Organising Union: Transport Workers Face the Challenge of Change, 1989–2013 by Mark Hearn (review)

Mark Hearn has written an engaging account of the recent history of the NSW branch of the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU). He skilfully frames his examination of the TWU within the broader context of the neoliberal ascendancy of the last 30 years, with its concomitant assault on trade unions through the combined pressures of deregulation and globalised supply chains. He also brings a strong human element to the study: it draws on interviews with union members, delegates and officials, painting a rich portrait of the TWU’s responses to the relentless, fast-paced process of change in the transport, logistics and aviation sectors.

The book picks up where another history of the TWU left off (Bradley Bowden, Driving Force: The History of the Transport Workers’ Union of Australia 1883–1992), although that work had a wider focus on the evolution of the national union and its state branches. It concluded with an assessment of the TWU’s growing cynicism about key elements of the Prices and Incomes Accord between the Hawke–Keating Labor Governments and the ACTU over the period 1983–96.

Hearn continues that story in Chapter 3 of his book, examining the later years of the Accord and the TWU’s outright resistance to ACTU-imposed notions of wage restraint. The union’s leadership was particularly embittered by the Keating Government’s 1993 reform legislation, which pushed further away from the Australian conciliation and arbitration tradition. The new law promoted enterprise-based bargaining, including through non-union agreements: a bridge too far for the TWU. Hearn explains that the rift exposed internal divisions within the TWU. The NSW branch held deep suspicions in the 1980s that its Melbourne-based federal office leaders were far too close to the ACTU. After NSW Secretary Steve Hutchins took over as Federal President of the union in 1994, the TWU broke away from the Accord – pursuing a 15 per cent industry-wide wage increase – and ultimately disaffiliated from the ACTU.

The book’s title, “Organising Union,” is quite deliberate. In Chapter 6, Hearn considers the TWU’s embracing of the US-style organising model to address membership decline, adopted by many Australian unions from the late 1990s. By this time, the TWU was back in the ACTU fold, and its energetic NSW Secretary Tony Sheldon drove the adoption of the peak body’s organising approach: “a determined shift in union culture” involving the development of a wide network of rank-and-file delegates and activists to recruit new members through a focus on key workplace issues. Hearn points to some modest initial success with this strategy. However, it has not halted the continuing slide in TWU membership levels, which declined by 15.5 per cent between 2003 and 2017.

Increasingly the union has zeroed in on the connection between long-distance transport pay rates and road safety, drawing attention to competitive commercial pressures that place drivers and the community at risk through a NSW Government Inquiry in 2000–2001 and the campaign to establish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. The latter is explored in Chapter 12, Hearn noting that the TWU’s success in having the Gillard Government establish the tribunal in 2012 to independently determine “safe rates” was short-lived. Just as the tribunal’s first minimum rates ruling was scheduled to take effect in early 2016, the Turnbull Government abolished the tribunal following a high-profile campaign of opposition by employers.

A recurring theme in the book is the battle fought by the TWU against various manifestations of economic restructuring in the globalised economy and what US labour law scholar David Weil calls the “fissuring of work.” Hearn examines the union’s mixed success in contesting the integration of transport and distribution (the “logistics revolution”) led by companies such as Toll; the emergence of less reputable operators, threatening driver safety, in the cash-in-transit sector; the collapse of National Textiles; the decade-long fight...