extreme right will base themselves upon the amorphous concepts as a means of more and more trying to head off into a dead end the workers’ complaints which will arise from the effects of automation. On the other hand, there will be an increasing section of the traditional reformists concerned with the lack of concrete procedures.
From the point of view of an alternative to this development in the form of mass campaigning, the needs concept (perhaps a better term should be. found for it) plus a margin for skill (and perhaps a different term for this too) would still have the most attractive force. The needs concept, however, would certainly have to be associated with modern needs, in particular the capacity to absorb the great wealth of goods that can be produced and distributed. The difficulty with the word “needs” is that it carries a connotation of existence levels only, rather than the high standard of living possible from the great quantity of goods wnich can be produced from automated industry.
Problems arise in regard to wage claims of a general nature where automation penetrates only some industries at the one time. For example the relatively high degree of mechanisation at General Motors produces fantastic profits for that company and large scale redundancy for the workers in the industry. But the general wages approach of the whole trade union movement at the present time fits in with the arbitration concept that the productivity of a highly mechanised industry is taken into account in a general claim, and that “efficient” industries are tree to enjoy all the fruits of their automated processes.
Despite the impact of automation in the particular industries into which it is introduced, it does not penetrate all industries simultaneously, and wages problems associated with spasmodic introduction will occur over a protracted period. Even in the United States only a relatively small proportion of industry is yet automated.
If one thinks of autom ation as being fully introduced, it is possible to think of a wages policy which on a nation wide scale can take the whole situation into account. Where the whole of industry and commercial activity is not automated, special claims and special problems arise in those sections where it is introduced, because an overall wages policy does not apply. This is where the special claims arise, such as a three months term ination allowance after 12 months employment, special payments available for people made redundant in industries whilst being retrained for others, etc.
A great deal more effort must be made to argue out the ideological problems of a mass wages policy with the onset of automation, as an alternative to the deliberately adopted “abstract” policies of arbitration.
A point regarding change of skills. Differences in skills for the performance of work will have to continue to be recognised, but a stronger stand should be taken with regard to the allegedly super skills which are often elevated to managerial and similar levels and so “bought off.” There should be more striving for a higher common content and lower differentials as the possibility of higher living standards for all increases.