Unions

Always the Pay is No Good

- Mark Hearn

Fair Wear's campaign for clothing industry homeworkers is changing the way we think about consuming.

	Yvonne, a Sydney homeworker, is just one of many thousands that Fair Wear is trying to help.

Since the 1960s waves of migrant women - Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Laotians - have been welcomed to Australia with an offer of impoverishing, debilitating work in Australia�s clothing and textiles industry.

The homeworker's is a hidden world of work, whose subversive influence is spreading in an age of deregulated and globalised industrial relations. Fair Wear, a network of churches, community groups and unions, is campaigning for a living wage for homeworkers, and for their right to work in a safe and healthy environment. Yvonne, a Sydney homeworker, is just one of many thousands that Fair Wear is trying to help.

Yvonne pushes the fabric beneath the needle, hammering out a neat seam along the length of material she will shape into a fashionable mauve blouse, which will soon catch the eye of young women in boutiques and department stores. They will pay nearly $100 to gratify an image of themselves captured in its tempting sheen. A sub-contractor will give Yvonne $6.50 for each of the 400 blouses she has made over the last two weeks. �Always the pay is no good.

Yvonne has worked from home in the decade she has been in Australia, and her new life as a clothing industry homeworker, or 'outworker' - a term which for too many employers is code for 'somebody else's problem'. Home is in the bayside Sydney suburb of Sans Souci, a wistful french expression which means 'without care'. Yvonne's Sans Souci home and workplace rattles to an impatient clamour of trucks and cars, and has no view of the serene bay. Yvonne cannot afford to be without care. She has a family to support, and she must work.

Twelve hours a day, six days a week, Yvonne stoops and peers to follow the cloth disappearing along its line of becoming fashion, steady and straight and without error. "I can do different garments very quickly - shirts, nightdresses, polo shirts", she proudly explains. Today, she double stitches the shirt front and carefully works around the collar. "Very hard", she smiles.

Yvonne spent five years making polo shirts for "a big company". She made good money, she says, up to $10 an hour. But then the big company went overseas, like so many others that have moved offshore or into corporate oblivion, driven into decline, in part, by the humble and unwilling competition of Yvonne and the army of women like her - about 300,000 at the last count. Yvonne went from serving the big company to half a dozen sub-contractors touting piece work for fashion houses and designers, and always driving down the rates. "I get very, very tired, but must work longer, because the pay gets lower".

Over the last few years her pay per hour has dropped from $10 to $7, and often falls to $4 or $5 per hour. Sometimes she is paid by the garment, like the blouse she is making today. Recently she was paid $3 an item for a dress which retailed for $149. Like most homeworkers, Yvonne knows the value of her work. She just doesn't see it in the hand. Between the contented customer and Yvonne looms a scrum of industry players - retailers, wholesalers, contractors - who all have one thing Yvonne lacks: more power than she has. More clout, more hype, more front, and in the chase for the dollar, they just push Yvonne out of the way.

Fair Wear is trying to push back on behalf of Yvonne, and the thousands of homeworkers like her. Over the past two years Fair Wear has lobbied clothing and textiles industry firms to sign up to the Homeworkers Code of Conduct, requiring retailers to check that garments have been manufactured ethically, and requiring manufacturers who use contractors to keep appropriate documentation and pay homeworkers to an award standard. As Fair Wear campaign worker Lisa Addely observes, "if they are doing the right thing they should have no hesitation in signing - it's just a statement of their legal obligations as employers".

So far, over one hundred companies have signed the code; hundreds more have not, including Jeans West, Supre, Kerry McGee, Nike Australia, Motto and children�s wear retailer Osh Kosh B'Gosh. Fair Wear's creative persuasion has included protests outside stores - particularly in major city retail centres like Sydney�s Pitt Street Mall. During the recent Fashion Week in Melbourne, Motto held a fashion parade which unintentionally featured four 'models' who appearing in their underwear, declaring that they would rather wear nothing than be clothed in exploitation. The stunt was a big hit with the media, but not with leading fashion designers. Only one, Saba, has signed the code. Lisa is not disheartened, smiling at the memory of Motto's embarrassment, and mulling over future tactics. "I think we might build on that one".

Signing them up is hard enough; enforcement is the next big problem. As Rita Lai, a former homeworker and an activist with Asian Women at Work, (a community based support group) says, "you can get companies to sign the code but you can�t control the sub-contractor". Or, as Lisa adds, "people don't give up profit margins easily." A problem that Fair Wear and the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia are trying to address at both the Federal and State level.

