unions
29 Sep 2008
Back To The Picket-Line
On the Waterfront: MUA dispute, 1998
To convince a new generation of workers that they can fight for their rights, unions need to discard failed strategies of compromise and concession, argues Tom Bramble
Union membership in Australia now sits at just 19 per cent of the workforce, the lowest level since the 1900s. With membership in decline, Australian trade unions are in a dire situation. In industries ranging from mining to telecommunications, several of their strongholds have been blasted to bits. Worse, less than one in ten young workers signs up to the union cause.And yet unions retain a public relevance as great today as ever before. The Your Rights at Work campaign was largely responsible for bringing down the Howard government. One half of all working Australians regularly report that they would "rather be in a trade union".
Why is it that unions have become so weak and yet retain such pulling power? The conservatives see only one side of the question. Commentators such as Janet Albrechtsen argue that the days of "union domination," class conflict and strikes are a thing of the past: "We're all individuals now". Others suggest that the problem is the decline of blue-collar industry. The sons and daughters of yesterday's wharfies and coal miners are call centre operators and Starbucks staff, genetically impervious to the appeal of trade unionism.
These arguments are as absurd as they are self-serving. If "we're all individuals now", why was WorkChoices such an electoral stinker and why did the ACTU's Your Rights at Work campaign strike such a chord? If structural change in the workforce is the problem, why were the unions able to turn the timid staff associations of nurses and teachers of the 1950s into militant unions in the 2000s?
The new employer militancy exemplified today by Qantas and Telstra is one obvious partial explanation. Employers have donned their hard hats and taken an axe to unionism amongst their workforces, sacking union activists, ripping up established arrangements and preventing union organisers from meeting staff.
Governments too have been gunning for trade unions. Waves of government industrial relations "reforms" have sought to box the unions in, with WorkChoices being the most obvious case. The Rudd Government shows no signs of wanting to reverse this trend.
But hostile bosses and governments can't be the decisive factor explaining union decline. There is nothing new in their hostility to unions — the Melbourne Club has never resonated with the sound of employers discussing ways to make the life of union organisers easier. And unions have been able to grow in the past even with hostile governments in power, as they showed during the Fraser years.
The crucial factor explaining union decline is that unions have forgotten how to fight. Whereas the Albrechtsens of the world suggest that workers won't join unions because they are identified with conflict, the historical record reveals that it is exactly when unions do fight for workers' rights that workers join in droves. During the strike wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, union membership soared by 32 per cent.
The beginning of the rot came precisely at the time that the leaders of Australian unions embarked on a cunning plan to strengthen trade unionism by forswearing workers' most powerful weapon — the strike. This was the Accord arrangement between the ACTU and the Hawke and Keating Governments, negotiated in the lead up to the 1983 Federal election and in place until 1996. The ACTU leadership policed the union movement for 13 years, rubber-stamped a 13 per cent cut in real award wages under Hawke and then engineered a series of wage-fixing schemes that allowed workers to boost their wages only by accepting work intensification and give-backs. As workers saw their wages and conditions sold off by their own unions in the name of "workplace reform", so unions lost their appeal. If unions wouldn't fight for better wages and conditions or for job security, what incentive was there to join?
With the election of Howard, union strategy did not change in its essentials. Cosy chats with government ministers were gone, but union leaders still insisted that "they had to keep their powder dry" when facing the most sustained decline in union coverage in Australian history. Even when staring down Chris Corrigan in the 1998 Waterfront Dispute, the nation's union leaders were desperate to ensure that the massive sympathy for the wharfies did not develop into support for large solidarity strikes. The most urgent wish of the union leaders was for "partnership" with business. But with union membership plummeting, business could now sideline the union leaders, leaving them clutching at thin air.
The pressure of a world economy going from bad to worse urged bosses onwards: a dollar saved today by gouging the workforce could be the difference between being prey or predator in the corporate shark pool.
The conservatives are wrong. It is not that workers are "so over" trade unions. The Your Rights at Work campaign shows the deep pool of support that unions can draw from. The 2007 election result confirmed it. The challenge facing unions is to put aside the failed strategies of compromise and concession pursued over the past quarter century and reach back to the weapons of yesterday that actually built trade unions — the strike, the picket line and workers' solidarity.
Tom Bramble's new book, Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide, published by Cambridge University Press Australia, is out now.
