
Issue No 16		04 June 1999

Unions

An Educated Fightback

By Louise Tarrant - LHMU research officer

A visiting US trade unionist reveals how training better union delegates is the key to reversing the membership slide.

Professor Margaret Hallock, Director of the Labor Education and Research Centre in Oregon, gave a presentation to a TUTA forum in Sydney on May 28 as part of a brief visit to Australia.

According to Professor Hallock there are some very important lessons Australian unionists can draw from the experiences and recent histories of our US union counterparts.

"You go into most US union workplaces and talk to union members today and they'll tell you they're concerned about what's in their contract, their conditions at work...they think the union is a junior attorney going to ride in on a horse. They buy this third party concept - insurance agency concept. This is still very widespread in the US."

According to Hallock it is the creation of this phenomenon that helped spell the dramatic decline in US unionism and it will be redressing this situation that will see its turn around.

Only a few decades ago US unionism had a 45% density rating and had a proud history of activism and struggle. It's now hovering around 14%. So what has gone wrong?

Hallock cites economic factors as the drivers of change:

"In a very short space of time we made a deal with employers and got sucked into an employer by employer relationship - we bargained on a workplace by workplace level and if you do that what is our membership going to be concerned about? Their wages, their contract and all the effort gets focused into negotiating, resolving workplace problems, handling grievances at the workplace."

Bill Fletcher, head of AFL-CIO's Education Department, (AFL-CIO is the US equivalent of the ACTU), talks about this as the Graveyard of Industrial Capitalism period where if unions made a deal with capital, that if they just bargained with them one on one, employers would get industrial peace and unions and unionists would get a share of the pie.

And indeed unionists are much better off than non union working people in the US. For wages alone a 30% plus differential exists between a union and non-union hourly rate of pay.

However the result of this site by site bargaining focus was twofold according to Hallock:

� On the one hand it created a very inwardly looking union membership and attributes this as the reason why unionised workforces were so easy to pick-off during the years of economic restructuring. In this context the rise in contingent, precarious work and casualisation and the international trade agreements implementation were all part of an overall deunionisation strategy.

� Secondly, it undermined US unions' ability to set wages for a whole industry and in so doing take wages out of competition. Prior to this US unions had what they called a 'whip-saw' tactic whereby the winning of a good agreement was moved through an industry (similar to our concept of pattern bargaining). Prolonged use of this tactic saw a withering of Employer Associations and an entrenching of the employer by employer strategy to such a point that the employers now have the upper hand through 'reverse whip-sawing' and the pursuit of concession bargaining.

"We are battling with a corporate agenda on its way around the world - that's our main export - the US management model.

Decentralisation and trying to get unions to pay attention only to workplace problems, I think, was the death knell for our union movement. We're trying to switch that around but it is by no means a done deal" Hallock reported.

So what is the fightback agenda?

Hallock calls it the transformation process - the movement from service unionism to organising unionism - a process of quite fundamental change. To understand that change and its lessons for our own movement it is important to be clear on the difference.

The service model union operates as a third party, where 'someone else' is going to solve members problems. It is essentially an insurance model - it is not a membership based approach.

The organising union has two very different but distinctive features:

� it's about building the union from within - as Hallock describes it: "To do servicing through a mobilising approach where you get workers involved in solving problems", and

� growth through taking on whole new workplaces with no members and organising them.

Hallock was asked whether the servicing and organising approach weren't just two ends of a spectrum and it was simply a matter of determining where unions wanted to move to in that spectrum. Her response was unequivocal. These were two different models and you had to choose between one approach or the other - this didn't mean under the organising model that servicing and grievance handling didn't occur - but rather it's how its done.

"Every action we take has to be assessed against 'does this build the union' and if you're providing a service I challenge you - does this build the union, does it create more power for the members, does it really build the organisation?

There is a way to do servicing through a mobilising approach that empowers members. That is what the organising model is.

The key is how you do these services - yes we need to do contracts, yes we've got to resolve grievances. We would not exist if we didn't do them but how you do these things is really the central question and every service action has to be assessed against the critical question - does this build the union?"

But to do this Hallock recognises that fundamental organisational change is required otherwise organising is simply layered on top of grievance handling. One of the real challenges is how to change the way grievances are handled.

A number of models were cited ranging from the specialist approach where a small number of staff looked specifically after individual grievance functions and the centralisation model where members only dealt with stewards (if not in their own workplace then as allocated) to resolve low order grievances. Both models have a shared end point - to free up organisers to actually organise.

Obviously critical to the devolution of this function, at least in part, to the workplace is how effective, educated and understanding is the delegate. Member education about why such a shift is necessary and delegate education to ensure their confidence and capacity to undertake such tasks is critical.

Hallock cites this issue of member education as the first most critical step to address in the transformation process - "you have to have membership support - vision from the top is necessary but not sufficient." A number of US unions have gone down this path of transformation and have taken this debate to their memberships and have won support for change.

Hallock also concedes that in the transformation process over the last decade or so many alleys have been gone down in trying new approaches and new organisational structures and some have been dead ends. However US unions have learnt from these experiences and many are moving forward having radically changed the way they do business. It is from these unions that Australian unionists can learn much.

If we ignore the important parallels in our movement's recent histories and fail to learn from US unions attempts at transformation then, as Hallock so neatly puts it:

"If we don't change our direction we're likely to end up where we're heading."

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Issue 16 contents

Interview: Opening Australia
Lindsay Tanner talks about new ideas, new policy and new politics in the Information Age.

Unions: An Educated Fightback
A visiting US trade unionist reveals how training better union delegates is the key to reversing the membership slide.

Legal: A Fair Case for Free-Rider Laws
The proposal to enable unions to charge non-members a service fee for negotiating enterprise agreements is consistent with the principle of freedom of association.

History: New Ideas in Labour History
See the latest from the May issue of Labour History, A Journal of Labour and Social History.

International: Tiananmen Square Ten Years On
We remember the massacre and the role that working people continue to play in fighting injustice.

Review: Organising Our Future - What Use the US??
A new paper looks at what Australian unions can learn from the experiences of their American colleagues.

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