In 2018 Professor Michael Quinlan published his book "Re-Evaluating Worker Mobilisation" an examination of how and why worker combine showing new evidence based on his research that shows an astonishing 4000 instances of Australian worker organisation in the period 1851 to 1900.
In his hard hitting conclusion Quinlan writes:
In Australia union density has fallen by well over half on the most optimistic estimate since 1975 and substantial falls have occurred in virtually all the 'old-rich' countries (including Japan), even those like Sweden where unionisation was once around 80% of the workforce. Evidence that more equal societies were more efficient as well as fairer was ignored amidst an ongoing mantra of tax cuts for the rich/trickle-down economics and removing burdensome regulatory red-tape on business. In Sweden, Australia, the UK and other countries supposedly progressive political parties—some created by unions at the turn of the 20th century—played a pivotal role in this shift, claiming to do neoliberalism `light' an impossibility becoming increasingly evident.
The shocking Grenfell inferno in 2017 was not an accident but highlighted the consequences of neoliberal policies on social protection epitomised by the infamous One-in/Two-out and One-in Three-out rule on new legislation—new regulation requires the removal of existing regulations—implemented by successive UK governments and copied by the Trump-administration in the United States.
Subordination and inequality at work were and remain central to capitalism, whether that be clothed in the language of master and slave, master and servant or master and seamen from the 16th to 19th centuries or in the neoliberal discourse of flexible labour markets/market choice, multi-tiered subcontracted supply chains, franchisee self-employment or portfolio employment.
The movement of work to countries in Asia and elsewhere was overwhelmingly driven by a search for cheaper, more vulnerable/compliant and mostly non-unionised labour. In other words, more readily subordinated labour. This shift has not as yet resulted in much by way of the unions in these countries getting greater traction let alone securing a substantial redistribution of the growing wealth generated.
The reasons are not hard to find. In a race to the bottom, governments fall over themselves to make their countries attractive to foreign business. In totalitarian regimes like China—currently the world's manufacturing hub—nominally free workers (many internal migrants with inferior rights) have no right to join let alone establish independent unions.
Official unions are Communist Party functionaries and collective action largely occurs as informal workplace strikes, much like those that occurred in Australia 170 years ago even if the scale differs. In other crony-capitalist regimes like South Korea and more especially Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar, unions are suppressed, strikes broken with state assistance, leaders gaoled and as in China much collective dissent remains informal.
In short, a crucial mechanism for redistributing income that made countries wealthy by raising total consumption levels and spreading social risk is missing and even corroding in those countries where it did occur last century.
History repeats but the same progression cannot be presumed. The growing inequality in the West is not helping to reduce wealth inequalities in those countries where work has shifted. Rather, the ruling elite in both, the fragment of the of the one-percent, is accumulating massive wealth while all but upper middle-class in the old-rich countries have begun to feel the residual pain. In key respects the new world of work in the 'Gig Economy' bears a striking resemblance to that of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century.
Meetings of the ruling elite like the World Economic Forum rum have begun to refer to inequality as a risk but just one in a list. There is little sense of concern let alone any determination to change policy settings that might alter things,—at their expense—because neoliberalism is unsustainable.
The ruling few—be they. global corporate CEOs or Beijing princelings—and the OECD neoliberal economists, financiers, corporate/tax lawyers, global agencies like the media outlets, politicians and others who serve them, aren't uneasy.
Michael Quinlan, The Origins of Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1788-1850, Routledge: London, 2017: 308 pp., ISBN 9781138084087, AUD 221.
Reviewed by: Terry Irving, University of Wollongong, Australia
When I was writing The Southern Tree of liberty, (2006), developing an argument about the early years of working-class politics in Australia, I relied heavily on articles by Michael Quinlan and his collaborators (Irving, 2006; Quinlan et al., 2003).
Before they appeared, historians of early labour had to work with measly information: some incidents of pre-modern convict resistance, a few tiny unions, a few short strikes, a few 'immature' workingmen's organisations. The result was, in his words, a set of 'fractured accounts' of worker activity.
The new approach in Quinlan's articles knitted the fractures and dazzled us with data. Let's not focus just on the narrow, formal aspects of worker organisation, he said, let's see how much informal activity there was. Answer: a hell of a lot. Let's also use a concept that makes sense of this activity, and that places it in the context of state and capitalist power, the idea of a class in formation — the working class. This is why his book is called The Origins of Worker Mobilisation — to put the stress on a class process rather than on the usual fare of labour history, strikes and unions, cultures and ideologies.
The title is also a pointer to its significance, which is far greater than its impact on those of us working in the field of early Australian labour history. Throughout the research that went into this book, Quinlan kept in mind the question that underlies all others in labour history namely, how and why do workers come together?
The evidence Quinlan presents in the book is both qualitative and quantitative, but it is the latter that gives the book its distinctive character. For three decades, using a specially designed relational data base, he has been entering information about worker mobilisation, informal as well as formal, making a file for each instance, no matter how small or ephemeral, and not just for New South Wales, but for the other colonies as well. He did this personally to ensure consistency.
He recorded evidence of strikes, court actions, go-slows, demonstrations, mutual insurance schemes, petitions, mass abscond-ing, sabotage and political meetings. He gained this evidence through the painstaking reading of a huge range of sources, including convict conduct records, police gazettes, official correspondence, court bench-books and colonial newspapers. By the time he sent off the manuscript to the publisher, he had recorded 6426 instances of worker mobilisation. Remarkably, this is probably only about two-thirds of all the instances of organisation for which evidence can be expected to exist, because, as he explains, his research in the court records is incomplete.
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