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Issue No. 132 | 19 April 2002 |
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Brand Spanking
Interview: Generation Next Legal: We’re All Terrorists Now Unions: Holding the Baby International: Taking It To The Streets History: Off the Wall Economics: Financing International Development Satire: Queen Mum's Life Tragically Cut Short Review: Return of The People’s Parliament Poetry: Silent Night
The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Week in Review
 Free Trade??Where's the Silver Tail?
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Interview Generation NextInterview with Peter Lewis
As someone who's been active in both wings of the Labour movement, the political and the industrial wings, how do you contrast the two cultures? Both the Party and the union movement have been around for a long time now, over 100 years and they are very established institutions. The organised labour movement in Australia both politically, and industrially, has achieved a hell of a lot over 100 plus years but both need to recognise changing times. There's a drastic need for both union renewal and ALP renewal. What are the differences in culture? Well the ALP seeks to win elections and form governments; hopefully to advance the common good. You have a lot of good principled people in the Labor Party; but you also have a few spivs and carpetbaggers frankly, who are on about nothing but themselves. Unions exist as a vehicle for people to improve their lives at work. For the union movement, I think the greatest problem is it's a very big ship to turn around. I just think there has to be a sense of urgency today at all levels of the union movement. You're someone who's had a choice out of working full time in the political or the industrial wing. What was it that made you choose to work full time in the Union? I don't think that unions have an automatic right to exist and if unions don't switch resources to grass roots organising, if they don't genuinely try and develop workplace leaders and shift resources to growth, I've got no doubt that we'll be down to American levels of density. Given that, it seems to me that the most important job to be done in the labour movement in Australia is to re-build union strength, so that people can exercise some say over their lives at work. I think one of the really healthy things over the last five years is that a hell of a lot of young activists are devoting themselves to working in unions rather than pursuing Parliamentary careers and that's enormously important for our renewal. You took on the leadership of the ASU Services Branch in NSW at the age of 30, what were the major immediate challenges you had to face moving into that role? Our Branch is an amalgamation of ten small unions. Those unions were across the public, private and community sectors, but the traditional strengths and the majority of members have always come from the public sector - the railways, the water industry, the electricity industry, the ports. In all of those areas employment levels have declined markedly and will continue to decline. In other areas of our coverage, employment is increasing, yet union penetration is minimal. The ASU is obliged to organise workers in the community sector and in those private sector areas of our coverage. No other union is going to do it. If the ASU doesn't do it people working in those industries aren't going to be organised. And if they're not organised, they'll suffer. The ASU project - if you want to call it that - is to organise workers in the community sector and in those private sector areas where workers haven't been well organised before. That's not to say we're going to forget or neglect our coverage in the public sector. We've got a very important role to ensure workers in the water industry and the railways industry for example are organised and we're going to continue to do that. But we have to vigorously pursue growth in those areas of our coverage where workers haven't been organised before. So how do you go about doing that? Let's look at the community sector for example. The ASWU which is now part of our union, is one of the youngest unions in Australia. It wasn't formed until the late 70's. There was no history of worker organisation in the community sector. Many in the labour movement saw the people working in the sector as volunteers who were somehow not deserving of the rights and conditions that other workers have. But that's crap. Employment in the social and community services sector has been sky-rocketing and will continue to do so because there's such a call on the non government sector to deliver services that governments won't deliver anymore. It's a really important job for the union movement to ensure that workers in that sector enjoy respect and dignity at work. We've put a lot of resources into that. We've campaigned for years and years to improve the pay and conditions of workers in the community sector in New South Wales. Just before Christmas that came to fruition with the new SACS award. We just didn't run a legal case to achieve that. The legal case was important and I think we got a pretty good result down at the Commission. But if it wasn't for the on the ground campaigning that our members did, I've got no doubt that the state government simply wouldn't have coughed up the dough to ensure community organisations can afford the improvements. The Carr Government has been good on this. Within a week of the decision, Michael Egan announced that the Government was going to fund all the community and charitable organisations in the community sector to pay for the award improvements. The challenge now is to get the Federal Government to do the same thing. But those gains have only come about because workers in the sector across the state have got themselves organised. They got themselves organised under the ASU banner, appropriately so. But if we simply said it's too hard, we've got to put all our resources into the areas where we've traditionally been strong, these workers rights and conditions just wouldn't be moving forward at all. Give me an idea of the resource shift internally that's been involved in moving from a focus purely on industrial to support an organising operation? Traditionally union organisers have had a defined area of responsibility ie. a certain number of members or workplaces on a geographic basis or an industry basis. We've got some organisers who don't have such a portfolio but are responsible for organising in non-union and poorly unionised workplaces. Now