Trade Unionism, Individual Contracts and the MUA’s Doppelgänger

By Christopher Sheil

Australian public debate commonly frames industrial relations as a contest between collective bargaining and individual agreements; between union organisation and freedom of contract. Yet in most workplaces, the alternative to union organisation is not the absence of collective organisation, but collective organisation according to other pressures and limitations upon which individual contracts are merely juxtaposed.

As a case study, the waterfront is scarcely a typical workplace, and it was never more atypical than during Australia's momentous 1998 conflict between the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and Patrick Stevedores. On the other hand, the non-union workplace is too rarely theorized, as even critics are often amenable to arguing within the liberal terms of jobs being subject to price signals stimulating individuals to compete in the market. 'Collective bargaining enhances productivity' reports an economist here. 'Family-friendly workplaces are good for business' says a feminist there. Alternatively, the non-union workplace is evacuated as a point of research altogether, on the presumption that the prevailing arrangements will simply be a function of employer power.

This article launches straight into the well known story of Australia's 1998 waterfront dispute through the prism of the less familiar history of the non-unionists. The dispute was the subject of real-time saturation media coverage and the record is immense, not only prompting a large secondary literature, but also plays, exhibitions, videos, songs, poems and a computer game (Gough-Brady, 2006). Given to dramatic representation, the first movie on the event has already been produced as the television mini-series Bastard Boys. Assuming a general familiarity with the much published contours of the conflict, this article outlines the dimensions and composition of the non-union workforce. It then briefly disposes of the concurrent debate over the incomes of wharfies, clearing the way for an analysis of the 'scabs' -- the notoriously prejudicial working class epithet for union busters that enjoyed general currency in 1998. The aim is to show that the non-unionists embodied collective traditions, values and ideas, before they proved the point themselves by becoming a spectre, or doppelgänger, of the MUA itself.

(Journal of Australian Political Economy, no 59, June 2007)