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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.[1] 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’ of the Australian Constitution, which Schulman doesn’t refer to, introduced legislative changes to reduce the powers of the Commission, an institution unions had utilised in the past to defend and advance worker interests.

Unions agreed to reductions in real wages in exchange for tax cuts which flowed to others including the well off, who benefited disproportionately in early incantations of such deals, with an opportunity cost for the government’s budget and reductions in welfare benefits for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Union rationalisation involved unions devoting time, energy and income to the bureaucratic problem of knowing how to rationalise themselves when employers and business groups adopted aggressive anti union campaigns. It was akin to unions trying to rearrange the deck chairs as the Titanic sank. Union leaders, like politicians, can find themselves hypnotised by the nostrums of Neoliberalism.

Reference has already been made to Schulman’s use of the phrase ‘the unions’. He continually uses it throughout the book, not just in the title. An alternative term could be ‘unions’. Schulman’s usage implies that unions are homogenous, where the alternative does not and lends itself to variability in the goals and behaviour of unions. Or to look at this in another way, Schulman has a class based if not Leninist view of unions. It is not clear that Schulman comprehends the raison d’être of unions. On page 85 he makes a reference to ‘the union ranks’. Industrial relations scholars have traditionally used the term ‘union rank and file’. Scholars, of course, can use whatever terms they like; maybe his term will catch on.

Schulman would be well advised to consult some early seminal works on what are called ‘labour movement theories’ to enhance his understanding of unions. At a minimum, he could start with the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb[2] and then move onto the works of Robert Hoxie[3] and Selig Perlman.[4] In different ways, they point to the variability of union behaviour. For work on unions in Britain and Australia in the period covered by his book, Schulman should consult Ed Blissett[5] and Barbara Pocock.[6]

Schulman finishes his book with a quotation pointing to how social democratic organizations, such as Labour parties and unions, are not committed to the overthrow of capitalism and increasingly are abandoning their principles and losing their way (p. 117). It is not clear that Labour parties and unions in Britain, New Zealand and Australia were ever committed to abolishing capitalism. There has been no equivalent of the storming of the Bastille or a Boston tea party. Moreover, is it that startling to reveal that Labour/Labor governments adopt policies which they believe will help maintain themselves in power? This was something that was observed by Robert Michels[7] with his notion of ‘the iron law of oligarchy’ more than a century ago. In the Australian case, there is a strong tradition of scholarship on how Labour governments do little more than try to civilise capitalism.[8] Schulman’s problem is his inability to recognize that, in Australia if not elsewhere, this is an object also of unions.