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Workers Online
  Issue No 66 Official Organ of LaborNet 11 August 2000  

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Interview

Shifting Sands


Michael Crosby Joint Director of the ACTU Organising Centre talks to Workers Online about the changing nature of union power, 'use it or lose it' coverage and how the ALP will have to deal with a transformed union movement.

 
 

You are in a position to get rare insights into the internal operations of unions: what are the common problems?

I think the problems follow a pretty similar pattern. We have got a group of union leaders - a majority - who are facing substantial union decline and that is incredibly stressful.

If I think about my own experience. People of my generation and earlier running unions. Every year we would bank on growth in union numbers; growth in union income. I didn't think so at the time, but it was a pretty comfortable environment to be in - where you just work out how you are going to spend that extra 5% a year that is coming into your coffers.

The position now is that many secretaries have to ask, how are we going to balance our budget at a time when our income is falling? These are really tough decisions to make.

Similarly for union officials right down the line, members are dissatisfied with what they are getting out of their union because the union hasn't got its hands on the levers of power any more. The Arbitration Commission has limited power.

So that sense of crisis is pretty widespread. There is, everywhere we go a struggle to get the skills to be able to operate in a new environment. That is common right across the board.

How well is the concept of organising understood?

I think it is patchy. I think most people have got some idea what we are talking about but it does surprise me how often people think of 'organising' as employing organising works trainees, and making sure people are out there selling union memberships.

There is certainly a core of officials who understand it extremely well. And they are the people who are really giving us the signs of success that we desperately need.

This issue of "What's the difference between organising and recruitment?" is a petty argument, but it masks a really important philosophical difference in the way in which you look at how we are going to reverse union decline.

Recruitment has all the elements of selling a union membership, - that we need to send out a team of people to sell a union insurance policy. That is just absolutely the wrong way of conceptualising what the Australian union movement has to do to survive.

We are not selling insurance and the more we characterise what we do as "join the union and we'll guarantee to look after you", the more we are setting ourselves up for failure. Increasingly as the power of Arbitration Commissions around the country decline, our power is going to come from the ability of workers to stick together and defend their interests against the interests of employers.

Do members understand what is meant by organising?

Our experience is that when you talk to workers directly and explain what has happened to the union movement and explained the changes in our external environment, they get it instantly. They have experienced our declining power themselves in workplaces. They understand absolutely what it is like for the boss to have all the power. So when we come along and give them the ability to have a voice about the way in which they are treated - they understand organising absolutely.

Where I don't think it is understood clearly is where we try and introduce an organising change by stealth, or on a piecemeal basis, and you've got members who have got a tradition of union service that dates back for 80 or 90 years, and all of a sudden the union is behaving in a different kind of way. That is where you are going to get problems arising with members saying "well hell, what is this union on about? They don't return my phone calls. I can't get an organiser to come out and fix this problem." In those situations they don't understand organising at all.

So in transforming unions it is important to take the membership with you?

I don't think it is important, I think it is critical.

Let me spell out why it is so critical. I think it is critical for union leaders because unions that decide internally - within the union staff - well, we are going to become an organising union - and they don't bring their members with them -they set themselves up for electoral defeat.

If we have been saying for 90 years we want to deliver to you a marvellous insurance policy, and we are going to look after you and protect you as a third party, and all of a sudden we do something completely different, and we don't bring them with us, well why aren't they going to throw us out and bring in somebody who is going to promise to deliver what has always been delivered in the past.

Why don't unions take the debate out to members?

In part it is because union leaders aren't completely convinced about the dimension of the change that is required. In part it is because some union leaders don't have an absolutely clear vision of where they want to take the union in the future. And in part, I think union leaders are worried that members are going to say: "Well, thanks for telling us what you aim to do, but we don't like that, and we are not going to vote for you."

Doesn't that also mean union leaders have to give up some of their power?

Look, in a narrow sense, that is true. But, whether they like it or not union officials are already losing power as a result of the changes in the external environment.

We lost a huge number of members last year. That represents a decline in power. There is no longer an Arbitration Commission, which is capable of issuing a determination in the middle of a dispute - at least on a national level and in many of the States. That is a loss of power.

The shift to organising, I think, really has the potential to mean that union secretaries have a lot more power: They get a growing union again - at least over the long term. What would you rather be the leader of: - a union that is just gradually declining year on year, or a union that has a huge number of activists; that has got members taking responsibility for their own defence.

I mean, that is the best kind of power. Yes, it is a different reward system. You are no longer seen as the great saviour on your white horse, charging to the rescue. And yes, that is something you will lose when you adopt a process of organising. But you are on the winning side again.

