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Strategic Choices and Unintended Consequences:
Employer Militancy in Victoria's Meat Industry, 1986–93
Patrick O'Leary and Peter Sheldon*
Concepts of strategic choice have become widely used in industrial relations, particularly as methods of understanding recent historical changes. While the operation of strategy-choosing relative to implementation has generated debate, there has been little discussion of how strategic choices can generate unintended consequences even where there are no apparent weaknesses in implementation. We discuss these issues in the context of under-explored areas of Australian labour history: the history of industrial relations in Victoria's meat industry and employer activity in the meat industry more generally. Our focus is the creation, by employers, of an intense, industry-wide struggle with the union and, in particular, their choices regarding terrains and methods for that struggle. Using a narrative approach, we explore important unintended consequences that flowed from the interaction of employer-strategising in product and labour markets. These, in turn, generated paradoxical outcomes, given employers' original objectives.
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| From July 1989, meat industry employers throughout Victoria engaged in an intensely bitter struggle with their workforces and the industry's union, the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU). The main dispute – technically nine linked disputes – lasted for more than two and a half years and came to be known as the VMBA (Victorian Meat and By-products Award) Dispute. This struggle – part strike, part lockout – affected the whole of a large and important industry. Nevertheless, it has largely eluded the attention of scholars of labour history and industrial relations. |
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This is part of a broader pattern of scholarly neglect of Victoria's important meat processing industry, particularly in comparison to the example of meat industry industrial relations in Queensland. These factors together suggest that this dispute is worthy of study. Furthermore, the particular focus of this article, employer strategy in the meat industry, is another neglected area within a scholarly (and practitioner) literature that has almost entirely focused on the AMIEU and industrial conflict. This is not in itself surprising. In Australia, unions have long attracted more scholarly attention than employer policy and strategy, including via employer associations. Furthermore, the AMIEU has long been a dynamic, colourful and interesting organisation; its militancy and traditions of workplace activism have made it an attractive research subject.1 |
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AMIEU militancy was also a major and persistent challenge driving the concerns of meat industry employers from the early years of the twentieth century. It shaped the responses of company and plant-level management as well as those of the industry's employer association, the Meat and Allied Trades Association (MATFA). In fact, MATFA's policies in the decades prior to the VMBA Dispute increasingly focused on how a reorganisation of the industry's bargaining structure and practices might best minimise the AMIEU's capacities for engaging in industrial conflict. These informed its strategic choices regarding industrial relations on behalf of employers. The purpose of this article is to look broadly at those strategic choices between 1986 and 1993 and seek to explain the outcomes that they produced. While the VMBA Dispute was a dominant feature of the choices employers made during those years, this article concerns itself less with the dispute itself than with explaining the generation of the choices by employers to embark on that dispute, how to proceed and then how and why to exit from it.2 |
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