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MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY 267

of democratically determined collective further advanced through the Liberal/
values and institutions’, as state sovereignty National government’s 1996 Workplace
is increasingly surrendered to large global Relations Act, which introduced individual
corporations (Leys, 2001: 4). In this shift, bargaining and a variety of measures that
market ideology (competition and individu- consolidated managerial prerogative, giving
alism) has penetrated every facet of society. corporations virtually unlimited scope in
Trade unions have not been immune. As a driving restructuring. During the period of
consequence, some trade unions have these changes, union membership in Australia
assumed an expanded role: they are now the has declined steeply. The Australian unions
advocates of market-driven politics. They are seem to be in free fall, with membership
instruments of ‘best practice’; they are a down to a mere 23.1% of the workforce in
driver of competition and efficiency. August 2002. This slide needs to be viewed
Australia is a good illustration of this rad- against the backdrop of their relative histori-
ical shift. Over the past two decades, the role cal strength, which had remained above 50%
and purpose of trade unionism has been for all but 13 years (11 of those years following
defined in these expanded, marketized terms: the Great Depression: 1931–1941) between
many have become partners in corporate 1920 and 1980 (Peetz, 1998).
restructuring. The Australian Council of These developments reflect a key feature
Trade Unions (ACTU), following the lead of of the Second Great Transformation – the
the newly elected Hawke/Keating govern- declining power and influence of trade
ment in the 1980s, embraced a positive con- unionism, deemed necessary to secure flexi-
ception of restructuring – the process created ble markets and the construction of unequal
efficient, competitive corporations that were worlds of work. The restructuring flowing
integrated into the global economy, seizing from rapid liberalization in the North is lead-
the opportunities of global market access. ing to what Burawoy (1985) calls ‘hege-
This vision flowed from the ACTU’s in prin- monic despotism’. This erosion of the
ciple support for the economic liberalization workplace power of trade unions and of the
agenda of the Hawke/Keating Labour benefits they had won for their members is
Government and their unambiguous commit- matched by the erosion of the welfare state
ment to neo-liberal globalization, to an open and the rights to a social wage, which had
economy and to market-driven politics. This been accumulated through decades of work-
strategic shift signaled ‘an historic water- ing class struggle. The sphere of the public
shed’ heralding a new era of partnership, of and the social, which had been established by
‘cooperative industrial relations’ that would the counter-movement in response to the
dissolve ‘ingrained distrust’ between employ- domination of the market during the First
ers and unions, improve productivity and Great Transformation, is being rolled back by
‘minimize traditional conflict’, thereby ener- the forces of neo-liberal globalization
gizing market-driven politics (Ogden, 1992: unleashed in the Second Great Transformation.
11). Many unions, as agents of class interests, The impact of the two Great Trans-
dissolved before this new orientation. formations in the North is illustrated
Ironically, this embrace of restructuring by schematically in Figure 18.1.
the ACTU did not signal a new era of union Much of the literature on transformation
growth. Rather, the steady decline of trade has been written from the perspective of the
unionism in Australia is a feature of the advanced industrialized countries of the
1990s, as the Labour government opened the North. These studies have taken the Northern
door to non-union employment relations, for model, the particular, and made it universal.
if flexibility is the essence of market efficiency, When Africa is discussed in this literature it
industrial laws need to be reformed accord- is treated as ‘a black hole’, a marginal part of
ingly. The Labour government’s reforms were the world described by Castells (1996) as the