Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the Wirundjeri Community as the traditional owners of this country. Today they are the custodians of the cultural heritage of this land.
I am a unionist and a community activist. I have been an organiser with the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance for the last 12 months, and prior to that I worked for another union, the Southern Shark and Gill Net Fishermen’s Association. I have been involved in student politics as a Women’s Officer, Union President and as Education Officer with the National Union of Students. I am in my second term as a Councillor with the City of Yarra, and I am the Chair of Planning and Community Development.
As you could imagine I have a passion for the community and a passion for social change. I’m also involved in the Women’s Participation in Local Government Coalition and go out to speak to women in regional communities about empowerment and how to get involved in your community.
One particular focus I have, being a unionist and a community activist, is about encouraging participation in democracy, focusing not only on women but also on young people.
I’m part of Trade Union Training Australia, which is organising training programs at the ACTU at the moment. There’s also another participant here today taking part in that program. The program is really about how do we organise, and not only in the workforce but also in our communities, in terms of affecting social change. Currently there are 17 organisers in Victoria across 10 different unions taking part in this program. It is focussed on getting younger people involved in the union movement.
Today’s discussion is really about strategies to oppose, or how do we deal with Howard’s industrial relations reform, and how we revitalise the union movement. There are some pretty big issues, a lot of challenges before us. I am a strong believer that organisational change and a cultural shift can only come about by the empowerment and education of members within our community and members within the workforce.
Today I will talk to you purely around organising and educating. They are key strategies that we need to start raising consciousness out there of these regressive changes in our community. We have a number of mission statements as unionists and community activists about effective social change. One of our main intents is to build the strength of the union membership base, involve the members in discussion and decisions around workplace change, develop skills of union delegates and workplace activists by enabling them to play a leading role in their workplace and across workplaces and industries.
We need to provide and find recruitment opportunities to effectively find new members and we need to retain existing members by ensuring the union is still relevant and dynamic. In doing so, we need to identify new workplace leaders and activists and educate our workers about collectivism. We also need to build genuine organisations.
Our job as union officials is to shift people away from individualisation across to collectivism and community.
Two main issues in the education process are not only around the worker and community, but it’s also about union officials too. For quite some time there has been a power imbalance between the workers and the union movement and management. This is our challenge to align those union and community values within the worker.
Regarding the education of union officials, it is critical that our officials are proactive not only within their individual industrial workloads – really get out there - but also within their own professional development. I’ve heard quite often from senior union officials that training is a waste of time, we know what’s best and we should just get on and do what we’ve done for the last 80 years. Well I’m sorry, that’s not where the union movement needs to head, it needs to be progressive and embrace change, to take a look at how we have organised in the past, some of the big campaigns that have been run through the ACTU and also the local campaigns that have worked on the ground.
Organisers and workplace leaders need to establish their own toolkits of skills to be adaptable in different working environments. It needs to go from learning the basic principles of organising so it can be utilised right across different industries.
In terms of empowerment and education of the workers, the key issues in dealing with these regressive changes that are coming in include having factual information presented in manageable ways, not just a broad problem, but ‘chunking it down’ into manageable parts to be able to ‘problem-solve’ around those issues.
As organisers we get out into the workforce, and union organisers need to be more committed to do so as we come into this new environment. We need to explore what the issues are and particularly in non-unionised areas, discuss the issues, have empathy with those workers and work out strategies and techniques to elevate the issues and move forward.
Through doing so we utilise a number of frameworks. One of them is a simple ‘anger - hope – action’ framework which is about getting the information to the workers, looking at and learning from experiences not only in different industries or sites down the road in the same industry, but also looking at what’s happened in places like New Zealand and the UK, and then saying that it is time to take some action, and give people hope that change can come about.
I want to read just a small case study pertinent to a number of the speeches here today. It involved a campaign that was organised in New Zealand about community involvement in contracting out. In New Zealand hospitals, union members had big issues with the contracting out of catering services.
What happened here was that a coalition was formed between community people and union organisers. In each battle the workers formed a fightback plan that involved on-the-job action but also their surrounding communities.
In South Auckland, Pacific Islander members took the issue to their community by involving their churches. Each Sunday the issue was discussed at the local churches service and prayers were said for the workers and the patients at the hospital. In this way the Pacific Island community learnt very quickly about what was happening at their hospital and came in force to the pickets and public meetings.
At Auckland’s North Shore Hospital, members enclosed a leaflet about contracting out of catering services with each Meals-on-Wheels, which go out to a large number of elderly and disabled people in the community. This resulted in letters to the editor and to the management at the hospital.
So community campaigns can help, they can work, and we need to consistently build those alliances. We’ve been fortunate enough to have with us now at the ACTU an organiser from New Zealand who is working on the campaign at the ACTU dealing with those changes by the Howard government. This indicates that the union movement is heading in the right direction, we are moving from that traditional service model across to a model that’s more about organising and empowering. So we go into sites where there may be no union members, we identify those who may be activists and workplace leaders and talk through the issues and come up with campaigns around the issues. Through the educational material provided through journalists, the ACTU or other organisations, we demystify what the issues are about.
There was an interesting article in The Age a couple of weeks ago by Paul Robinson, the Industrial Reporter, who is also the Vice-President of the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance. He and one of his colleagues wrote an article debunking the notion of Howard’s idea that you are better off under an AWA than a collective agreement. It was interesting how the misuse of information and data can give a perception that AWAs are better. The article demystified the issue by putting it purely in economic terms – you were actually not better off. We have issues with AWAs – a number of journalists have been offered AWAs, particularly in Adelaide and Queensland. They are the people doing additional overtime, working a lot longer hours than those on collective agreements. But with AWAs you can appoint a ‘bargaining agent’, and at Ticketmaster we have had 86 people on AWAs, and once they were all due to expire, we organised around that. So there are opportunities to organise in the new environment. However, we must still rebuke those changes and organise around them.
The only way we are going to change the way things do happen and the culture within workplaces is by empowering and educating the workers. We do that through training, establishing workplace consultative committees, and nurturing workers to take control over workplace issues and practices.
Revitalising the union movement requires a lot more discussion than the time we have here today. There is a huge age gap in union membership between the ages of 20 and 35. We need to be diverse, to encourage youth participation, and the program run by the Organising Works centre at the ACTU is one of those that goes some way to achieving that. It has been going for 11 years, and there is a number of people who have come through that. But we certainly need to increase the participation in that kind of program.
It is our role as community activists or agents of change to create opportunities to change the environment. The opportunity for this change is the union. More people will require a union’s help because their jobs and wages and conditions will be under threat from Howard’s agenda. So it is a real opportunity for unions to get out there and get active.
Through our organising techniques, the shifts can be achieved in the workplace and the broader community. Unions have been an effective opposition and they can continue to be so only through the transfer of knowledge and skill development to organise and empower the members and potential members.
Howard has set a challenge for the unions. He and his anti-community and anti-union cohort present an organising opportunity to unions and community activists. The challenge is ours. We must challenge and question all regressive reforms and undertake it in an organised an inclusive manner for all workers, union and non-union. It is integral for the movement to remain well-disciplined and coordinated. That is a really important point.
Ultimately information is power. If we want to empower workers, we must have accurate and factual information that is clear, concise and easily understood. This information cannot be sustained as part of the old regime of organising tactics and the control of power and knowledge. We need to demystify the issues around workplace concerns and get out and get organised about it.