So, this change requires a certain amount of idealism?

With the tough buffeting that unions are taking at the moment it is a perfectly rational response for union officials of all kinds to just say, well I am going to go and do something else.

If you are convinced that the union movement has got no future, then please look around for another job. So absolutely, idealism is the key driver of a change in unionism. If we don't believe in this stuff, then give up.

But I am convinced that the vast majority of union officials I talk to - as soon as you outline it in those terms - there is that gut feeling that they are not prepared to allow this to happen. That they are not prepared to allow our long tradition of union activity to just grind to a halt. And that is where I think the seeds of our revival have come from. Of people being prepared to say, this is going to be really tough, but I'm going to play my part in this.

What about the next layer of union officials isn't there a certain amount of self interest in the way things are?

Of course there is a certain amount of self-interest and people don't like giving up the nice cars and the good salaries and the reward system of being the hero in the Arbitration Commission. And yes, union officials do resist this change to a greater or lesser degree. But God, the vast majority of union officials - if they are convinced that to give workers the power of collective representation they need to go down this path, they go down this path.

But isn't there a generation of union officials with skills that are more appropriate for the old system?

Yeah, absolutely, but that is what the Organising Centre is all about. That is why we are going through such an intensive process of training for a huge number of union officials around the country. It would be completely unfair for us to say; you have got to change everything you do, and get on with it if we didn't provide the training that people need to be able to do it.

But we are doing that and I think the training is by and large of an incredibly high quality. It is of a quality that union movements in New Zealand, the US and Canada and the UK want to tap into. It is the one thing that we really are world leaders in. So yes, that is available. It is a question of people tapping into it.

You could say that the service sector is the achilles heel of the union movement. What have we been doing wrong there?

I think it is fundamentally a resource question. Organising costs a lot. You need to have a ratio of one organiser for say, 300 potential members a year, if you are aiming to get those members signed up, and it is a question of do the unions with coverage in the service sector have the resources to be able to put into it.

Now, at the same time, some of those unions are coping with decline.

What we need is for unions with coverage in the service sector to really become very serious and very focussed on the effective financial management of their operations and make a very clear redirection of resources into their growth areas.

I think we are seeing that with a number of the key service sector unions - LHMU I think is a model in this area, where both at a national and a branch level they are tightly financially managed and they are really redirecting significant resources into areas of potential growth.

Other unions are starting to grapple with this. I think the ASU for example, is right in the middle of working out how do we put say, 30% of our resources into a growth strategy.

If they succeed in doing that, then the union movement will be serious about getting into some of these growth areas such as IT and call centres.

The SDA is an enormously successful union, but they have a huge growth area in the retail sector. Now the test for that union is, are they going to be able to build on their strength and get an increasing proportion of retail sector employment. Go say, from a quarter, or a third, of the retail sector into representing half the retail sector. That would have an enormous impact on the union movement's overall density figures if they managed to pull that off.

Is there ever a point where a union is organised? Does it ever stop?

No, no, no. There is never a point when a union is organised. You can always get more of an activist base. There are always surely growth areas into which a union can push. And I think one of the interesting things that came out of the ACTU Congress - in fact possibly one of the most significant decisions the Congress made, was to introduce some freeing up of the demarcation structure in Australia, so that unions have the ability to go to the ACTU executive and say that there is a section of the workforce that is not being organised at the moment, that has no plans to be organised, and we would like the right to move into that area.

That of course is going to be enormously difficult and contentious in the implementation, but what that does is firstly it puts pressure on people with existing coverage rights, but also it gives the possibility that other unions will be able to expand their area of coverage and put resources into organising a non-unionised workforce.

The thing that we have got to remember is that there are seven million unorganised workers out there, and we only represent 25.7% of the total workforce. That means that we only have a limited ability to make inroads into the seven million.

We can't afford to have any union shrugging its shoulders and saying, well, we have finished now, we got 100% membership in our area, there is nothing more we can do.

We have got to work out ways for every union in this country to play a role in going after some bits of the seven million.

So it will be either use it or lose it?

I think use it or lose it is a pretty confronting kind of slogan. That certainly is one way in which you can characterise the ACTU Congress's new policy. But I certainly think that what the policy does is it is going to start making unions think seriously about what is reasonable in terms of maintenance of existing coverage.

Peetz makes the distinction between territory-driven unionism and member-driven unionism. And the reality is now with union decline pushing us further and further down, we can't afford to have unions that are motivated purely by preserving their territory. That has become an irrelevant anachronism now.

