Sally-Come-Lately

At a time when Australia is grappling with a cost-of-living crisis, productivity flatlines and as our international competitiveness dissipates, the ACTU has the answer: make it more expensive to employ anyone.

They demand a reduction in a work week from 38 to 35 hours with no reduction in pay, and an increase in annual leave to 5 and 6 weeks depending on how you are employed.

They seek 10 days of paid Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural leave, 10 days of paid reproductive leave, expanded personal and carer’s leave for casuals, and higher casual loadings and redundancy entitlements.

In other words, they want your employer to pay you more to do less: fewer hours, more leave, higher costs and less flexibility.

These are not modest adjustments to working conditions. They amount to a wholesale restructuring of Australia’s labour market in the middle of a productivity crisis.

The ACTU prefers to frame its campaign for shorter hours as the modern continuation of one of the labour movement’s proudest victories: the eight-hour day won by stonemasons in Melbourne in 1856.

But the comparison reveals a rather awkward irony.

The eight-hour day emerged in a labour market that was astonishingly simple by modern standards.

Today Australia operates one of the most legally complex labour markets in the developed world. It has more than a hundred and twenty modern awards and thousands of enterprise agreements and tens of thousands of prescriptive pay scales.

Changing it in practice is a little harder than the economic ransom note submitted by the union.

And here lies the deeper irony.

This extraordinary complexity of Australia’s current Labour market did not arise by accident. It is the product of more than a century of institutional engineering enthusiastically supported by the labour movement itself.

Now the same movement finds itself navigating the regulatory maze it spent a century constructing.

But there is another difference between 1856 and today that is harder to ignore.

The stonemasons won the eight-hour day because they had real economic power. Skilled labour was scarce and employers needed them. Their victory reflected the realities of the market.

Modern union campaigns often reflect something else: the search for relevance in a labour market where union membership has steadily declined for decades. In the 1950s more than half of Australian workers belonged to a union. Today it is closer to one in eight.

None of this means the question of working hours is illegitimate. Over the long sweep of history working time has indeed fallen, and the punishing schedules of the early industrial revolution to the 38-hour week Australians now enjoy is often followed by technological progress and rising productivity.

But that is precisely the point.

The great reforms of working hours occurred when economic conditions made them possible. The eight-hour day was not declared by activists and then imposed upon the economy. It emerged from the economy itself.

The current proposal turns that logic on its head.

Instead of productivity enabling shorter hours, shorter hours are expected to produce productivity. Instead of bargaining power delivering reform, reform is expected to substitute for bargaining power.

If the stonemasons of 1856 were transported into today’s debate, they might find the situation faintly bewildering. Their achievement was the product of organisation, courage and economic leverage. Their modern successors appear to be asking Parliament to do the negotiating for them.

And that may be the greatest irony of all.

The most famous victory in Australian labour history was won without legislation, tribunals or regulatory complexity. Yet the movement that celebrates that victory now seeks its next triumph through precisely those mechanisms.

In Australia’s industrial relations debate, it sometimes feels like the joke is on the ACTU themselves.