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BOOK REVIEW
| Tom Bramble, Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2008. pp. xv + 293. $49.95 paper.
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| A new book outlining the past 60 odd years of Australian trade union history is a timely intervention in an ongoing debate about the movement's future. At a time when membership density is sitting at roughly 19 per cent and news of unionism's death has been, like Mark Twain's, 'greatly exaggerated', Tom Bramble's lively and perceptive book is for anyone wanting to understand what has effectively recruited workers to the union movement in the past, reasons for its current post-war nadir and, concomitantly, what might workers do to protect and extend their interests in the current economic crisis and beyond. |
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Bramble argues that there was a 'flood tide' of unionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the more activist unions and various social movements mobilised. While trade unionists were striking successfully over pay, conditions and anti-union legislation, their victories added industrial weight to protests over the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, equal pay for women and land rights. Even the consummate strike 'terminator', Bob Hawke, was moved to say that '[a]nything that constitutes discrimination or hardship against our people – then in we go'. It was also not accidental that when strike days trebled from two million in 1972 to over six million in 1974, union membership also leapt by 300,000. |
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