In March the Australian Industrial Relations Commission upheld a TCFUA application exempting three key provisions of the Clothing Trades Award from the award stripping process (reducing awards to 20 allowable matters). The provisions specifically protect homeworkers rights. It�s a result that the TCFUA sees as critical to maintaining a public spotlight on the right of homeworkers to receive the benefits of award entitlements, as NSW TCFUA Secretary Barry Tubner told the Commission. "The 'invisibility' of outworkers' work has not only made enforcement of award and statutory conditions more difficult, it has also prevented proper consideration and analysis of the work done by outworkers".

Lisa Addley was present at 'workplace' inspections conducted by the Commissioners during the case. Lisa felt they were on "a very steep learning curve. They were quite shocked at the conditions faced by homeworkers." Presented with compelling union evidence of the mistreatment of homeworkers, the employers adopted a �strategy� of shamefaced silence. The AIRC decision noted: "the unchallenged evidence before us shows that exploitation and unlawful and unfair treatment of outworkers in the industry still continues".

The TCFUA and the Labor Council of New South Wales are also urging the NSW Government to reform the state's industrial laws, including regulation of contractors, and the right of union entry to home based workplaces. Premier Bob Carr has said that he will need "strong arguments" to persuade him to adopt the Labor Council's proposals: he could have a chat with Yvonne. In fairness, the NSW Government is developing a program to support homeworkers, particularly in the area of enforcing award compliance - although it�s hard to see how any strategy can work without effective regulation of sub-contractors.

A small number of homeworkers - the more assertive and skilled - play the sub-contractors at their own game, turning down work, forcing the sub-contractors to pay a higher rate for their valued skills. It's a grim echo of pre-arbitration, nineteenth century industrial bargaining, where the 'fittest' survive - while the many struggle. It's a reminder that we live in a time when unions are forced to fight to stop provisions being stripped from awards.

Yvonne has at least found a network of people willing to help her; many like her have no help at all, and work longer hours, are paid less, endure chronic work-induced pain in the back and the limbs, or whose eyes have finally failed under the strain. Rita Lai has no doubts about the solution to this cycle of exploitation. "The government should do something to protect the outworker". For that, you need a government that listens.

Meanwhile, Fair Wear steps into the breach. Lisa says Fair Wear is currently preparing a uniform campaign, targeting schools, employers, sporting clubs and indeed unions. Where was the uniform made? Under what conditions? Has the manufacturer/retailer signed the Code of Conduct? "It's a big industry", Lisa says, and it's a big job mounting another ambitious campaign. Anyone who wants to assist the Fair Wear campaign (in any aspect; Fair Wear�s campaigns often rely on volunteer help) should contact Fair Wear on the numbers listed at right. Lisa also urges us to remember that every consumer is complicit in the system that perpetuates the homeworker�s lot; the only way to improve it is to check the label of the garment you�re purchasing, and seek out retailers and manufacturers who have signed the code of conduct.

"It's a free country", insists Mr. Reith's Employment Advocate. Yvonne's freedom is a room awash with cloth and off cuts, reams of pockets and collars, wads of designer labels, symbol of the glamour industry. Yvonne works alternatively at two machines upon which she seems unable to throw sufficient light. Lamps probe mantis-like at the needle, and she squints in their yellow glare. Above her, utilitarian fluorescent tubes have overtaken an exhausted, globeless chandelier. Behind her, a handwritten timetable, in her native chinese, details the intricate steps she must take to unite all the disparate pieces into somebody else�s dream. Soon, there will be another timetable.

This article was first published in WorkSite, the journal of the Lloyd Ross Forum

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  Issue 20 contents

»	Direct Links to Timor Militia Revealed
»	Child Laws Cause School Camp, Sport Chaos
»	False Advertising Complaint on Second Wave
»	Its Official. Howard's Public Sector Cuts Hurt Everyone
»	Hard-Hats Only as Builders Strip for Outworkers
»	Unions Unite to Protect Jobs in the Bush
»	Square Eyes Workplace Warning
»	WorkCover Scheme Has Passed Use-By Date
»	Bruised Not Beaten: FSU Battles On
»	Gordonstone Miners Win Battle, But Robbed of Justice
»	Currawong Spots Up For Grabs
»	Workers Online Turns 21!

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Thanks from the Hyde Park Hyatt
»	The Chant of a Jilted project Co-ordinator
»	Have the Times Really Changed?
»	You've Got to be Kidding!

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