This chapter explores the Australian experience with the various ideas of workplace employee representation during the interwar period. As in the other four countries, there was interest in exploring ideas of employee participation in the Australian workplace against a background of industrial and political unrest at the end of the First World War and during its aftermath. While Australians were interested in German works councils, Whitleyism, union-management cooperation and ERPs, they had very little impact in practice. The union movement was particularly hostile to the concept of ERPs and there were doubts about the relevance of the various forms of employee representation in an industrial relations system of state tribunals.

Influences

As in the other countries examined in this book, the industrial and political turmoil during the last years of the First World War and the immediate post-war period heightened Australian interest in ERPs and other management labour strategies. A major strike in NSW in 1917 centred on the state railways and tramways. In 1919–20, there was an unprecedented wave of strikes that included maritime workers and Broken Hill miners. The Russian Revolution and the movement towards the OBU led to conservative hysteria over a possible Bolshevik challenge to Australian capitalism. Some conservatives argued that the Bolshevik threat could be neutralised by raising workers’ living standards through increasing productivity and allowing employees to participate in management decisions. Fears also arose that Australian industry would not survive international competition in the post-war world unless reforms were introduced. While the Bolshevik threat declined in the 1920s, international competition remained an issue.

The Australian state played an important role in promoting new ideas to deal with these issues. The British government communicated directly with the Australian government highlighting the benefits of Whitleyism. In 1919–20, the Commonwealth Advisory Council of Science and Industry published reports on industrial cooperation and welfarism, which included a discussion of Whitleyism and examined case studies of employee representation such as that at Rowntree in Great Britain and Filene's Sons & Co. in the US.