What is important is how many members in a particular industry have you organised? And if there is no prospect in the foreseeable future that you will be putting resources into that area, then we just have to get other unions putting the resources in there.

Unions will have to look at their responsibilities to the larger movement?

There is a large proportion of those seven million un-organised workers who are not getting a fair deal. That is the key driver of change. We can't allow seven million Australian workers to be treated in the way they are being treated. Wherever there is no union, workers don't have a voice, and every time you go out into a sector and you talk to people who aren't in a union, and frankly have no prospect of being in a union, you get quite horrifying stories of the arbitrary exercise of management authority. Of managers just clicking their fingers and expecting Australians to jump. And that is repugnant to our tradition. It is repugnant to the way in which we think Australian society should work. And that is the thing that we should be upset about.

How important is union education and are we doing enough of it?

Look, education is absolutely at the centre of an organising approach. How can you have increased levels of activism if you don't give your activists the skills to be able to do their job? How can you ask somebody to do the work of the union, if you don't at the same time say, and we will give you the help that you need to do that job for us?

People are just not going to volunteer to do this work unless they are satisfied that they can do it properly. Even if it is the most basic kind of union activity, they want the confidence that they are not going to stuff it up.

Since government funding of delegate education ended unions have been sacking training staff. Training staff are seen as the lowest status employee in the union. The amount of money going into training is at an all time low, and a huge proportion of our delegates and activists have received no training.

How do we fix it up? What has got to happen is that we have got to find ways of getting employers to pay for delegate education. And that is why we are looking for unions to act as a spearhead for a campaign around PEL - a scheme we have borrowed from the Canadian movement. Canadian employers contribute a certain payment per hour, per union member in a workplace, that goes into a trust fund and that is what is used to train delegates and activists.

But it goes further than that. We have got to make training both affordable and accessible for union members. We have got to be serious about getting union leave provisions put into enterprise agreements and making that an important issue that we bargain around.

We have got to break union training down into digestible modules so that it can be delivered at times that is convenient to members rather than at times that's is convenient to the union officers. It has got to be capable of being delivered at night, on weekends, in lunchtimes, wherever. And it has got to be capable of being delivered over the net or in people's homes or wherever they are.

So in the whole area of union education things have got to be turned on their head. But it will only be turned on its head when we change the nature of our union organisations and we see training and the empowerment of activists as central rather than peripheral.

How will the transformation of the union movement to an organising culture affect its relationship with the ALP?

I think things with the ALP are going to change, because if we have a completely different kind of union movement where activists are at the core of things; where member issues are driven from below; where union officials at every level are far more facilitators and coachers of collective action, rather than the great wise decision maker, that is going to mean that the ALP is going to be dealing with a substantially different kind of institution to the one that it has always dealt with in the past.

The ALP, when it deals with the union movement, will be dealing with a much smaller percentage of the workforce. I can't see us getting up to 50% of union membership in my lifetime again. But the 30% or the 35% that I hope we can get up to is going to be a proportion of the workforce that is extremely active - that is extremely self-confident in expressing its voice. The ALP will have to cope with that.


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*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 66 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: Shifting Sands
Michael Crosby Joint Director of the ACTU Organising Centre talks to Workers Online about the changing nature of union power, 'use it or lose it' coverage and how the ALP will have to deal with a transformed union movement.
*
*  Unions: Mission Possible
From Cambodia to Kyrghyzstan, from Malawi to Mozambique, this is one nurse who accepts certain missions where life is on the edge, and she loves it.
*
*  Economics: A Progressive Alternative
Andrew Scott outlines a policy approach for an ALP Government that aims to deliver social as well as economic progress.
*
*  International: Unions Back International Seafarer Deal
Shipping union representatives from 56 countries have decided to back a pioneering international collective bargaining agreement with ship employers.
*
*  Politics: Apolitical Myth
Over the last ten years one story about public interest in politics has found resonance, especially in the US. It suggests that people are no longer interested in political issues. Researchers from the Demos Foundation put this claim under the microscope.
*
*  Satire: Elaine Nile retires citing victory in "War on Masturbation"
There were emotional displays and many tributes paid today as Elaine Nile, Christian Democrat MP of 12 years standing, announced her retirement from the Parliament.
*
*  Review: Pure Shit
The 1970s Aussie drug classic, Pure Shit - a 70s Australian style Trainspotting - is being dusted off for a one-off showing at the Chauvel.
*

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Columns
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»  Sport
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»  Trades Hall
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»  Tool Shed
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Letters to the editor
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