Turning now from member-to-member relations, it is relevant to consider the relational impact between union members, the union office and specific employers. One of the reasons enterprise bargaining works to atomise the working-class is that it structurally radicalises employers and other agents of capital. It does this chiefly by limiting, directly at least, the wage impacts of union-led bargaining only to those workplaces where there are union workers engaged in enterprise bargaining.
In economic terms, this is mainly evidenced in the union wage premium that attaches to union workplaces compared to similar workplaces that are regulated either mainly by the Award (industry minimum safety net in Australia) or common law contracts. As of 2023, this union wage premium has grown to an average of AUD$312 per week more in median income for a main job over non-members.1 Interestingly, this figure has trended up over time even as total worker power has fallen.
Absolutes and relatives
The reason is the difference between relatives and absolutes. The enterprise bargaining regime acts to contain and constrict the effectiveness of collective organising, and as such it works to drive down wages on an absolute basis. Even if this by itself is not enough to drag down the real wages of workers in the union sites themselves, the imbalance in corporate authority and subsequent predatory behaviour this allows, results in a reduction in the overall quality of life even for relatively privileged workers at union sites.
Regardless, as the absolute outcome goes down a diminishing number of comparatively privileged union workers no doubt remain relatively better off. This, in turn, financially incentivises managers and owners to want to either de-unionise where feasible or work to prevent workers organising. This is because union sites face an ever growing wage premium compared to non-union competitors. This encourages an ongoing defensive dynamic at existing union sites where members have to defend their ground, that is their union wage premium. Union sites may be stagnating but non-union sites are going backwards with respect to pay and conditions. It becomes, therefore, a hard fight just to maintain existing relative wage levels.
This defensive struggle takes considerable time and energy. Moreover, as the union fight loses its universal class character struggle becomes more localised, managers then interpret a group of workers’ decision to be union a comment about them or it could be prejudicial to their highly paid position. Getting organised shifts from just what workers do to a slight on a senior manager.
How solidarity bargaining interrupts employer radicalisation
Solidarity bargaining itself, of course, is no cure for the ego and privilege of the managerial class nor does its mere existence as a strategy in of itself change the nature of capitalist accumulation and extraction. What it can do, however, by offering the option of an indirect approach to wage struggles limited to a specific workplace, is exploit fissures in the capitalist class that enterprise bargaining creates.
Through a process of containment, the enterprise bargaining regime places the responsibility for managing and controlling organised labour in the private sector onto a decreasing number of capitalists. Moreover, as the number of capitalists and agents who need to deal with unionised workers declines, the relative cost (and in a competitive market system this is the key feature) increases. This itself is evidence of a way in which elite discipline is maintained in the absence of actual solidarity.
The relative success of the neoliberal reaction has resulted in two outcomes. One is that the prospects of the generalised power of labour being a threat to capital accumulation is remote at best. Two is that the costs of containment are being dumped on fewer and fewer employers. Some employers, in market terms, are paying a high cost while other employers are reaping the gains. Class cohesion amongst capital has fallen away.
To this diminished pool of union employers and key managers, solidarity bargaining can offer something of a temporary understanding in the ongoing class struggle – give us more space to organise, and we will lift the wages of your competitors relative to what you pay. The strategy offers this prospect because its chief goal is to lift the absolute wage rates of the entire working class, and thereby reduce the relative wage premium for union worksites in such a manner that these worksites nonetheless experience higher wage outcomes over time.
This is far from one weird trick that fixes all. I am not claiming that this one change will wipe away decades of entrenched managerial hostility but it can impact the overall industrial climate of some worksites – opening fractures of space here and there so that union workers have the ability to take a wider focus. There is a reasonable prospect that solidarity bargaining, at a workplace level, can take advantage of a capitalist class division to gain an inch of space from which to draw strength to fulfil a broader social mission of ensuring every single worker has a living wage.
This post is the third post of chapter four which is the second chapter in part two of the overall project. Part Two is Solidarity within Wage Labour and examines building transformational solidarity within the constraints of the wage labour relation. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.
This is one of the most practical takes on union strategy I've read in years. You have turned a structural problem (union wage premiums making employers hostile) into an actual tactical opening. That's the kind of thinking organizers can use on the ground. Thank you for sharing.