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That a country which has historically had some of the highest trade union density rates in the world has witnessed a decline of 40 per cent in such rates over the last twenty years should be of more than a little interest to union leaders and activists, as well as to students and scholars of the labour movement. The country is Australia and in this work, David Peetz sets out to explain how this could happen. According to Peetz, there are three principle factors behind the shocking decline in trade union membership and power: structural changes in the composition and functioning of the labour market; a paradigm shift in government and business that has witnessed greater hostility to unions; and the responses of the unions themselves to these shifts.
While these culprits have been implicated in union decline in other national jurisdictions, what is novel here is the complex web of interactions which Peetz weaves between them in the context of a highly specific and exceptional system of industrial relations. Since the turn of the century, Australian employment relations have been governed by an arbitrational/award system. This reached its highest stage of development in the corporatist years of Accords 1 through 5 (1983-1990). Aspects of this system were responsible for the historically high rates of union membership (over half the workforce in the mid-1970s), but they were also implicated in the Achilles heel of the labour movement which was finally exposed when the conditions were ripe in the 1990s.
Shifts in the structure of employment between industries and occupations as well as the growth of casual labour markets account for a significant decline in union densities, but primarily during the 1980s. By the onset of the present decade the negative impacts of these factors had largely been registered, and yet the decline...