Accord

From Freepedia

For other uses, see Honda Accord.

In Australian Industrial Relations the Accord period was a period of industrial peace and class collaboration, suggested by the Communist Party of Australia in the late 1970s as a response to a perceived productivity crisis, and actively taken up and implemented as government policy after 1983 by an Australian Labor Party government under Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

The Accord was an agreement between trade unions, the government, and employers to restrict wage demands, inflation and price rises respectively. This was seen as a method to increase productivity without reducing the living standards of Australians. At the beginning of the Accord, only one union, the New South Wales Nurses Federation (then controlled by radicals), voted against the Accord. The Accord broke down in the late 1980s and lead to the enterprise bargaining period.

Criticisms of the Accord generally come from the revolutionary left within Australia, who claim that it kept real wages stagnant for over ten years, destroyed union membership and strength, and caused real suffering for members of the Australian working class.