Trade Unions Need Complete Reform

The historical pornography that is the myth held by trade union and Labour tribal loyalists of their, and only their, magnificent contributions to the sum of human happiness and improvement in the human condition is as ill-founded as their apparent belief that all wealth is the surplus produced by labour. While the organisation of labour to raise wages and improve conditions is to be welcomed, the extension of trade union activities into the lives and circumstances of those who are not members is not, nor is it ever justifiable.

Yet intruding into our lives is what they seek to do as globalisation has weakened trade unions through the enhanced competition of goods and services produced far away by cheaper labour, in sectors producing tradeable goods and services. In these sectors trade unions are virtually powerless; they can inflict temporary modest losses on their employers by going on strike, but they cannot hold all of us to ransom. They might as well not be there when acting in their proper purpose - that traditional purpose of raising wages and improving conditions.

Of course in the non-tradeable sectors they can hold all of us to ransom, because their members are virtually irreplaceable and enjoy a monopolistic position. The total withdrawal of their services inflicts on all of us a loss which is proportional not to the low utility of the marginal worker in their sector but to the very high average utility of workers in that sector. The loss of one doctor inflicts a minimal loss on the community, no greater than the loss of the marginal waiter. The withdrawal of labour by all doctors inflicts an intolerable loss. Workers in non tradeable sectors are able, by the threat of the total withdrawal of their labour, to push their earnings up to the high average productivity of their group instead of the low level marginal productivity of the same group. Their market power is monopolistic, and this monopolistic power is always wielded in a manner that is utterly despicable and irresponsibly selfish. In all our interests it should be confronted, and by all of us it should be removed.

If the validatory myths of trade union existence are a denial of the reality that public health, decent housing, mass education, even working hours, conditions, and pay, co-operative and mutual institutions, indeed democracy itself are the product of human endeavour and goodwill under many political banners - Liberal, Conservative, Radical, religious, through the 19th and 20th centuries, what is their reason to exist at all? Unions in tradeable goods sectors should disappear because of powerlessness; unions in non tradeable goods should be replaced by co-operative, not confrontational institutions, so as to prevent the exercise of intolerable monopolistic power.

The Australian and the German models of trade union roles and activities provide the answer. There labour is organised, represented in its special concerns and contribution to the productive process, and trade unions benefit efficiency and profit making and profit sharing.

The trade unions in our country, with their baneful influence on a major 'democratic' party, their falsifications of history and theft of credit for the good brought about so diversely, their self arrogated power over the lives of many who are excluded from any influence upon their policy and decision-taking systems, their long term infiltration by communists for at least the last 50 years and all the damage that has inflicted on an open society, are a horrible infection in the body politic.