Patrick O'Leary and Peter Sheldon, Employer Power and Weakness: How Local and Global Factors have Shaped Australia's Meat Industry and its Industrial Relations.

Barry, Michael

Patrick O'Leary and Peter Sheldon, Employer Power and Weakness: How Local and Global Factors have Shaped Australia's Meat Industry and its Industrial Relations (Victoria: VURRN Press, 2012). pp. 222. $29.95 paper.

This book highlights the role played by employers in regulating the meat industry and, in particular, its troubled record of industrial disputation. In the early chapters, the authors situate the industrial relations of the industry in its wider political economy. This context is helpful in understanding the interplay of local conditions and broader national and international forces in shaping the development of the industry. The authors do a good job of explaining the sluggish development of the industry, which owed much to seasonal and climatic variation, the relatively late introduction of technology into Australia, the problems encountered in moving meat from production to market, and inconsistent quality. Fickle trade also hampered employer coordination, but also important in this regard was the industry's strong tradition of local union activism. Following its early development, the industry expanded more rapidly in the post-World War II period with new markets emerging, particularly to the USA, and later Japan, while there was substantial decline in the traditional UK market. Important in the growth of the export market was the role of international capital, led by a small number of large overseas employers. These employers also had a major role to play in industrial relations.

The authors show that the industry's employers pursued different industrial relations (IR) strategies, being at times aggressive in directly countering union industrial action and at other times accommodating a strong role for state intervention; but at all times being opportunistic. The authors convincingly describe the role of the dominant employer association, the Meat and Allied Trades Federation of Australia (MATFA), in seeking to establish federal awards. This coordinated strategy was aimed at countering the strong tendency of the union to use local activity to whipsaw employers. Employer coordination was also important in assisting employers to gain or maintain control over the work process. Using Edwards' well-known typology, the authors examine employer efforts in countering employee job control by the use of technical and bureaucratic control. The employers achieved technical control through the introduction of the chain system in the 1930s and later Can-Pak, while bureaucratic control came via the introduction of the tally system to regulate payment. MATFA was influential in pushing employers down both of these paths.

Much of the analysis of the book focuses on the period from the 1980s to the 1990s, which was one of pronounced employer militancy, itself a response to chronic over-capacity in meat processing. The fascinating tension that emerges from the book is that between the efforts of the employer association to coordinate the employers' activities on an industry-wide basis, particularly through recourse to the federal award system and integrated bargaining, and the desire of individual employers to maintain autonomy over IR decision-making. This is highlighted in the discussion of the period leading up to the introduction of enterprise bargaining under the Accord, when MATFA initiated an unsuccessful industrial campaign on behalf of its Victorian members and lost much of its control over IR. From this point on, individual employers such as the dominant Australia Meat Holdings (AMH) exploited size and power, and the new scope for enterprise decision making offered under an emerging system of IR decentralisation. The authors convincingly show that the militancy of individual employers was a response to product market pressure arising from chronic excess capacity. They show that through militancy, dominant employers such as AMH were able to secure substantial market advantage in two key ways. First, over-capacity allowed employers to take, or induce, industrial action while not fearing any effect of lost production. Second, enterprise industrial action secured a lower labour cost structure for the likes of AMH, allowing them to pay more for stock while remaining competitive, and thereby marginalising their competitors or squeezing them out of business.

The book is a well-written case study of the importance of industrial relations to the fortunes of what has been one of Australia's key export industries. Indeed, reading this historical narrative, one could draw many striking similarities between the pattern of industrial relations and the role of employers in meat, and those of other significant export industries such as mining. The strength of the book is then that it highlights the often-neglected role that employers, both individually and collectively, play in shaping and re-shaping their industries' industrial relations in line with changes to prevailing product and labour market conditions to remain competitive.

MICHAEL BARRY

Griffith University