The degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa was conferred on Ross Murdoch Martin, MA NZ, PhD ANU, HonDLitt Macq., Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University at the Division of Economic and Financial Studies graduation ceremony on Wednesday 19 April 2006.
Emeritus Professor Ross Martin delivered the Occasional Address.
"Chancellor, Members of the university, Graduates and Guests,
I’m deeply honoured by the conferring of the honorary doctorate. I’m also honoured by being given the opportunity to contribute to a ceremony that’s of such great personal significance to so many here this afternoon.
Among those most affected in this sense are the parents who have come to witness their daughter’s or son’s achievement. You’ll be feeling proud of your child; and rightly so. But you should as well, I suggest, be feeling proud of yourself. For your sacrifices, your support and love have been critical to this outcome.
But, of course, the highest place of honour here today belongs to the graduates. Whether this is your first degree or your second, you’ve achieved a most momentous personal goal; and you, too, have every right to be proud of yourself.
I hope, however, that mingled with the pride, and with the inevitable sense of relief that the long ordeal is finally over, there’s at least a tiny tinge of regret. I’d like to think that the university experience enriched you in ways that mean you’ll recall your time here with affection, and perhaps even a little nostalgia.
I hope, too, that you’re excited about entering the world of work as a qualified professional. It’s a world, as you’ll be well aware, in which organization is king. And among the organizations that you may encounter, at some remove during your career, are those commonly known as trade unions.
Now, in countries like Australia that are historically distinguished by a free market economy and a liberal democratic political system, the basic mission of unions has traditionally been protective. By ‘protective’, I mean that unions have sought to redress the imbalance in power that typically exists between a single employee and a single employer; and they’ve done so by creating a collective employee strength that can be brought to bear in the negotiation and settlement of the terms on which individuals are employed.
In recent years, Australian unions have come under mounting attack from a school of thought which argues that unions encourage rigidities in the employment relationship that unduly impede economic productivity. The influence of this school of thought is reflected in the terms of the federal Work Choices Act, as it’s commonly known, which was enacted in 2005 and came into force just three weeks ago.
The Work Choices Act is frankly hostile to trade unions. One measure of that hostility is provided by a single point of comparison with the corresponding American and British legislation. In both those countries employers are legally required to recognize and to negotiate in good faith with a union that has the clear support of a majority of their employees. The Work Choices Act, in contrast, is entirely silent on this point - which means that Australian employers, as a matter of law, are under no similar obligation.
In April last year, the federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations foreshadowed the way that the issue of a minimum wage would be dealt with under the Work Choices Act. He also claimed authoritative support for this policy in the shape of an encyclical letter that Pope John Paul II issued in 1981, under the Latin title of Laborem Exercens (the English title is: ‘On Human Work’).
Laborem Exercens is one of four connected papal encyclicals published in the course of the 20th century. What connects them is that each of them celebrates principles originally set out in the epoch-making encyclical letter that Pope Leo XIII issued, in 1891, under the title of Rerum Novarum (English title: ‘On the Condition of Labour’).
One of Rerum Novarum’s several historic initiatives was its legitimation of trade unions. Leo XIII, in other words, put the authority of the Roman Catholic Church behind the proposition that unions are rightly protective of the material interests of employees. Indeed, the Pope expressly nominated what he called ‘workingmen’s unions’ as one of three agencies (the other two were the Church and the State) that were chiefly responsible for protecting working people against the evils of what he called ‘unchecked competition’ in the economic sphere.
Since 1891, Leo XIII’s endorsement of unions and their protective purpose has been reaffirmed and elaborated in each of the four encyclicals stemming from Rerum Novarum. Thus, in Laborem Exercens, the encyclical which the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations cited in support of his minimum wage policy, John Paul II described trade unions in the following terms:
Their task is to defend the existential interests of workers in all sectors in which their rights are concerned. The experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life, especially in modern industrialized societies.
Now, it seems to me, pace the Minister, that these papal evaluations of unions are utterly at odds with the evaluation implicit in the Minister’s Work Choices Act of 2005.
The Act radically changes, in favour of employers, the previous legal balance of power between employers and employees. I can accept that some such correction in that balance may well be necessary and beneficial for productivity and national economic growth.
On the other hand, the Act’s calculated marginalisation of unions involves a correction so extreme as to raise (or at least not put beyond the bounds of possibility) a spectre. And that, I suggest, is the spectre of something approaching the kind of ‘unchecked competition’ in the labour market that prompted Pope Leo XIII, 115 years ago, to proclaim to the world that trade unions have a proper and critical role to play in protecting working people."
Contact: Skaidy Gulbis
Phone: +61 2 9850 4774