that's got to be targeted, you don't just say go out there and find where the non-members are and bring them in. There's pretty rigorous planning in assessing what workplaces are targeted. At the same time we've got people devoting themselves to industry wide campaigns as well as targeted workplace campaigning. In the community sector we've got people whose job it is to ensure that we're campaigning around sector wide issues. That's by no means unique. A lot of unions now have made that shift over the last five or so years and I think shifting resources to organise the unorganised is now pretty much mainstream opinion amongst union leaders. A strike such as the one by Photocopier Workers this week is a sign of the success of that approach? We're pretty encouraged by what's happened at Canon this week. You see we've got responsibility for photocopier technicians, that comes from the old Technical Services Guild. The pace setters have been the workers at Fuji-Xerox. We said to our members there: how much longer do you think you can get pay and conditions better than the staff of Xerox's competitors if we don't organise them? There would be a commercial imperative for Fuji-Xerox to take you on if their competitors' wages bills are so much lower. So we've taken the view that we've got a responsibility to get out there in large companies in that industry where workers haven't been strongly organised in the past. Canon has always had a fair few union members but they haven't exercised power frankly, and this week for the first time the staff at Canon have taken industrial action. They went out for a day and there was great support for that. What role did the Fuji workers have, how did they play a part in the action at Canon? Our key delegates at Fuji-Xerox have been involved in discussions with their colleagues working for Canon. They do the same work, a lot of them know each other. They've talked to them about what they've achieved. It's not a hard argument to sell, hey look guys we got organised and these are the results we've achieved, you could do the same thing. Moving on to the ALP Election Review a lot has been said about what needs to happen for the ALP survival, but how important is this sort of review for the union movement? Well there's been a lot of talk about the relationship between the ALP and the unions, a lot of that has been driven by the conservatives. The conservatives know what they're on about, that's destroying unions' ability to organise. Why I think there's a lot of disquiet from unionists is that there's been a lot of timidity from the ALP. There seems to be a reluctance to defend the relationship with the union movement. Now I think it's a pretty important relationship. There are not many countries in the world where you've got a good chance of having national government formed by a trade union based political party. I think that's a pretty valuable thing and we don't want to let go of it lightly in Australia. So the challenge then for unionists becomes ensuring that the Labor Party is responsive to working peoples' issues. One of my concerns is that the debate really is a top down one at the moment, conducted between union officials and Labor frontbenchers. But if it's simply a debate between insiders, I think the point's being missed. Everything we're trying to do to re-build union strength is focused at the grassroots level, we're talking about developing workplace leaders, we're talking about member activism, we're talking about delegates' rights. For me, one of the key things I'd like to see out of the ALP Reviews that are underway is some bottom-up initiatives. There's now a whole lot of ALP Parliamentarians who hardly ever come across a unionist. They've got very little exposure to our people and our issues. So I'd like to see the ALP require it's MP's to develop a dialogue with working people in their local electorates. That is, some mechanism where local Labor MP's are required to engage regularly with the local union delegates working in their community. You're talking about maybe an alternate form of branch structure where each electorate has a body of unionists from across the movement meeting regularly with an MP? Absolutely. The party of the workers has hardly any workers who are members. The affiliated unions in NSW have 482,000 members, only about 3,000 of them are actually members of the ALP. That's woeful. Sixty percent of ALP members don't work for a living! You've now got a whole lot of Labor Parliamentarians who are pre-selected and get themselves back into Parliament election after election, who hardly have anything to do with working people. There's a real disconnection now between what unionists do and what Labor politicians do. So we've got to look at structures and mechanisms to ensure that a connection is there in the future. In the NSW rail industry our delegates meet with Carl Scully, the Minister for Transport, so he's not just talking with me, he actually fronts a room full of delegates a couple of times a year. We reckon that's a good thing. He doesn't just report to them, he also listens to them. But why isn't every Labor MP required to do the same thing locally? The smart MP's would use it to develop and build a grassroots network in his or her community. If unions are fair dinkum about fostering workplace leadership we have to give a role to our workplace leaders to help shape the political agenda. What does that mean for the factionalism you spoke about earlier? In an era of 25 per cent union density the traditional left-right factional battles ought to mean very little. There's left wing and right wing and union officials leading the union renewal project. That's a good thing. The left-right battles simply don't mean that much anymore when the union movement could go out of business if we don't get serious about our future. So do you see a prospect of say the left and right factions collapsing and a new industrial faction maybe emerging within the Party? Look, I'm a realist. The factions continue to exist. I am not one of these people who pretend that they shouldn't exist or is embarrassed about being a member of a faction. At the same time though, I acknowledge that no faction or group has a monopoly of good principled and active people. But I repeat, in an era of 25 per cent union density, some of that history has to be put to one side. There's only one issue for unionists, that's union renewal, so that people can exercise some control over their lives at work. It can't be approached in a factional way.
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