Unions and Arbitration: A Dependent Relationship?

The analysis of Australian union behaviour, growth and structure has centred on the relationship between unions and arbitration. To varying degrees it has been assumed that Australian unions are, through their involvement and legal incorporation into the arbitral system of labour market regulation and dispute settlement, dependent on arbitration for the supply of resources critical to their functions. The nature and extent of this so called dependency relationship has, however, remained empirically unexplored. Yet, it is clear that if this dependency relationship was a valid description of the relationship between unions and arbitration, its implications for the survival of unions under a different labour law regime would be profound. This paper, through the investigation of four representative historical case studies, questions the validity of the dependency hypothesis and its usefulness as a framework to understand how Australian unions behave. A number of concerns emerge from the case analysis. To begin with, the general interpretation of key historical moments, which the dependency hypothesis relies upon, does not capture the diversity of experience and behaviour evident in these four cases. While arbitration played an important role in influencing union behaviour through altering the costs and incentives of pursing particular strategies, the evidence suggests that a range of other factors account for this diversity. Moreover, arbitration was not an immutable or unpliable institutional structure which unions faced. Rather, part of their strategic interplay with it was concerned with shaping the system to further their own goals through the use of different ‘bundles’ of political and industrial resources at the disposal of individual unions. Most importantly, to the extent these unions were dependent organizations, they were dependent on a range of institutional and organizational mechanisms for the supply of critical resources. This then of course, makes the concept of dependence as it has been employed in this literature, a nonsense. This paper was originally prepared for the Industrial Relations Seminar Series, School of Industrial Relations & Organizational Behaviour, UNSW, May 27, 1996. I would like to thank participants of this seminar for their helpful comments.