Lights, camera, collective action!

Professor Stiglitz gave the inaugural Laurie Carmichael Lecture in Melbourne on 20 July, entitled ‘The Economic benefits of Trade Unions’.

Former ACTU Assistant Secretary Laurie Carmichael (1925-2018) was “a visionary, an intellectual, an organiser, a change-maker and a unionist through and through”, said Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Secretary Sally McManus.

In this proud tradition, Professor Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, laid out a vision for transformative change.

In the beginning

“Before unions, in the early days of the industrial revolution, GDP was going up, but wages went down and working conditions got worse,” Professor Stiglitz said. “If you’ve read Dickens, you know how bad conditions were in 19th century UK.

“And even as recently as the early part of the 20th century, working conditions were terrible in the United States. Workers were locked up in factories, and there was a fire – the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [25 March 1911] in which hundreds of people died. That provided impetus not only for unionisation, but also for social legislation.

“It has only been through the action of unions that workers’ conditions got better. The unions made a big difference as the US opened up – it led to a reversal of these terrible conditions that had prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Constant struggle and collective action

“But it was a struggle, employers have always resisted,” Professor Stiglitz said. “They want to get labour for as low a price as possible. In the early days of the founding of America, the way we got cheap labour was slavery from Africa. And when [the ruling class] couldn’t get slaves, they created frameworks to keep wages as low as possible. It was only through collective action that workers were able to improve their wellbeing.

Read full article in ie magazine.

Published September 2022. Monica Crouch, journalist.