This short piece by Laurie Carmichael highlights the dissatisfaction among the metal industry unions with Hawke Labor government’s efforts on industry development as required by The Accord in 1983.

Note the emphasis in this Forward on the role of the members of the unions in tackling the problem presented to them by the Labor government.

The Forward is a good example of Carmichael’s conceptual framework for a workers’ “intervention strategy”.

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The centre piece of the Hawke Labor government’s election in 1983 was the Accord, and agreement between the ALP and the union movement on economic management issues. It was not just a prices and incomes agreement. It covered a range of major issues, although not all. One of the issues set out the agreed principle for the development not downgrading of manufacturing industry.

However, upon being elected, the government convened a tripartite National Economic Summit that drew employers, state governments and some other civil society organisations together to propose how the government should proceed. The Statement from the Summit enabled the government to dilute in its practice the agreement/Accord that had been worked out by the ALP and the unions.  

Led by Laurie Carmichael, the metal industry unions were determined not to allow this without a struggle, but at the same time avoid actions that might undermine the government to the advantage of the employers and the LNP opposition.

Thus, the metal industry unions through their national Award Negotiation Committee produced the most comprehensive report that laid out how manufacturing industry should be developed consistent with the text in the Accord.

In August 1984, the Metal Industry Unions presented its Report to its members, the government and the public its own comprehensive jobs-creating industry policy. The Report ran to 309 pages and was supported with supplementary leaflets, journal articles, media stories and pamphlets.

As National Secretary of the Metals Award Negotiation Committee, Laurie Carmichael laid out in the Foreword the independent and united union position for ongoing consultations with both the employers and the government.

The unions' research officers worked closely with a network of state and regional research centres that operated voluntarily, in the main, to develop the content.

These included the Transnational Cooperative (Sydney), Hunter Workers Research Centre, Labor Research Centre (Melbourne), Wollongong Workers Research Centre, and the Labor Education and Research Group (Adelaide). They, in turn, used the content to further develop their own local initiatives to defend and develop manufacturing industries against the downgrading of manufacturing.

For example, the Railway Workers Union, united several unions in its Rail Unions Intervention Project to counter the privatisation strategy for Australian National, driven along by the Labor Minister Peter Morris, the CEO of AN and the private road transport corporations.

Interview conducted by Lesley Dormer for Workers Weekly, Radio 5UV, University of Adelaide. (Produced by Ray Broomhill.)

Introduction - Don Sutherland

This interview was run about 12 months into the Hawke Labor government’s operation of “The Statement of Accord by the ALP and the ACTU regarding Economic Policy” (The Accord), created in February 1983.

Interviewer, Lesley Dormer, enables Laurie to explain what had been achieved in the first 12 months, outline the character of the Accord from his point of view as a medium for “higher intervention” by workers, and why that was necessary. He starts by emphasizing a point about strategy: that in that first year the Liberals’ monetarism had been rejected.

Carmichael also outlines the problems and obstacles that have not been overcome and introduces the crucial question of the relationship between the industrial wage and the social wage in defining living standards.

Presciently, he describes the potential of the finance system to be a defining "nuisance" in the efforts to get the full value out of the Accord strategy.

His discussion on the industrial wage raises vital questions; for example, “militant” unionism can, in a particular form, promote a wages struggle that aligns with the free-market approach of the employers. Thus, here in 1984, he suggests “enterprise bargaining” is in that framework.

The interview concludes with a brief discussion that links his approach to the Accord to earlier views he had expressed about an open-ended transition to socialism.

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