| Book Review | Labour History, 94 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEW

David Peetz, Brave New Workplace: How Individual Contracts are Changing Our Jobs, Allen & Unwin 2006. pp. x + 262. $29.95 paper.

It's not often that an author can write a book that appears to have been so emphatically and promptly endorsed by the turn of events. David Peetz's condemnation of individual workplace contracts, particularly those implemented as Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) by the Howard Government, has apparently been embraced by the Australian people. The Howard government has gone; and in late February 2008 (this review was written perilously close to the deadline), Howard's unlikely and crestfallen successor, Dr Brendan Nelson, was reduced to an abject confession that the Coalition 'got it wrong' with AWAs. Allowing AWAs to cut workers' pay and conditions had been a terrible mistake, Dr Nelson conceded, and the government had paid the political price. WorkChoices has been pronounced dead.

So at first glance a belated review of Brave New Workplace may seem as redundant as John Howard's political career. However the election of the Rudd Labor Government provides an opportunity to assess the claims made by Peetz, although it may be a little too soon to decide if his denunciation really has been vindicated by history.

Peetz's analysis of AWAs is underwritten by a hostility to what he characterises as 'individualism'. Early in the book Peetz does acknowledge the possibility that individualism and collectivism, the latter reflecting his ideal type of social and employment relation, are not necessarily opposed, but may coexist, as 'points on a continuum of possibilities', but this thought, hinting at ambiguities and complexities, is not allowed to intrude on the subsequent analysis. Individual employment contracts in general and AWAs in particular are Peetz's targets. AWAs, Peetz argues, do not promote individual bargaining so much as individual contracting, imposing a contractual template on the employee regardless of individual need, and without involving a genuine bargaining process. AWAs are indeed a crude mechanism: recent figures confirm that AWAs removed at least one protected award condition, and most made significant cuts in other basic entitlements. Peetz also asserts that:

Those who promote the individualisation of employment relations do not actually seek to remove collectivism. They simply seek to reshape it, to suit particular interests, by altering the identities of workers – towards identifying not with a collective of fellow workers but with the collective of capital referred to as the 'corporation' ... reshaping identities away from the collective aspirations of workers helps narrow aspirations and precludes challenges to the decisions of corporations ... [and] fundamentally undermines the capacity of workers to organise collectively.

The trouble with Peetz's argument is its reductionism. The spread of individualising forces is far more widespread and insidious than the manipulative, corporate/Howard Government conspiracy that Peetz seeks to uncover. If there is a conspiracy, its aims are greatly facilitated by the consumer culture in which it functions and of course promotes – a culture that has been turning producers into consumers, to borrow the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's description, for some decades. Workplace relations may certainly help to shape culture, but they also reflect wider changes already underway. Which helps to explain why Labor may not restore workplace equity, nor facilitate union revival, to quite the extent that its supporters may hope.

Since the publication of Brave New Workplace Peetz has argued that not only will the problem of AWAs be resolved by a Labor Government, but also the problem of union recovery, a recovery that's required, as he argues in Brave New Workplace, to repair the damage caused by AWAs. In a Sydney Morning Herald article in late January Peetz argued that 'hostile legislation' since the early 1990s largely accounted for union decline. AWAs were also a product of legislative initiative. Hence reversing the legislative trend would seem to provide an effective cure.

Labor's dedication to eliminating AWAs needs to be understood in the context of other significant aspects of its proposed workplace relations system – recommending uptake of common law employment contracts (which currently cover about 30 per cent of the workforce) for those who prefer an individualised alternative to the award system; limiting union access to workplaces; limiting the right to strike; the introduction of flexibility arrangements in awards, and allowing employees on over $100,000 to opt out of the award system. What's left is a constrained space of coverage and operation for the union movement and the collectivised workers' unions seeks to cover. In Brave New Workplace Peetz also hoped that the Office of the Employment Advocate would be abolished, and Labor would rejuvenate the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC). Labor plans to scrap the rather tired and bureaucratic AIRC. It seems that Labor has a more decentralised authority in mind, committed to promoting 'flexibility' – perhaps not unlike the OEA. WorkChoices may have some life left in it yet.

It seems that Labor will cultivate a world of two workplace nations, helping to fulfil a trend evident before the election of the Howard Government in 1996: the individualised haves with their common law contracts and superior bargaining power, and low paid workers on 'flexible' awards, whose commitment to, or opportunities for experiencing 'collectivism' are likely to be compromised or eroded by the creeping flexibility of their employment relations. Human resource management practices, with their promotion of worker identification with the organisation and individualised reward schemes, are likely to exacerbate this trend. A discussion of these disturbing trends and dilemmas is largely absent from Brave New Workplace because Peetz is so focused upon his dislike of AWAs. There is no discussion of the implications or impact of common law contracts, a far more widespread manifestation of individual contracts than AWAs.

Peetz also argues that unions must respond to the threat of individualised workplace relations through revitalised strategies to mobilise workers into collective action and organisation. In his chapter on this theme Peetz draws on Bradon Ellem's research on the Pilbara mining region as an emblematic motif of a new union organising model. The Pilbara model is an essentially old-fashioned form of union mobilisation that may flourish in a remote, particular and relatively self-contained space – hence of limited relevance as an organising model in more heterogeneous urban centres and regions.

Peetz acknowledges the 'failure of arbitral unionism', and refers to the union movement's failure to implement its own organising model – according to his own research and which he outlines in Brave New Workplace, 'unions were less than a quarter of the way through the changes that they needed to make to become properly focused on organising'. Peetz does not develop a sustained critique of union performance or how it might creatively adapt to the requirements of a new workforce, increasingly dominated by younger generations of workers well experienced in individualised culture but unfamiliar – although not necessarily hostile – to collectivised union identity. The revival of the AIRC that Peetz urged in Brave New Workplace would surely have only restored the authority of 'arbitral unionism'.

The key problem with Brave New Workplace is its author's unwillingness to think outside of familiar frames of reference. Since the 1980s a range of thinkers have tried to creatively engage with the implications of post industrial society – Bauman, Michel Foucault, Nikolas Rose, Norman Fairclough – each of them as disturbed by the barren cult of consumerist individualism as Peetz. Brave New Workplace reflects a conservatism influential within the union movement, a defensive insistence on familiar practices and values conducted and expressed in familiar industrial and intellectual terrain.

In 1992 Vaclav Havel made a speech which powerfully captured the dilemmas of the postmodernity we inhabit. We need a politics that embraces the plurality of human experience, Havel argued. The union movement must embrace organisational and ethical practices that adapt to the plurality of workplace experience and close the divide between itself and its own constituency.


Macquarie University	MARK HEARN

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