Neoliberal Labour Governments and the Union Response: The Politics of the End of Labourism, By Jason Schulman (2015) Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 167 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-30316-5

How should scholars respond to the work of other scholars? Should they accept their work on trust or should they be sceptical? The answer is the latter. It is only by relentless testing that scholars can overcome fears that they are not in error when they make prognostications. Theoretical work should be examined in terms of its logic and predictive ability. Various documents and numerical data which underpin empirical accounts should be examined to test whether or not the accounts provided accord with the evidence upon which the analysis is based. There is no substitute for not examining primary sources, especially in this digital age where, especially government statements, legislation and the decisions of courts and tribunals are readily available. Obscure documents can be obtained through inter-library loans, or by writing/emailing organizations and individuals responsible for their authorship. It is not enough to stand on the shoulders of others; what sometimes appear as shoulders are nothing more than feet of clay. These fundamental issues of scholarship are relevant to Jason Schulman’s analysis of the relationship between Labour governments in Britain, New Zealand and Australia (where the spelling is Labor), and what Schulman calls ‘the unions’ in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. Much of his analysis draws on the Australian experience which, dear reader, you are either lucky or unlucky; I was a Johnny on the spot and have extensively commented upon this. Schulman has only one primary source document to what happened in Australia during this period—an Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 1997 publication on Labour Statistics. His reference material does not include the eight agreements, Accords, between the Labour government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), legislation at both the national and state level, decisions of Courts and industrial tribunals and other documents produced by a wide array of interested parties. As a result, his account of Australian experience, in both general terms and specifics, is far from convincing. I doubt if he understand the nuances of Australian industrial relations during this period of continuous change. Here is a sad empirical example. He says that, in 1974, Australia lost more than 30 million working days in industrial disputes (p. 71). An examination of ABS data will show that 6.2 million working days were lost. Schulman is concerned with examining the relationship between a Labour Party and ‘the unions’, and the embracing of Neoliberal policies by the former. In both the British and New Zealand cases he maintains that ‘the unions’ were too fragmented and/or were so committed to keeping Conservative parties out of power that they mounted little resistance to their respective Labour parties adoption of Neoliberalism. The Australian case is seen as being different in that, under the Accord, ‘the unions’ were able to slow down the adoption of such policies. The counter argument that will be mounted here is that the adoption of Neoliberal policies in the labour market was speeded up rather than slowed down by unions in Australia. The ACTU was a strong supporter of the need for changes to enhance the growth of the Australian economy. It supported generic reform of the labour market and more specific reforms of work practices to make firms more efficient; reform of the union movement away from a craft/occupational basis to industry unions to make it easier for employers to bargain at the workplace; and most importantly, was in the vanguard of the campaign for a system of enterprise bargaining and of attacks on the Industrial Relations Commission for its ‘intransigence’ in adopting such an approach. The Accord Partners, based on ‘new interpretations’ …