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Large employers have also become adept at projecting a caring image to employees.
A large retail hardware chain I worked for did that very well , but the devil was in the detail.
We worked a contracted number of yearly hours , no overtime , banked hours instead . The suprises came after you had exceeded your contracted hours for the year . The most alarming was the requirement to use banked hours in lieu of sick leave , this caught out one student, who had been banking hours in anticipation of them being paid out at the end of the financial year to cover university fees , on suffering a long period of illness found his bank of hours exhausted , no fees and owing hours as he had fallen behind.
Hours in excess of your contract hours didn’t attract sick leave or holiday leave entitlements , effectively discounting your hourly rate.
A similar story with the annual performance bonus , which when push came to shove was worded as a gratuity , one which could be refused.
Why ?
Apathy ,less than 5% of the employees where members of the SDA . You noticed that overtime anyone who was the primary breadwinner looked for work elsewhere , leaving primarily second income earners , semi retired and students as the main pool of employees. Nobody with the motivation to organize for a better deal.
Trust me if you pointed out the rorts you were slapped down hard by management.
I hope you gave them heaps Jonah.
My brother is a middle -aged Mechanic working in the Brisbane area.
He has never in his life been a member of a union, being well and truly discouraged by his many employers over those years, including the Holden dealership where he trained, who have all told all employees that if they so much as looked at a Union, they would be sacked. Now, when he is employed, always for much less than a living wage, he is not provided with a pay-slip, enquiries as to pay rates are ignored, Superannuation and Tax are more often than not, NOT paid in to the relevant required places, often disappearing completely (the Tax Office tell my brother that they expect never to recover his lost Super, and when he requires a Tax Statement from a previous employer, they more often than not say, "You have never been employed here", and he has no proof to offer anyone). He is required, as are all his fellow employees, to work many hours per week of unpaid overtime. Any argument, any query, and they are instantly sacked. They have families to feed and house and clothe, and they are too old generally to go to the Coal mines, so they are forced to comply with the employers wishes.
For about a year now, we have been trying to get the Unions and the Queensland and Federal Governments to do something about this situation, and have been continuously fobbed off. We get letters back from Government minders telling us that my brother should join a Union, and the Unions say that indeed he should join a union, otherwise they will do nothing, while being well aware that my brother would pay the ultimate sacrifice, if he did. One can clearly see why Unions are a dying breed, if this is their attitude.
So he is supposed to go to a Union, be immediately sacked, and be declared ‘black’ by all employers in the district. For what???
I was under the impression that when a Government passes and promulgates a Law, they are supposed to enforce those Laws. We have been given web references to the relevant Laws in relation to employment (which say that employers MUST issue a pay-docket to the employee, and various other things, which they do NOT do) by the Bligh Government, but they lay all responsibility for enforcing those Laws onto the poor bloody employee, KNOWING that they can NOT do so. So damned cynical, they have no intention of upsetting their voters and contributors in the Small Business Sector.
The Bligh Government passed their responsibility on to the Workplace Ombudsman, who has contacted us, and wants to get all the details from my brother so that they may, perhaps, take action against various employers. When asked if my brother’s name would come up when such enquiries were made, they said his name would! So, my brother squeals on the employers, the Ombudsman squeals to the employers, and my brother again gets sacked, never to be re-employed at his trade in his living area. One can clearly see just who gets shafted by all of this, and it is definitely NOT the law-breaking employers. How is it that the various Governments (and Julia Gillard’s office has clearly indicated a total lack of interest in this, when I eventually did get a reply), the Ombudsman, the Unions can not make their own enquiries and take action according to established LAW?????
I was active in trying to get rid of Work Choices, having been a Union Member for 36years, I supported Rights at Work, but what we get from Gillard and Rudd is a very slightly watered down and name changed Work Choices, while the Government we elected to get rid of inequalities at work and elsewhere, buddies up to Big Business, and reaps heaps of donations from them, and makes damn sure that the Employer is still BOSS!!!!
So what do we VOTE for?!
Dazza.
Great article Tom. It is good to see that beneath the surface there is still intelligent discussion being held on trade unions and the symptoms of a larger disease being told.
For myself and most of my friends there is no union to join. Industries like IT, design, multimedia and communications etc. have no union that can represent them. There are many times, years ago I would have loved union representation to fight for fair wages and conditions working at dodgy IT companies.